Public perceptions of energy infrastructure often hinge on how communities perceive the risks and benefits of proposed facilities. This study investigates how U.S. residents evaluate energy facility types when imagining them near their communities, including a used nuclear fuel storage (UNFS) and a carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, compared to a generic large-scale energy (LSE) facility as a control. Drawing on a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1,141), we examine how perceived risks and benefits vary by facility type, how proximity influences support, and how mental models may shape perceptions. Quantitative analyses reveal that UNFS facilities are perceived as significantly riskier and less beneficial than CCS or LSE facilities. Support increases with proximity, but it does not override technology-specific perceptions. Qualitative data analyzed via structured topic modelling (STM) show that risk narratives for UNFS facilities emphasize long-term health and safety concerns rooted in historical events and institutional distrust. Public risk perceptions for CCS center on uncertainty and unfamiliarity, while LSE facilities elicit more localized concerns. Benefit perceptions are less detailed and varied in scale, with UNFS facilities tied to economic utility, CCS to environmental mitigation, and LSE facilities to community development. These findings illustrate the importance of tailoring public engagement activities and communication strategies to distinct facility types and community mental models. Effective siting strategies must address not only geographic proximity but also the symbolic and emotional dimensions of public perceptions.
This article explores the conditions of risk action by examining why acknowledged seismic risk often fails to generate participation in collective risk reduction measures. Drawing on the case of housing renewal in Istanbul, T & uuml;rkiye, it argues that seismic risk does not operate as a continuous motivational force but as a latent condition whose influence is activated only when specific agency-enabling thresholds are crossed. Rather than interpreting non-action as a deficit of risk perception, the study demonstrates how constrained feasibility, institutional uncertainty, and threatened social continuity delimit households' capacity to act, rendering risk practically secondary. The analysis is based on an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. Qualitative dimensions are tested through a field survey experiment, combining ordered logit modelling with a randomised gain-loss framing vignette under fixed risk and cost conditions. The findings show that seismic risk remains behaviourally dormant unless households perceive renewal as feasible, institutionally credible, and socially sustainable. Economic capacity emerges as a binding precondition for action, while trust in proximate implementing institutions conditions willingness independently of general state trust. Experimental results demonstrate that informational framing does not mobilise action in the presence of binding constraints. Gain framing increases willingness only among financially constrained households by reconfiguring feasibility, while loss framing fails to produce behavioural change. The article contributes to risk research by re-specifying the role of risk in collective decision-making. It introduces the concept of a risk action threshold, showing that risk becomes consequential only after agency constraints are relaxed. This perspective explains the systematic underperformance of awareness-based and nudge-oriented policies in urban risk governance and redirects attention from persuasion toward the institutional and material conditions that make risk actionable.
This study investigates the barriers that limit women's ability to receive and act upon early warning messages during disasters. It focuses on the intersection of socio-economic and cultural factors in coastal Odisha, India, with particular reference to Cyclone Fani . Using a mixed-method, exploratory design, data were collected in two phases from 211 women and from 173 stakeholders, including community volunteers, health workers, NGO staff, and government responders. Through surveys, focus group discussions, and interviews, the study identifies religious beliefs, socio-economic inequalities, communication barriers, and gendered risk perceptions as critical barriers to effective warning dissemination and preparedness. A Force Field Analysis (FFA) was applied to map and evaluate the relative strength of the barriers and facilitators influencing women's disaster response behaviour. Factors such as grassroots volunteering, trained personnel, and strong neighbourhood networks emerged as key facilitators. Findings reveal that although most women received early warnings, behavioural and socio-cultural constraints limited their preparedness actions. These barriers underscore that early warning access and action are not merely technical challenges but are rooted in structural inequalities. The paper concludes that integrating behavioural and socio-cultural understanding into policy design is crucial for advancing inclusive disaster preparedness. By adopting behaviourally informed Early Warning Systems, Odisha and similar disaster-prone contexts can strengthen community responses to warning information and enable marginalized women to become active participants in resilience building.
