CDR (C ALL D ETAIL R ECORD )

One of the major difficulties in engaging and establishing dialogue with a wide range of stakeholders, who range from lay people and organised pressure groups to the scientific community and other relevant agencies of the government, has been known to be their differing perceptions of risk (Thorne et al. 2007). Risk perspective or perception is a term that refers to one’s awareness and knowledge of hazards, including potential consequences associated with a situation or set of circumstances (Wogalter et al. 1999).

Many researchers argue that individuals and communities respond to risk and risk information according to their perceptions and understanding of the risk (Rogers 1997) and that being informed about levels of risk, severity and efficacy jointly produce greater rates of willingness to take actions designed to avoid the hazard (Kurt et al.

response, and therefore it has implications for the design of flood risk management policies and the effective delivery of responses (Thorne et al. 2007) and thus the governance of flood risk management.

The task of converging risk perceptions of the communicators and the public raises the vital question of how risk perception is formed by the communicators and the public.

While it has been contended that the public tends to deny flood risk (Burningham et al.

2008) and define flood risk differently than ‘the experts’ who act as the communicators of flood risk (McCarthy 2004 cited in Faulkner et al. 2010), it has also been argued that

‘the experts’ make assumptions about the character of the risk situation that are quite removed from the experiences of those at the actual site at risk (Fischer 2000 cited in Winnubst 2011). The risk perception of ‘the experts’ can be regarded as the ‘outsider perspective’ whereas the risk perception of the members of the public who actually live in the area at risk can be regarded as the ‘insider perspective’. These terms - ‘outsider perspective’ and ‘insider perspective’ which originated in the field of linguistics and anthropology – are termed as ‘etic’ and ‘emic’ respectively. Although these perspectives are complementary in the sense that they often present the same data from two points of view (Pike 1967 in Fielding and Fielding 2008), they also explain the need of flood risk communication: to converge these perspectives (Schelfaut et al.

2011). Convergence of etic and emic perspectives of flood risk means that the perspectives on flood risk of the communicating agencies and that of the population living in flood risk areas match or represent the same attribute of flood risk.

This raises vital questions: i) Why do the etic and the emic perspectives of flood risk not converge? and ii) How can flood risk communication strategies benefit by understanding why they do not converge? Furthermore, adaptive risk governance is particularly expected to address challenges that result from a lack of knowledge and/or competing knowledge claims about risks where a risk is characterised by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity (Klinke & Renn 2012, van Asselt & Renn 2011, van Asselt

& Bree 2011 and Renn et al. 2011). These are also the characteristics of flood risk since it transcends geographical and administrative boundaries, and has associated uncertainty and ambiguity in view of climate change and complexity of associated assessment methods. Additionally, this is also evident from the discussion in the next chapter on

Since risk perceptions are formed partly on the basis of ‘knowledge’, these questions are tackled here by explaining how the etic and emic perspectives are formed by referring to the instrumental position of ‘knowledge’ in shaping these perspectives.

Knowledge is identified to be a societal property or an asset existing in the minds of individuals which is made available for collective action to meet societal goals (Etzioni, 1968 cited in Winnubst 2011). Knowledge can be broken down into three subtypes:

scientific or technical knowledge (the domain of ‘the experts’), political and administrative knowledge (the field of expertise of government decision-makers and government officials in particular) and public knowledge (particularly expertise of the citizens) (Winnubst 2011). The first two subtypes pertain to the etic perspective whereas the latter to the emic perspective and are explained below.

It has been contended that it is the task of science to disclose and assess sources of potential harm, identify measurable correlations and assess the probabilities of harm (Boholm 2003) in order to generate knowledge that would facilitate risk management.

The experts, and thus the risk communicators, become ‘knowledgeable’ mainly by performing scientific assessments based on facts, probabilities and calculations (Boholm 2003, Figueiredo et al. 2009), which in turn form the etic perspective. Thus, the etic perspective is based on an objective assessment of risk. It is further shaped by their organisational structure, associated rules and resources and their objective of governance - how to exercise power, take ownership and fulfil the responsibility of risk communication (Höppner et al. 2010). On the other hand, emic perspective is hardly informed by scientific assessments. Instead it is based on the ‘lived’ experience of being in the ‘at risk area’, any access to relevant information, personal attitudes and judgements, any exposure to risk communication and any prior experience, personal needs as well as consideration of a range of issues, preferences, responsibilities, relationships, social and cultural values (Wynne 1992 cited in Willis et al. 2011, Stickler et al. 2011) and more importantly trust in the institutions relevant to governance of flood risk (Renn 2008, Winnubst 2011, Kellens 2011, Janoske et al. 2012 and Thorne et al. 2007). Therefore, not all the public living in areas at risk of flooding as identified by a flood risk communicator may accept, fully or in part, that their area or their individual property is at risk of flooding.

The acceptance of science as the instrument of institutional producers of risk-knowledge has also been critiqued (Willis et al. 2011) by contending that common and social knowledge has the same importance and the same usefulness as that of the scientific or technical as well as administrative, legal and economic knowledge (Firus et al. 2011 cited in Stickler et al. 2011). Going further, Lidskog (2008), while investigating the role of experts and lay people in the production of knowledge, highlights that the debate on who should be seen as legitimate knowledge producers not only takes place between science and citizens, but within science as well. Lidskog (2008) then contends by referring to Giddens (1994) that there is a need for a plurality of expertise where no single one can legitimately assume the role of ‘expert’ over ‘all experts’.

The above discussion highlights the role of various knowledge claims and the associated risk perceptions. It also challenges the assumption that risk is the calculated domain of experts on which lay people must rely (Stickler et al. 2011). It shifts the focus towards socio-cultural approaches to understanding risk perceptions which can inform more useful flood risk communication strategies (Burningham et al. 2008 cited in Willis et al. 2011) by framing policies which relate the lay knowledge or emic perspective with the expert knowledge or the etic perspective (Willis et al. 2011) in order to develop shared understanding of risks. Lidskog (2008) puts it as:

‘demarcations between science and lay people should be transgressed through a democratisation of science and a scientisation of the citizenry’. According to Jasanoff (2005 cited in Lidskog 2008) this can be achieved by creating spaces for deliberation and negotiation. This underscores the significance of public participation, identified in section 1.4, firstly for a two-way transfer of knowledge between the experts as the communicators and the public as the target audience in order to develop shared understanding of risks; and secondly for inclusion of public as a legitimate partner in decision making in the domain of adaptive governance of flood risk management. The process of two-way transfer of knowledge between the communicators and the public for developing shared understanding can be explained in light of a social action theory called Theory of Communicative Action which is outlined in the next section.