Building Quality Community Relationships: A Planning Model to Gain and Maintain Public Consent (Monograph)

Today's business operating environment finds a public very sophisticated about science, environmental impact, and current issues. Contrary to industry and management assumptions, and despite this high level of knowledge, the public often sets rationality aside, making decisions using highly emotional approaches, ideas, and even hunches. Why is this so? Because community decision-making is always values-driven. The irritations to the process caused by values-driven decision-making are very real. If the public's concerns are not addressed, or worse, minimized, trivialized, ignored, or belittled, the publics - whether the community, neighbors, activists, elected officials, or some combination of all these - in a position to manage the destiny of a company, a product, or an environmental situation, will take control and bring about defeat. Management's principal linkage to these powerful interests is through communication, and much of the information communicated flows out of the environmental audit process. As such, in this monograph we will examine the critical communication concepts that, if correctly applied, can help businesses take advantage of information gained through environmental health and safety (EHS) audits to develop an effective strategy to gain and maintain consent from the community. This monograph is constructed to meet several objectives: audit checklists are included to help evaluate existing communication plans, strategies, policies, and tactics; planning document models are included to aid in constructing communication-based relationships which will minimize the chances of failure and maximize the obtaining of community consent; and communication plan formats are presented for use as both audit and operational models.