Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl

Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl Radioactivity in the environment chapter 17 stakeholder engagement in regaining decent living conditions after chernobyl

Radioactivity in the Environment, Volume 19

ISSN 1569-4860, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-045015-5.00017-4

Stakeholder Engagement

in Regaining Decent Living

fol-if the associated levels of exposure were low, was a permanent worry for the population as far as health was concerned because of the remaining uncertainty

* Parts reprinted, revised and adapted from Lochard, J (2007) Rehabilitation of Living Conditions

in Territories contaminated by the Chernobyl Accident: The ETHOS Project Health Physics, 93,

N° (5), pp 522-526, with permission of Wolters Kluwer Health.

Chapter Outline

17.1 Introduction 311

17.2 A Key Feature of the

Situation of the Population

in the Contaminated

Territories: The Loss of

Control on Daily Living

1999–2001 320

17.4 Key Lessons 322 17.5 New Approach to

Long-Term Rehabilitation 325 17.6 Conclusion 326

concerning protracted exposure, particularly due to internal contamination It was also a very serious handicap for the long-term preservation of the socioeco-nomic infrastructures and the quality of life of the inhabitants.

This led the governments of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine to elaborate and adopt ambitious national laws in the early nineties in an attempt to organize the health, social, and economic living conditions of the population residing in the contaminated territories The objective of these laws was mainly to address long-term issues through a series of national countermeasures and compensa-tion mechanisms, designed mainly according to radiological protection criteria Schematically, the adopted rehabilitation programs relied on restricting further the human presence in the contaminated territories (mandatory or voluntary relocation, free stays in sanatoriums outside of the territories for children…) and on strictly controlling the level of contamination in foodstuffs and the whole body contamination of individuals Many countermeasures were focused

on the control and improvement of the radiological quality of agricultural ucts in collective farms; private productions being restricted as much as possible because of the difficulty to control and monitor their qualities

prod-However, despite the diversity of the countermeasures and the huge amount

of national resources dedicated to their implementation, the adopted strategy failed to take properly into account the complexity of the situation created by the contamination In particular, they did not succeed to mobilize the local com-munities and the individuals who progressively felt completely powerless in the face of the radiological situation The general loss of quality of products, com-modities, and assets combined with the rising concern about the presence of the contamination and its potential health consequences continued to undermine the quality of life of the families, in fact the large majority of the population, which had made the choice to stay in the affected territories Altogether these factors contributed to generate among the inhabitants a general feeling of loss

of control on daily life, exclusion and abandonment

During the mid-nineties, the continuous degradation of the economic tion due to both the collapse of the USSR and the financial burden of the reha-bilitation programs pushed the inhabitants of the territories to restart private production and to rely ever more on the products of the forest to ensure their daily subsistence In the absence of individual know-how and adequate means to control the radiological quality of the foodstuff at the local level, the effect of this change was inevitably a significant increase of the level of exposures within the population and particularly among children The importance of diary products in their diet put a strong pressure on the authorities and experts and contributed to aggravate further the loss of confidence of the population in their ability to man-age the situation In this difficult context, the authorities of Belarus supported the proposal of a group of French experts who were involved since several years

situa-in the evaluation of the radiological, psychological, social, and economic sequences of the Chernobyl accident in the contaminated territories in Ukraine and Belarus to develop a Pilot Project with the objective to directly involve the

con-population in the management of the radiological situation to improve durably, using the existing resources, both its protection and living conditions.

The project, named ETHOS, started in spring 1996 in the Stolyn District in the South of Belarus From the French side, it involved an interdisciplinary team of 12 experts in radiation protection, agronomy and local development, social risk-man-agement, communication, and cooperation in complex situations, supported finan-cially by the European Commission From the Belarus side the project was directly supported by the Chernobyl Committee with the technical assistance of 2 Belarus institutes dealing with radiation protection and agronomy The first phase of the project (1996–1999) was implemented in only one village of the District It allowed

a few tens of voluntary villagers to participate together with the team of experts to

a step-by-step expertise of the radiological situation of the village (coexpertise) and its surrounding to progressively regain control on their daily life and to noticeably improve their protection and living conditions In a second phase (1999–2001), at the request of the local authorities, the Project was extended to 4 other villages of the District to evaluate the feasibility of the diffusion of the approach by local profes-sionals and authorities The Project went to an end in autumn 2001 with the running

of an International Seminar that gave the opportunity to all those who participated actively in its implementation to express their views on its results and lessons.The paper presents an overview of the ETHOS Project, which by several aspects brought a new insight into the long-term rehabilitation strategy after

a nuclear accident or a radiological event Section 17.2 describes briefly the key features of the situation of the population in the contaminated territories

of the Community of Independent States (CIS) in the mid-90s that led to the implementation of the Project Section 17.3 presents a short insight about the methodological and ethical basis of the approach and the two phases of the Projects with their main results Section 17.4 and 17.5 present respectively the lessons learnt through the project and their impacts on the long-term rehabilita-tion strategy for contaminated territories

