Organizing risk communication for effective preparedness: Using plans as a catalyst for risk communication

Abstract

Crisis response preparedness is a problematic issue for local governments. It is a responsibility with high stakes, but at the same time it is very distant from the daily management of the community. In France, local governments engage to a limited extent with preparedness by designing crisis response plans, which very often lack operationality. This paper examines the contribution of risk communication to effective crisis response preparedness. Indeed, technical and organizational issues are at the core of preparedness concerns, but we argue that political and cognitive dimensions are equally important, although often overlooked. The use of risk communication thus plays a critical role in the construction of reliable organizational response capabilities in order to face the unexpected, across all these dimensions. To understand this process, we examined the activity of a French risk manager whose objective is to support a group of municipalities in the organization of their respective organizational crisis responses. We found that to help the municipalities go beyond the limits of strictly organizational responses and engage in resilience, this manager uses the formal and technical character of the plan to generate rich cross-sectional communication that produces the conditions for resilience.