The fundamental topology of risk has shifted from isolated episodes to converging, cascading, and compounding crises. Yet, despite this transformation, prevailing risk communication frameworks remain rooted in mid-20th-century linear paradigms. We argue that reliance on these static transmission models creates a structural liability in modern governance. Such approaches provide an illusion of institutional control while failing to account for the nonlinearity and interdependence of complex adaptive systems. To bridge this operational gap, we propose a complexity-aware five-stage model: detection, alignment, framing, interaction, and behavioral feedback. By reconceptualizing communication as a central control parameter for system resilience instead of a post-assessment dissemination function, this framework transforms communication from an unmeasured administrative task into a quantifiable driver of adaptive capacity.
This article examines how flood risk is communicated and socially interpreted through hydraulic and transport infrastructures in flood-prone territories. Drawing on visual sociology and visual semiotics within risk communication research, it analyses 31 bridges in the Lower Mondego region (Portugal) using a layered visual-semiotic protocol that combines systematic description of material features with semiotic interpretation of infrastructural configurations. Visual data were triangulated with narratives from 26 focus groups conducted in flood-affected communities, allowing comparison between material cues and lived interpretations of risk. The analysis identifies five risk communication regimes: localised effectiveness, systemic fragility, spatial injustice, normalised error, and institutional disconnection. These regimes show how infrastructures function as communicational artefacts that make infrastructural vulnerability and uneven exposure visible, normalise uncertainty, and materialise uneven forms of care and responsibility. The article contributes to risk research by conceptualising bridges as socio-technical media through which flood risk is communicated and interpreted outside formal messages, showing how material configurations shape public understandings of infrastructural vulnerability, uneven exposure, responsibility, and acceptable risk, and advancing a transferable visual-semiotic protocol for analysing risk communication through everyday public infrastructures in flood-prone contexts.
Production is increasingly shifting into village territories as a result of rural industrialization, leading to an uneven distribution of socio-ecological risks. This article examines how such manufactured risks arise and how women enact reflexivity in Bakung Village, South Sumatra. Using a qualitative descriptive design embedded in participatory action research, we combined in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and community social mapping to diagnose exposure pathways and responses. Findings reveal hamlet-specific configurations: domestic water contamination linked to tapioca effluent in Dusun 1; persistent dust and noise from a coal haul corridor disrupting livelihoods in Dusun 2; and cross-boundary particulates from a wood processing plant affecting Dusun 3. Women lead proactive contention-demonstrations, petitions, monitoring, and visual documentation-while developing adaptive micro-infrastructures such as household filtration, interior dust barriers, and intensified hygiene. Institutional responses were largely compensatory and reactive, reducing immediate burdens without addressing structural drivers. The research offers a gendered, community-driven viewpoint to discussions on risk society, illustrating how delocalized threats are made apparent through participatory mapping and how adaptation expenses are individualized at the household level. Enforced setbacks, cumulative impact assessment, independent monitoring with public dashboards, and stakeholder forums involving affected villages are among the implications of industrialization.
Young pregnant care-leavers in danger of having their infant removed are positioned as both exposed to risk (e.g. as a result of their vulnerability) and posing a risk to others (e.g. their child). They are at the transition between being a child and becoming a parent within the welfare system. Often considered hard-to-reach, young pregnant care-leavers are high-risk and complex clients. 'My Place' is a South Australian trauma responsive service providing health and therapeutic services to this population group working to assess, navigate, minimise, and operationalise risks. As part of the evaluation of My Place, qualitative semi-structured interviews and focus groups were held with young service-users (n = 9), staff (n = 4), health consumers (n = 3), and service stakeholders (n = 23) from a range of fields of practice. Several understandings of risk were identified. The young people reported My Place engaged them in the navigation of risks and, whenever possible, choice and decision-making. They took the young peoples' developmental-stage, strengths, and trauma-background into account in risk assessment and planning using a harm minimisation approach. In recognising the frequency and intensity of the therapeutic alliance, service stakeholders trusted My Place's risk-assessment and management plans. My Place made risks explicit, openly grappling with ethical trickiness and working to share or carry risk. Embedded within a trauma-responsive learning health service, My Place was found to have a high tolerance for risk, 'holding' risk for young people and other services. Sharing information across services, access to safety-learning systems, and clinical supervision provided a safe and supportive environment for My Place to embrace risk.
