Risk Communication and Regulatory Culture Clash

Abstract

This paper discusses conflicting regulatory perspectives and their implications for the response to the discrepancy between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s public health objectives and public attitudes about health risks. If the goal of public policy is to maximize individual and social welfare, then we should permit people to trade their personal health for other, more preferred goods. This view implies that the appropriate measure of an risk communication program’s success is not whether everyone above some (arbitrary) exposure level takes action to reduce their exposure, but whether people fully understand the consequences of taking or not taking action. There are both practical and ethical problems with this approach. Informed consent provides an ethically attractive alternative model to the traditional standard-setting approach for public information programs. Advocates of informed consent are willing to accept people’s own judgment of where their best interest lies. Therefore they generally are more willing to allow people to trade off health for other values and are more willing to disclose information to facilitate such trade-offs than those who define well-being strictly in terms of public health. The disagreement on how to measure welfare explains much of the bureaucratic tension between those who ascribe to the standard-setting view of environmental risk regulation and those who advocate a less paternalistic approach.

The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Department of Defense or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.