Towards a strategic research agenda for social sciences and humanities in radiological protection

Reflecting a change in funding strategies for European research projects, and a commitment to the idea of responsible research and innovation in radiological protection (RP), a collective of research institutes and universities have developed a prospective Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in radiological protection. This is the first time such a research agenda has been proposed. This paper identifies six research lines of interest and concern: 1) Effects of social, psychological and economic aspects on RP behaviour; 2) Holistic approaches to the governance of radiological risks; 3) Responsible research and innovation in RP; 4) Stakeholder engagement and participatory processes in RP research, development, policy and practice; 5) Risk communication; and 6) RP cultures. These topics were developed through broad stakeholder consultation, in conjunction with activities carried out in the framework of various projects and initiatives (EU H2020 CONCERT programme, the EU FP7 projects OPERRA, PREPARE and EAGLE, the 2015-2018 RICOMET series of conferences, and the 2014 and 2016 International Symposia on Ethics of Environmental Health); as well as through dialogues with members of the European radiation protection research communities. The six research lines open opportunities to integrate a range of key social and ethical considerations into RP, thereby expanding research opportunities and programmes and fostering collaborative approaches to research and innovation

Towards a strategic research agenda for social sciences and humanities in radiological protection

peer reviewedReflecting a change in funding strategies for European research projects, and a commitment to the idea of responsible research and innovation in radiological protection (RP), a collective of research institutes and universities have developed a prospective Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in radiological protection. This is the first time such a research agenda has been proposed. This paper identifies six research lines of interest and concern: 1) Effects of social, psychological and economic aspects on RP behaviour; 2) Holistic approaches to the governance of radiological risks; 3) Responsible research and innovation in RP; 4) Stakeholder engagement and participatory processes in RP research, development, policy and practice; 5) Risk communication; and 6) RP cultures. These topics were developed through broad stakeholder consultation, in conjunction with activities carried out in the framework of various projects and initiatives (EU H2020 CONCERT programme, the EU FP7 projects OPERRA, PREPARE and EAGLE, the 2015-2018 RICOMET series of conferences, and the 2014 and 2016 International Symposia on Ethics of Environmental Health); as well as through dialogues with members of the European radiation protection research communities. The six research lines open opportunities to integrate a range of key social and ethical considerations into RP, thereby expanding research opportunities and programmes and fostering collaborative approaches to research and innovation

Revised Strategic Research Agenda for Social Sciences and Humanities in Radiation Protection

This document describes the research priorities and the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in radiation protection for the next 20 years. It also reports on the results of a first gap analysis. The SSH SRA is a living document, under constant development through the engagement of the SSH community in radiation protection field and other stakeholders, especially technical and research platforms. To this end, the SSH community in radiation protection field will structure and enhance dialogue at the European level among the different stakeholders, fostering the sharing of knowledge and information among various disciplines working on aspects of radiation protection and identify the SSH research needs in the field of radiation protection. The objective of Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in radiation protection is to contribute towards improvement of the Radiation Protection (RP) system by coordinating European SSH research in the field of radiation protection; supporting education and training; knowledge management and sharing; and identifying SSH state of the art across domains. It is only by enabling SSH research to play a fuller and stronger role through a coordinated SRA mechanism that societal perspectives on research relating to radiation protection will be realised. The SSH SRA has been developed through a broad stakeholder engagement process. The research topics to be included in the SSH SRA have been collected through various activities carried out in the H2020 projects CONCERT and the FP7 projects OPERRA, PREPARE and EAGLE, notably the RICOMET 2015, 2016 an RICOMET 2017 conferences and Symposium on Ethics of Environmental Health, as well as in dialogues with members of the radiation protection platforms, carried out in a context of the CONCERT 2.6 task group. These research topics have been prioritised for the first time at the Radiation Protection Week in Oxford (19-23 September 2016) with task 2.6 members, SSH community and platforms, and further debated upon at the RICOMET Conference 2017 (June 27th to 29th, Vienna) with a large audience. The version summarised in this report is the most recent revision on of the SSH SRA (D2.8 and D2.10)

Multi-criteria decision aiding model for the evaluation of agricultural countermeasures after an accidental release of radionuclides to the environment

