January 2014: Open lecture by Linda SONERYD

The importance of stakeholder involvement in nuclear waste management for a successful siting process is today widely recognised. I will focus on efforts to transfer one particular mechanism for dialogue, aiming to initiate and improve discussions on nuclear waste management, from one national context to another. The RISCOM model was developed by Swedish Nuclear Waste Authorities at the end of the 1990s, and efforts to implement it in the Czech Republic were initiated more than a decade later. In this study (conducted together with Konopasek and Svacina) we see RISCOM as part of a complex of programmes, techniques and procedures that aim to support governmental ambitions to find a solution to nuclear waste disposal. Based on our analysis of how RISCOM ended up in the Czech Republic, I will elaborate on how the boundaries between inside and outside the RISCOM model were controlled and transgressed. As a clearly-demarcated model implemented and evaluated according to its own standardised principles, 'failure' can always be ascribed to factors external to the model. The involved actors however translated the RISCOM model into their own projects and interests and were therefore also highly interested in making certain aspects of the RISCOM activities to materialise outside these controlled events. Moreover, 'the Swedish model' had the function of a myth that fuelled certain hopes for democracy and transparency (cf. citing success), that had little to do with the dominant versions of 'stakeholder involvement' related to nuclear waste management in Sweden.