Partnership building and purpose

One can characterize trust as the willingness of a person, group or community to make themselves vulnerable in the expectation (or hope) of a benefit coming from association with others that would not otherwise be forth-coming. The conditions of trust in government, as in a commercial enterprise, as in scientific and technological advances more generally, all relate, on the one hand, to hopes of benefits and, on the other hand, to confidence in the capacity

and will of society’s leaders and innovators, and other potential partners, to ensure the sharing of those benefits. Successful stewardship, like successful diplomacy, will arise from effective dialogue leading to confidence in the prospects for a worthwhile common future.

As an example, the OECD/NEA’s workshop ‘Forum on Stakeholder Confidence’ held in Ottawa, Canada, in October 2002, highlighted the experience of the communities of Port Hope, on the shores of Lake Ontario (Canada), whose townships have been contaminated with (mostly low level) long lived radioactive wastes due to past industrial activities involving radium and uranium refining [50]. As made clear by key stakeholders and reinforced by multimedia presentations, the Port Hope (and neighbouring) communities have, purposefully, set about to build a social — and societal — relationship with the wastes. After more than 20 years of discussions, suggestions and delib-erations, the Port Hope community has insisted on its ownership of the contam-ination problem, accepting it as a historical liability that the community adopts as a part of its identity. The community’s favoured stewardship solution concept, formalized in terms of the Port Hope Area Initiative, is to accommodate the radioactive wastes as modern-day burial mounds. The radioactive wastes, piled together and suitably ‘capped’, will become landscape features integrated into the everyday life of the community. The managed wastes thus become features in a kind of theme park, which becomes (it is hoped) a tourist attraction rather than a reason to avoid the area.

An interesting feature of this example is that the host community has refused alternative solutions for long term waste management, such as deep underground disposal, that would — in the community’s view — depend on expertise and knowledge that they feel is not sufficiently accessible to them.

Rather than a solution that would place the problem ‘out of their hands’ (and out of their control), they prefer a solution that they can see and understand (and, hence, that remains within their control).

No doubt this solution for Port Hope has been facilitated by the fact that the radioactive waste in question is due to industrial activities (radium and uranium refining) that engaged many of the past generations of the town’s inhabitants and, thus, contributed fundamentally to the building of the local economy and community. An objection might be made that, even if the ‘theme park’ concept might work for Port Hope, it is not necessarily an appropriate concept for other contaminated sites or for the long term management of large quantities of high level radioactive waste. This is a valid objection. The key point is that, whatever the details of the site contamination or wastes, relation-ships of stakeholders in society must and will be built and maintained. Thought will need to be given to the forms of these relationships, and to the conventions

and mechanisms (e.g., economic, political, legal and sharing of information) by which they are established and maintained.

Examples such as Port Hope suggest that the ‘appropriation’ of the problem by local stakeholders, and their identification of a concept for a solution that is acceptable to them, may be among the key ingredients for the economic, social and political viability of a solution. Equally necessary, of course, is the engagement of the relevant national authorities, establishing a political and economic partnership that will unite the complementary local and national resources and forms of authority. This suggests, from a societal point of view, the identification of three key components for a viable solution to a contaminated site stewardship problem:

(1) Technical and scientific expertise: The development, application and maintenance of scientific knowledge and technical competence to measure and to control the present and eventual exposure of living beings to radioactivity;

(2) Building social/societal relationships with the site: The envisaging and invention, in social and symbolic terms, of how the relevant community (or communities) will relate to and interact with the sites, the risks, the residues and the records.

(3) Political and economic partnership: A means to permit mobilization of the relevant knowledge and resources for the implementation of an agreed societal strategy for stewardship.

The societal challenges addressed in this section relate principally to the second and third of these components which, in various ways, underlie the operational considerations such as management (Section 5), economics and financing (Section 7), and records and information systems (Section 9). It should also be emphasized that the societal components are interdependent with the effectiveness of technical and scientific expertise. As highlighted already in Section 5.5, the building and maintenance of the necessary political and economic partnerships depend basically on the relationships that the different stakeholders develop and maintain amongst themselves and with the site. Without these ongoing partnerships, the relevant knowledge for stewardship will not be mobilized or renewed, and the motivation for long term engagement will be fragile. Therefore, it is important to consider stakeholder participation for designing the stewardship solution, or for formulating and evaluating options, as well as for roles in the operational stages. No individual or institution holds a complete knowledge base for ‘what should be done’. The participation of stakeholders is necessary for the mobilization of existing wisdom and purposefulness, and for the regular renewal of this.

6.3. SOCIETAL CRITERIA FOR DEFINING AND IMPLEMENTING