Multi-criteria decision aid has emerged from the operational research field as the answer given to a couple of important questions encountered in complex decisions problems. Firstly, as decision aiding tools, such methods do not replace the decision maker with a mathematical model, but support him to construct his solution by describing and evaluating his options. Secondly, instead of using a unique criterion capturing all aspects of the problem, in the multi-criteria decision aid methods one seeks to build multiple criteria, representing several points of view. This work explores the application of multi-criteria decision aid methods for optimising food chain countermeasure strategies after a radioactive release to the environment. The core of the thesis is dedicated to formulating general lines for the development of a multi-criteria decision aid model. This includes the definition of potential actions, construction of evaluation criteria and preference modelling and is essentially based on the results of a stakeholders’ process. The work is centred on the management of contaminated milk in order to provide a concrete focus and because of its importance as an ingestion pathway in short term after an accident.Among other issues, the public acceptance of milk countermeasures as a key evaluation criterion is analysed in detail. A comparison of acceptance based on stochastic dominance is proposed and, based on that, a countermeasures’ acceptance ranking is deduced.In order to assess “global preferences” taking into account all the evaluation criteria, an ordinal method is chosen. This method allows expressing the relative importance of criteria in a qualitative way instead of using, for instance, numerical weights. Some algorithms that can be used for robustness analysis are also proposed. This type of analysis is an alternative to sensitivity analysis in what concerns data uncertainty and imprecision and seeks to determine how and if a model result or conclusion obtained for a specific instance of a model’s parameters holds over the entire domain of acceptable values for these parameters.The integrated multi-criteria decision aid approach proposed makes use of outranking and interactive methodologies and is implemented and tested through a number of case studies and prototype tools.Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieurinfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe

Representations of Incident Reporting as a Collective Learning Process

In the context of vulnerability analysis, it is now widely aknowledged that social factors should be taken into account, alongside technical ones. Depending on the particular approach adopted, these social factors are considered to influence “coping capacities”, “adaptive capacities” or “resilience”. The ability of a socio-technical system to learn from past incidents and accidents seems to have a positive influence on its vulnerability, as it increases its capacity to adapt properly in case of future unwanted envents. To that regard, incident reporting systems are of first importance as they are supposed to constitute a collective memory of past incidents, to initiate a collective share of information and to foster collective learning and adapations. Yet, the theoretical assumptions about the ability of a reporting system to imply collective learning have still to be demonstrated. This paper proposes a methodology addressing this issue. To do so, we conduct a number of semi-structured interviews in a nuclear facility with various types of actors (managers, lab responsibles, technical workers), and in different risk contexts. In addition, participants are requested to produce a mental map of the reporting system they are concerned with. These inputs are then analyzed following a “cross-case analysis” procedure in order to identify patterns of actors' representations of the reporting system, and to link these patterns to potential learning processes fostered by the system. This constitutes the first step of an inductive research process aiming to identify and characterize the link between reporting systems and collective learning. In the next steps, the link between the identified patterns of representations and collective learning processes will be tested quantitatively. The final aim being to elaborate ways to improve Incident Reporting Systems to improve collective learning

How are we vulnerable? Opening industrial hazards vulnerability analysis to participation

The risk analysis framework has been the dominant theoretical framework used to address the uncertainty of a potential hazard bypassing the system's safeguards and protection. In essence, this involves the evaluation of the probability and the magnitude of the consequences of the undesired events that can transform the hazard into actual damage. Despite the technical premises, the importance of integrating social aspects into the analysis is now recognized by an increasing number or risk analysis models. Another way to deal with potential consequences of hazards is to analyze the vulnerability of the system considered. This paradigm overcomes the shortcomings of risk analysis in situations when the knowledge about the probabilities and the outcomes is incomplete or insufficient On the one hand, studies in the literature show that socio-economic factors are often integrated in a participative way in vulnerability analysis models especially in the natural hazards research field. On the other hand, it seems that such considerations are rarely integrated in the models aiming at evaluating the vulnerability to an industrial hazard. What can we learn from the analysis of models addressing vulnerability to natural hazards in terms of the participatory integration of social factors? What could be the reasons to apply such participation tools in order to assess the vulnerability to industrial hazards? These are the questions we address in this contribution. To do so, we realized a systematic literature review from scientific journal papers on vulnerability analysis published in the last two decades. From this review, three main arguments can be found arguing for the use of participation for vulnerability analysis. Indeed, participation allows (1) context-based assessments, that may (2) foster the development of adaptative capacities (3) both for short and long-term. Based on those arguments, we identifiy possible paths to foster participation for context-based industrial vulnerability analysis