Virtues and Vices of Trust, Mistrust, and Trust-Building in Radioactive Waste Management Policies: a Historical and International View

Spurred by repeated failures to gain public acceptance for high-level radioactive waste repositories across a number of Western countries, and in the context of concerns for a long-term decline of trust in state institutions, radioactive waste management (RWM) emerged, since the 1990s, as a forerunner in more participatory governance approaches. As part of these efforts, trust-building has become somewhat of a ‘magic bullet’ supposed to solve the problems of local citizen acceptance of waste repositories. The long-term, multilevel and sociotechnical character of RWM highlights in particular the role of institutional trust – public trust in safety experts and the institutions responsible for planning and implementing RWM solutions. National and industry efforts in this area (e.g. via the concept of Social Licence to Operate – SLO) have been accompanied by those at the international level, with the Forum on Stakeholder Confidence (FSC) within the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency as a key example of forum for cross-country learning via exchange of information and experience. Building on research conducted within the EU-funded HoNESt project (History of Nuclear Energy and Society), which provides a Europe analysis of evolution of the interaction between the nuclear sector and society, this paper provides a novel historical and cross-country perspective to trust-building in RWM policy. The paper focuses on the experience of four key European forerunner countries – Finland, France, Sweden and the UK – in their efforts to build institutional trust, throughout the evolution of RWM policies from a purely technical to more participatory models since the 1990s. We focus on the transnational processes of exchange of experience and information, with NEA FSC as an illustrative example of the role of international organisations as knowledge brokers and facilitators in trust-building and public engagement. We examine the degree to which the historically high levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in Finland and Sweden help explain the relatively smooth advancement of these countries’ deep geological repository projects as opposed to the continuing difficulties of France and the UK in their respective RWM policies. We seek to explain the differences between two Nordic cases – the Swedish project experiencing delays caused by scientific controversies that have been debated in public (incl. in the Environmental Court) – a debate that hitherto has been absent in Finland. We conclude our analysis by critically examining the role of trust and trust-building efforts in RWM policy and participatory governance practice, exploring the virtues of mistrust and the downsides of unwarranted and excessive trust.