Risk Communication for Resilient Communities
 
Background
 
In "Risk Perception and Communication Unplugged: Twenty Years of Process," Baruch Fischhoff (1995) argues that we can view risk communication as an evolutionary process. Tracing risk communication back to its origins, he explicates the seven "historical stages"
of risk communication's development. As we reach a higher understanding about the nature and complexity of risk communication, especially in relation to the community audiences of risk communication messages, the core principles of the field change. The stages Fischhoff explores mirror some significant changes in emergency management's approach to its stakeholder communities:
  1. All we have to do is get the numbers right.
  2. All we have to do is tell them the numbers.
  3. All we have to do is explain what we mean by the numbers.
  4. All we have to do is show them that they've accepted similar risks in the past.
  5. All we have to do is show them that it's a good deal for them.
  6. All we have to do is treat them nicely.
  7. All we have to do is make them partners.
We have already seen FEMA take steps in the direction of allowing community stakeholders to access more informaiton. At a 2011 press conference, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate claimed that social media allows emergency managers to "leverage the investment we've made [in research] by putting the data in the hands of the public. If you look at a lot of government Web sites, [the government] determined how [information] was going to be seen and you had to go to their site to see it. Instead of doing that, why not put out the data feeds?" (Qtd. in Hoover 2011). 
 
In recent years, particularly since the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, we have seen a similar evolution of approaches to emergency management, progressing from strictly "top-down" approaches to ones that allow for, and even require, community integration into risk mitigation programs. The move toward community driven risk mitigation has the potential to seriously impact our approaches to risk communication and our use of it as a risk mitigation tool for fostering resilient community infrastructures.
 
The relevance of community resilience as a goal for emergency management agencies and other risk mitigation organizations has been well-established by researchers: Emergency management agencies and resilient communities are not merely coextensive; they are constituents parts of effective risk mitigation programs (SERRI/CARRI 2009). From a community resilience perspective, programs that develop resilient communities and sustain their inertia are integral parts of efforts to create a "culture of preparedness" among citizens. A growing body of
research into resilient communities approaches involves locating the embedded homeland security, emergency management, and risk mitigation resources already extant in the community.
 
Many attempts to define "risk communication" position it as a subdomain of technical communication, a discipline preoccupied with the communication of technical or scientific information to a range of audiences, including the public. Technical communicators have consistently elaborated the kind of "us/them" dialectical tension between "experts" (the "we" in Fischhoff's survey above) and their audiences. From a technical communication perspective, technical and scientific experts have access to rarified, highly specialized information that they must then "translate" into terms the public can understand (Bazerman & Paradis 1991; Fischhoff 1990; Gibson 1985; Gow and Otway 1990). Information is, in this construction, handed down to the public from on high to the lay-public. If described well enough and in appropriate terms, the public not only gains an awareness of the risk, but comes to also understand the risk in ways that allow them to take independent, informed actions to participate in its mitigation (Morgan, et al. 2002).
 
Risk communication in the context of resilient communities is better described as a "community wide" process of exchanging information and understanding about risk to all stakeholders involved, whether those stakeholders are technical experts or "experts" in the dynamics, discourses, and cultures that sustain community relations. It is important to consider risk communication as part of an iterative process, one whose products are the risk messages repeated throughout the community across a number of heterogeneous connections to community commonplaces such as concerns, capacities, and (often ad hoc) networks of responsibility and authority. The topic of risk is an invitation to study a community's inherent discourse networks and derive strategies for leveraging them in the interest of community resilience.
 
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