The Communication Contract and its Ten Ground Clauses

Birgitta Dresp (1)

1 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

The design of procedures for the responsible and effective management of risks to humans and their environment is an important topic in modern environmental engineering. This calls for ethical ground clauses within a communication contract for the global society. How respecting ethical ground clauses of communication may help avoid that the short-term economic interests of a few are placed before the long-term interests of society as a whole is explained on the basis of examples from disaster case studies. The need for rules which ensure that relevant information is effectively transmitted, received, and taken into account promptly is highlighted. Why successfully implementing such rules involves the individual responsibility of all stakeholders, from witnesses or victims to scientific experts and policy makers, is made clear. The ethical ground clauses of a communication contract for the global society provide universal rules for responsible communication. They are defined in terms of general guidelines for sincere, transparent, prompt, and cooperative information sharing, in particular in risk management. Earlier work has shown that implementing such a model for a communication contract in corporate decision making helps promote stakeholder responsibility awareness, and triggers a learning process for initiating and fostering individual and collective behavior that will ultimately lead to responsible decisions and action. These are the prerequisite for avoiding the disastrous consequences of non-action in response to early warnings. They help prevent that relevant scientific data and/or expert knowledge are dismissed or not adequately taken into account. Finally, a communication contract for the global society makes perfect common sense given the fact that faulty communication processes have repeatedly been identified as the major cause of disasters.

Mots clés: Global Society; Human; Risk; Management; Policy making

Domaines: Sciences cognitives; Psychologie; Ethique

Birgitta Dresp. The Communication Contract and its Ten Ground Clauses. Journal of Business Ethics, 2009, ⟨10.1007/s10551-008-9929-3⟩. ⟨hal-01060096⟩