How risk information and stakeholder-participation affect the sustainability of collaborative decisions: A case study on how the sustainability of stakeholder decisions is affected by different levels of stakeholder participation in preparing risk information

Participatory approaches are the preferred means of assessing environmental damage attributed to the pursuit of profit through the unsustainable deployment of technology. This paper examines how nonprobabilistic risk information, and stakeholder participation in preparing and evaluating this information, influences the formulation of socially acceptable safety thresholds aimed at regulating the unsustainable use of technologies. It concludes that participatory risk platforms, which integrate experts' technical and other stakeholders' social values into safety thresholds, better reflect technological harm despite its characteristic complex causality, inherent uncertainty and diffused responsibility. Further, the multifold consequences of active and genuine stakeholder involvement in constructing risk information-namely, social learning, confidence and trust in regulatory systems-are important for engendering sustainable behaviors at the psycho-cognitive level. Stakeholders acquire capacities for social learning, which increases the chances of competing interests becoming open to other perspectives and the needs of the ecosystem, while generating confidence and trust in the risk-construction process.