Meaningful communication among experts and affected citizens on risk: challenge or impossibility?

Experience to date demonstrates that it remains challenging to engage experts and concerned citizens in a meaningful and mutually comprehensive dialogue on complex and technical risk-bearing projects. In search of an explanation we found Niklas Luhmann's interpretation of modern society very useful. Luhmann describes modern society as the aggregate of more or less self-sufficient functional subsystems becoming more and more isolated from each other in a spiral of progressive specialisation. With each system developing its own expectations, language, rationality and ways of observing and interpreting reality, communication between systems becomes progressively problematic; according to Luhmann, even impossible. Contrary to Luhmann, however, we consider communicating human beings (and not communication in itself) the constituting elements of society. From that perspective we see a connection with Ulrich Beck's thesis on modern society as an individualised risk society and his call for 'reflexive science and decision making'. We will use Beck's negotiation model to build communicative bridges between (Luhmann's) social (sub)systems, in particular, by engaging as many concerned parties as possible. Further, we will argue that the Belgian experience with the siting of a radioactive waste repository demonstrates that the creation of an environment in which experts and citizens can enter into dialogue as individuals, rather than as representatives of interests or (scientific) disciplines, can help bridge differences in the rationality and jargon of systems, and result in finding common ground.