Community Engagement, Impacts and Decision-making
Community engagement involves the meaningful involvement of people in decision-making with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Assessment of impacts to communities allows people to understand potential effects of siting and ensures that public safety and wellbeing is prioritized. These are both important to ensure decisions about nuclear technologies are acceptable.
The community engagement process involves identifying reasons that prevent communities from being a part of the siting process, so that communities receive support that is tailored to their needs. Therefore, community-engaged processes can lead to better outcomes, more durable solutions, and more robust processes for negotiating differences in perspective and for sharing different kinds of knowledge.
Including stakeholders can improve decision-making because they have specialized knowledge about their community’s priorities and challenges. Stakeholder engagement refers to the process of incorporating groups or individuals who are affected by, or who can affect, a decision. Developing a process that includes the range of affected stakeholders can lead to more acceptable outcomes.
Featured Content
This spreadsheet provides a list of documents that national laboratory staff found through a search of the literature on social and behavioral science and environmental justice issues related to spent nuclear fuel...
Key tenets of community-engaged decision-making
- Community involvement in decision-making emphasizes that decisions should be made transparently, and individuals are able to influence outcomes. Communities and local governments can assert independence and adapt appropriate solutions to their community needs.
- Assessing impacts and outcomes to distribute the benefits and drawbacks of a policy action, decision, or system in a reasonable and balanced manner for communities. The goal is to help communities recover and prosper by stimulating economic growth.
- Community engagement aims to support communities that may have been left behind, helps communities recover and thrive, and develops solutions that strengthen communities and protect future generations.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions of document authors do not necessarily state or reflect those of the U.S. Government or any agency thereof.