17.2 A KEY FEATURE OF THE SITUATION OF THE

POPULATION IN THE CONTAMINATED TERRITORIES:

THE LOSS OF CONTROL ON DAILY LIVING CONDITIONS

Several studies performed in the context of the European Commission (EC)- Community of Independent States cooperation program (1991–1995) to evaluate the consequences of the Chernobyl accident had shown that a salient characteris-tic of the situation in the territories considered administratively as contaminated was the general and progressive loss of control of the population on its daily life (Girard & Hériard Dubreuil, 1994, 1995) This observation, shared by sev-eral Belarus authorities and experts, undoubtedly gave the impetus to launch the ETHOS project when it became evident that not only the national rehabilitation program encountered difficulties to improve the radiological situation, but on the contrary this last one was deteriorating in some areas, despite all the efforts of

the authorities and experts to try to restore decent living conditions It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe in details this process of loss of control but

it is however worth to highlight some of the factors that can explain it and also contributed to its reenforcement over the years

First, the invisible and intangible presence of radioactivity in the ment resulting from the Chernobyl accident created a radically new and very difficult to conceive situation for the millions of individuals who were directly confronted to it It induced severe disturbances of their daily life at the health, social, economic, and cultural levels In the absence of past experience and memory this complex situation was unspeakable by the population and gave rise

environ-to a multitude of interrogations that remained in most cases without answers and generated a lot of different concerns among the population (Hériard Dubreuil & Girard, 1996) Furthermore, the management of the contamination and its potential consequences introduced a set of scientific terms, measurement units and new technical procedures, which were meaningless for nonspecialists Peo-ple confronted to the contamination felt ignorant and progressively renounced

to get involved in the day-to-day management of the situation They finally left this task to a limited number of experts who in most cases were unable to express in a common language the meaning and usefulness of the proposed actions As a result, this process generated among the general population a feel-ing of exclusion that prevented the development of personal know-how and direct involvement of the individuals It is interesting to note that the implemen-tation of a vast radiation monitoring system within the territories did not really help the population to understand and regain control on the situation In fact, measurements, independent of their more or less sophisticated technical aspects difficult to understand and the fact that they were rarely shared and explained to the population, rather contributed to increase the interrogations and concerns of the population and generated anxiety

Another aspect that greatly contributed to the loss-of-control process is the centralized and prescriptive management of the situation adopted by the author-ities A retrospective overview of the strategies, including those adopted after

2001 in the context of the new national laws on “the safe living conditions of the population”, shows that these strategies were mainly driven by the scientific and technical features of the radiological situation and implemented throughout the affected territories by means of countermeasures without neither involving the inhabitants and the local professionals in the decision making process nor providing them with feedback information on the successes and difficulties In most cases they were decided by experts and authorities on cost-benefit con-siderations, and applied at the collective level on a centralized and planning mode Basically, they aimed at maintaining individuals at a certain distance from the contamination or reducing, as far as reasonable, the levels of contami-nation in the environment and particularly in agricultural products However, for many inhabitants of the contaminated territories, the implementation of the countermeasures, particularly those that were affecting ancestral relationships

with the environment and the traditional modes of production were experienced essentially as intrusive and generating interdictions before to be considered as

a means of protection This process kept the individuals aside the real lems and re-enforced their feeling of exclusion and confiscation by experts and authorities of the control of the situation (Lochard, 1996)

prob-In this context in which the population was unable to cope with the ity of the situation and felt excluded from its management, individuals devel-oped strategies ranging from denial to anxiety The first was the most frequent, characterized by the withdrawal into oneself and the ignorance of the risk as a means to support the situation For example, many people in the contaminated territories of Belarus adopted the belief that after several years of exposure to the contamination they became immunized against radiation like Colorado beetles against pesticides Other inhabitants just gave up They adopted a fatalist atti-tude, felt abandoned and victims of a great injustice Both attitudes led to neglect basic protection actions and resulted in an increase of exposure Altogether, the management of the situation, focused on its radiological dimension, progressively re-enforced among the population the strange and hostile character of the environ-ment and the concern about health Neither the contamination and exposure limits nor the countermeasures were able to generate social confidence and to incite individuals to take control again on their future situation Taking into account the uncertainty inherent to the long-term effects of radiation, the inevitable debate about the norms to manage the situation and the global depreciation of the eco-nomic value, the social confidence in authorities and experts deteriorated rap-idly This led generally the authorities to call for more technical expertise and to develop communication strategies to try to close the gap of perception of the situ-ation with the population These approaches did not bring any re-insurance and on the contrary even re-enforced distrust toward the authorities as far as they tended

