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7 PRINCIPLES FOR RISK CHARACTERIZATION
Pages 155-166

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From page 155...
... Our study has led to a conception of risk characterization as the product of a decision-driven, analytic-deliberative process and to a set of principles for organizing the process. The purpose of risk characterization is to improve the understanding of risk among public officials and interested and affected parties in a way that leads to better and more widely accepted risk decisions.
From page 156...
... Acceptance of risk decisions by the interested and affected parties is usually critical to their implementation. Satisfactory risk characterization processes and products provide all the decision participants with the information they need to make informed choices, in the form in which they need it.
From page 157...
... · Risk characterizations should, when appropriate, address social, economic, ecological, and ethical outcomes as well as consequences for human health and safety. Human health and safety are often the only important consequences to the interested and affected parties, but for some decisions, other outcomes are as important or even more so.
From page 158...
... The analytic-deliberative process must have an appropriately diverse participation or representation of the spectrum of interested and affected parties, of decision makers, and of specialists in risk analysis, at each step. Risk characterization requires a sound scientific base, supported by systematic analysis.
From page 159...
... Deliberation is needed to frame, and where necessary reframe, the decision problem, define the fundamental questions that risk characterization needs to address, set the research agenda, decide who will participate in the effort to build understanding, identify the relevant information, settle on ways to gather the information, select assumptions to use when data are insufficient, and arrive at judgments about the degree of reliance that should be attached to the results of risk analyses and about the amount and kind of uncertainty these results contain. For potentially controversial risk decisions, deliberation should involve the spectrum of interested and affected parties to bring the analysis into better alignment with the parties' needs for information, choose more realistic and satisfactory assumptions based on specialized knowledge the affected parties may uniquely possess, and subject analyses to critical review from a fuller range of perspectives.
From page 160...
... Depending on the purpose of the deliberation, appropriately broad participation may be achievable through the use of surrogates or representatives who bring to the table knowledge, perspectives, and concerns of the parties that are relevant to the issue at hand. · Broadly based, appropriately participatory deliberation will sometimes require that resources be provided to some of the interested and affected parties.
From page 161...
... Risk situations vary along many dimensions, and the same analyticdeliberative process is not appropriate for all risk characterizations. In particular, the level of effort that should go into problem formulation, process design, and the other elements of the analytic-deliberative process and into securing appropriately broad participation is situation dependent.
From page 162...
... It is therefore extremely important for the organizations responsible for risk decisions to investigate whether there are or might be competing definitions of the risk problem. Risk characterization can be fairly straightforward if the interested and affected parties agree on which issues deserve analysis; if they do not agree, it is often worth making special efforts at the outset to engage them in deliberation about what should be analyzed.
From page 163...
... Analysis and deliberation are complementary and must be integrated throughout the process leading to risk characterization: deliberation frames analysis, analysis informs deliberation, and the process benefits from feedback between the two. As already noted, a typical criticism of risk characterizations is that the underlying analysis failed to pay adequate attention to questions of central concern to some of the interested and affected parties.
From page 164...
... At a minimum, it should pay attention to organizational changes and staff training efforts that might be required, to ways of improving practice by learning from experience, and to both costs and benefits in terms of the organization's mission and budget. Organizations may experience difficulties in following these principles, particularly in regard to increasing input from some interested and affected parties, involving nonscientists in deliberations about risk analysis, broadening the range of adverse outcomes to consider in risk analysis, more fully integrating analysis and deliberation, and doing anything that appears to prolong the decision process or increase its complexity.
From page 165...
... Organizations that characterize risk should work with interested and affected parties to define criteria for evaluating the process leading to risk characterization. They should also consider implementing explicit practices to promote systematic learning from their efforts to inform and make risk decisions.
From page 166...
... We are confident that a conscious and careful application of an analytic-deliberative approach will lead to better risk characterizations and better risk decisions.


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