Community Waste Management (COWAM) 2 - Improving the Governance of Nuclear Waste Management and Disposal in Europe

Current

Mainly Europe (see Results).

The European EURATOM programme stresses that "the absence of a broadly agreed approach to waste management and disposal is one of the main impediments to the continued and future use of nuclear energy". Whether one agrees with the political agenda behind or not, it can be argued that the main difficulties lie in the absence of practicable decision-making processes in radioactive waste governance (RWG) and therefore, as it is also stated in the programme, "(i)t is needed... to develop decision processes that are perceived as fair and equitable by the stakeholders involved". In this perspective, the COWAM 2 project specifically addresses the objectives of the EURATOM work programme, viz., "to better understand what influences public acceptance and develop guidance for the improved governance of geological waste disposal" (NUWASTE-2003-3.2.1.1-5). In particular, COWAM 2 is aimed to produce "development and evaluation of alternatives measures,... of better governance processes that properly address public concerns on waste disposal" (NUWASTE-2003-3.2.). The project is set up under the 6th EU Framework Programme (STREP). The objective of COWAM 2 is to contribute to the actual improvement of the RWG by: - Better identifying and understanding societal expectations, needs and concerns as regards radioactive waste decision-making processes (DMPs), notably at the local and regional levels, taking advantage of the past and ongoing successful and unsuccessful experiences of RWG in the concerned European countries; - Increasing societal awareness of and accountability for RWG at the local, national and European levels, creating the conditions for an improved dialogue among representatives of civil society and the traditional public and private actors of RWG; - Developing guidance on innovative democratic governance of RWG, integrating the local, national and European levels of decision as well as the key non technical and technical dimensions involved; - Developing best practices and benchmarking on practical and sustainable DMPs recognised as fair and equitable by the stakeholders involved at the local, national and European levels as well as consistent across the short, medium and long term of RWG; - Contributing to enable European societies to make actual progress in the governance of radioactive waste management (RWM), in order to reach practicable, accountable and sustainable decisions. COWAM 2 aims at a broad involvement of actors from civil society (with a significant representation of local communities, elected representatives, and NGOs, as well as social and natural scientists from outside RWM institutions) together with the traditional actors in the field such as the implementers of RWM, the Public Authorities, experts and waste producers.

Most countries represented in COWAM 2 (Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, as well as Japan and South Africa) are at a turning point of experimenting new approaches in decision-making around RWM. As the reports from each working group show (Section 2 of final report, www.cowam.com/spip.php?article71), COWAM 2 proposes tools and strategies for implementing inclusive governance in the RWM context. Not least important is the fact that these results were achieved in a collaborative manner among participating actors. COWAM 2 indeed developed an innovative methodology of cooperative research, based on the structured involvement of stakeholders in the production of knowledge having a direct connection with their concerns and actions. It is a valuable outcome of COWAM 2 in the same way that the tools and strategies worked out by participants are valuable. The cooperative research approach, like the concrete COWAM 2 work package offerings, can be used again in new contexts to improve the governance of RWM or other societal risk management. Across three years of cooperative research to develop their tools and strategies, COWAM 2 participants identified the latest advances and best practices on three levels: - Structuring local communities for engagement in RWM governance - Legal and institutional frameworks for inclusive governance of RWM - Sustainable and reliable governance of long term issues. Indeed, the COWAM 2 research made it plain that RWG must be concerned with the local level (democratic structures and processes...), with the institutional level (organisations and formal instruments and processes, often national), and with the longterm dimension (the special constraints introduced by the very long periods associated with RWG). These three levels of different nature are interrelated, and they are all essential. Governance of RWG is indeed multi-level governance, and while different actors may be more specifically concerned with one level or one element, all actors should be aware of the full extent of this three-dimensional governance "space".