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Stakeholder involvement : an integral part of radiation protection decision making

Current trends in participative democracy suggest that the use of stakeholder involvement in decision making will increase in the next decade and beyond. The evolution towards stakeholder involvement is driven mainly by stakeholders’ expectation to participate in decision making on issues that affect them. The current view of international radiation protection organisations is that the stakeholders have a right to participate in decision making, but the changes to the current system of radiation protection decision making will only occur slowly through build up of positive experiences and appreciation of benefits provided by stakeholder involvement.The benefits of stakeholder involvement have already been observed in decision making in issues ranging from new nuclear build to dealing with radiological emergencies, but unsuccessful stakeholder involvement programmes have also been observed. In order to integrate stakeholder involvement further into radiation protection decision making it is important to incorporate and implement lessons learnt from both successful and unsuccessful stakeholder programmes, and understand when stakeholder involvement can be applied. My research into clearance of low radioactivity materials shows that stakeholder involvement can be applied in planned exposure situations as defined by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). Involvement of stakeholders in planned exposure situation decision making should, however, be limited to issues with high level of reputation risk or wide ranging impacts of multiple stakeholder groups.To assess whether stakeholder involvement can be applied in the other exposure situations defined by the ICRP as emergency and existing exposure situations, the other part of my research focused on radiological emergencies. The research demonstrated that stakeholder aided decision making already has a place in solving cooperative problems of emergency management, but there is still further scope to apply stakeholder involvement in coordination of emergency management. The research shows that there is scope to integrate stakeholder involvement further into radiation protection decision making, but this must be done in a planned and organised manner.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:568656
Date January 2013
CreatorsKoskelainen, Markku Olavi
ContributorsHughes, Colin; French, Simon; Butler, Gregg
PublisherUniversity of Manchester
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttps://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/stakeholder-involvement-an-integral-part-of-radiation-protection-decision-making(afc624d4-c887-46ae-9710-cfe8091a40b2).html

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