Public participation and the implementation of the Seveso III Directive in Portugal: results of interviews with Portuguese Environment Agency and city councils personnel

The main piece of EC legislation aimed at minimizing major accident hazards involving dangerous substances in the EU is the Seveso Directive-SD. Adopted for the first time in 1982, its last revised version, the SDIII, came... [ view full abstract ]

The main piece of EC legislation aimed at minimizing major accident hazards involving dangerous substances in the EU is the Seveso Directive-SD. Adopted for the first time in 1982, its last revised version, the SDIII, came into force in 2012. Decree-Law-150/2015 transposed it into Portuguese law on 5th August 2015. The different versions of the Directive have considered the role of communication in the context of industrial risk increasingly important. In fact, in the last two decades the idea of risk has been complexified and understandings of risk communication have moved towards dialogue and the legitimation of all actors involved.
The EC has been reviewing the regulatory framework of the SD in order to increasingly adapt it to the EU demand for effective governance of industrial risk. Concerning communication, two legal requirements of the SD III (also transposed into Portuguese law) are the improvement of “the level and quality of information to the public” and the implementation of “a public participation procedure”. Hence, the new Decree-Law-150/2015 determines that communication be addressed differently from previous Decree-Law-254/2007: 1)it indicates that information available to the public was previously not sufficient and ought to be enhanced and 2)it requires the creation of a public participation procedure on this matter, which is supposed to be different from mere public consultation for preparing or updating an external emergency plan as determined by the earlier law.
It is important to examine in detail what has been conceived and planned by the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) and by city councils in order to implement those matters. More specifically: How will information to the public be improved and by what means should public participation be undertaken? These questions are being investigated through interviews with APA and city councils personnel and the first findings will be presented. Such issues are part of the research project CIRIS – ‘Communication of industrial risk in Portugal’, which started in 2015 at the Communication and Society Research Centre at the University of Minho and is funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation. CIRIS aims to analyze industrial risk communication in Portugal through interviews and content and discourse analyses, with a focus on the main actors involved –industry, official authorities, the media and the public, especially people who live near industrial plants. The project looks at three main Portuguese industrial complexes: Matosinhos, Estarreja and Sines. The legal reference of the research is the SD.