In this article, the role of the home in citizen crisis preparedness is explored by utilising a theoretical framework that highlights the home as a sociological phenomenon and as a base for the construction and maintenance of ontological security. The aim of this article is to explore the performativity of crisis preparedness, and the ways it is co-produced through gendered imaginaries of home, identity and relational security. By foregrounding the interplay between preparedness practices and ontological security, the article analyses how ideas of home and social relations are mobilised in the enactment of preparedness, and how these enactments reproduce or unsettle gendered identities and expectations. In so doing, we explore how the home becomes a place for preparedness, as well as how understandings of home and preparedness are constructed in relation to gendered identity formations. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, all living in Sweden. A thematic analysis of the material reveals three empirical themes: (1) Staying at home, (2) Leaving home and (3) 'Doing' crisis preparedness - 'Doing' gender. The analysis shows that citizen crisis preparedness is a deeply gendered practice, where ontological security is constructed in relation to both place and gender. Women's sense of security is in large part relational, family-oriented, and collective, while men's sense of security is more often individual, competence-oriented, and materially anchored. Both forms of security are connected to the home - but the meaning of home varies depending on who is speaking, what practices are carried out there, and what resources are available.
This article compares the political conceptualisation of risk in Brazilian Portuguese and German. The corpus consists of minutes from the Bundestag (German parliament) and the C & acirc;mara dos Deputados (Brazilian parliament), covering 20 years of debates (2001-2001) and originates from two research projects. The first is the BrPolicorpus, a corpus of political official Brazilian government documents maintained by the MiDiTeS (Media, Discourse Technology, and Society) research group at the Ph2D (Research Centre for Post-Humanist and Digital Humanities) at UNICAMP while the German corpus is maintained by the Discourse Lab project at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at TU-Darmstadt. The corpus was POS processed and the occurrences of risk were counted for each language, using a work per million normalisation. Linear regression served as an indication of uses above or below the median; such variation was assumed as evidence of variations in discourse motivated by context. After this, the collocates in a five-year period groups for each language were processed using Log-Likelihood. The libraries employed for processing were SpaCy and NLTK and the base R package. In German, the use risk remained stable between 2001 and 2021, with an emphasis on compounds and reflecting discursive continuity despite political changes. The term is widely used in topics such as health, economics, and security. In Portuguese, it showed variations linked to the political context, with peaks in election and crisis years. Grammatical patterns with personalisation and impersonalisation strategies were identified. The use of adjectives in a marked order intensifies the discourse. Environmental, economic and health risks were frequent, with an emphasis on sovereignty and investments. Cultural and linguistic differences were a challenge. The research thus makes a significant contribution to the study of the word risk and also to the lexical and discourse comparison between German and Portuguese.
Drawing on nationally representative data from the 2017 and 2021 Chinese Social Survey, this paper examines how Internet use shapes public safety perception (PSP) in China. Across multiple linear regressions, logit models, multilevel analyses, and instrumental-variable (2SLS) estimates, we find a robust negative relationship: greater Internet use decreases people's PSP. The effect, however, is heterogeneous. By purpose, social-information use consistently eroded PSP, while the relationship between entertainment-oriented use and PSP exhibited a cross-wave divergence which appeared neutral in 2017 but positive in 2021, reflecting the buffering and diversionary role of online entertainment during the pandemic. By perception type, the Internet has a stronger depressive effect on societal-level evaluations of safety than on individual-level assessments. Subgroup analyses show sharper declines among women and the less educated, and provincial context was more salient in 2021 the wave, with higher average education predicting lower PSP. These findings underscore how digital exposure interacts with usage patterns and social environments, carrying important implications for governance and risk communication.
This study investigates the motivational factors influencing the intentions of Chinese citizens to seek information in the context of environmental risks associated with Japan's discharge of nuclear wastewater. The conceptual model combines the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model (PRISM) with social media exposure and fatalism, which is a concept related to traditional Chinese culture. Data from an online survey of 650 Chinese citizens, conducted using quota sampling, are analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that social media exposure positively affects individuals' risk perception and negative affect but does not significantly influence information need. Furthermore, risk perception, negative affect, and perceived knowledge all positively influence the information seeking. Additionally, the study conducted a multi-group path analysis using fatalism as a grouping variable. The results show that in the high-fatalism group (N = 354), the positive influence of risk perception as well as information need on information seeking is weakened, whereas the positive impact of negative affect on information seeking is strengthened. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