complex-to substantiate the feeling among the people that they had not been properly tected so far Based on general recommendations not linked to the local living conditions, they also failed to address the individual situations and the specific actions for their daily management

pro-Combined with the intrinsic difficulty for the individuals to cope with the new reality of the contamination, the top-down, centralized, prescriptive and normative approaches adopted by the authorities, which were necessary in the very emer-gency phase, have progressively become inefficient and even counterproductive

in the long-term rehabilitation perspective They did not adequately addressed the complexity, and also the specificity, of the situations created by the long-lasting contamination and failed to give the inhabitants the means to regain control on their day-to-day life and to protect themselves and their offspring On the con-trary, they contributed to generate several negative side effects, among which:

l A dependency culture within the affected population, which evidence was given by the continuous demand of the population to increase the State efforts throughout assistance programs to the “victims” of Chernobyl;

l Social distrust and loss of confidence in authorities and experts, corollary of the several reorientations of the national strategies and budgets reductions to respond to the increasing economic difficulties perceived by the local affected populations as a decline in their protection; and

l A general feeling of abandonment and fatalism and a phasing out of personal initiative, which excluded further the population from the rehabilitation strate-gies and acted as a strong blocking factor for self-help initiatives

17.3 THE ETHOS PROJECT

17.3.1 The Approach

Based on the findings of the studies that preceded the launching of the Project, the intention was to develop an original approach addressing jointly the technical and societal dimensions of the situation created by the presence of the contamination, and involving actively all local, regional and national stakeholders in a decentral-ized management in order to improve concretely the protection and the day-to-day quality of life of the affected population The aim was not to produce any new sci-entific knowledge about the radiological situation but to apply the existing ones in the development of a practical know-how for the population Furthermore from the beginning, this approach was clearly presented to all stakeholders as complemen-tary to the national rehabilitation program implemented by the Belarus authorities.Beyond these general intentions, there was no preestablished methodology

to implement the project but a shared willingness between the French teams to build, what became later on the “ETHOS approach”, pragmatically and step by step with the local actors However, before to start of the missions in the territo-ries, the team carefully developed its ethical position as far as the meaning of its intervention was concerned Indeed, working with inhabitants of contaminated territories to help them to live better in these territories raises very difficult ethical questions This led the ETHOS team to adopt the clear position that the proposed approach to rehabilitation of living conditions could only be engaged with per-sons having decided to stay in the territories despite the risk, assuming that they were informed about this risk and had the means to evaluate it As a consequence, the team went to the territories with the intention to help the inhabitants to under-stand the radiological situation they were living in and its associated risks but also with the position to refuse to decide for them if they should stay or leave their liv-ing places This difficult decision was to remain the responsibility of each family.Such a position was deliberately opposite to the one that is “traditionally” expected from the experts to take the decision for those who are facing a risky situation It also led the ETHOS team to implement the Project in a so-called

“voluntary relocation zone” i.e a zone defined by the law as contaminated and opening the right for families to be relocated with the support of the State if they wish so, but where the risk was considered law enough to allow further living for those having made the choice to stay taking into account the countermeasures

implemented within the national rehabilitation program and assuming that ple were following the official recommendations for their protection.

peo-17.3.2 Phase 1: 1996–1999

The Project started in April 1996 with a first mission of the French team in order to select a site for its implementation In total, the team visited 6 con-taminated districts in the Southern part of Belarus and met with local authori-ties, professionals and inhabitants to present the Project An important criterion was the voluntary commitment of the local community After discussions and negotiations, the candidate village of Olmany (1300 inhabitants) in the Stolyn district (Brest region) close to the Ukrainian boarder and about 250 km West from the Chernobyl power station, whose population clearly expressed its will-ingness to participate in the Project, was selected (Figure 17.1) According to the Belarus law of 1991 on the “Safe living conditions of the population”, the village was located in a “voluntary relocation zone” where the estimated annual average exposure ranged between 1 and 5 mSv with a ground contamination ranging between 185 and 555 kBq/m2 In fact, only a few families with very young children left the village after 1991 when it was officially recognized as contaminated Despite an on-going debate among the authorities on the appro-priateness of relocating the population because of the local living conditions

FIGURE 17.1 The district of Stolyn-Belarus with the villages in which the ETHOS Project was

implemented (For color version of this figure, the reader is referred to the online version of this book.)

(remoteness of the village, importance of forests and swamps…), there was a strong opposition from the villagers to leave the place.

A cooperation agreement was signed in July 1996 between the Ministry of Chernobyl, the authorities of the district of Stolyn, the village of Olmany, and the Ethos team setting up the basic principles of the cooperation and the respec-tive commitments of the partners As far as the ETHOS team was concerned, the members committed themselves to work with the voluntary villagers to evaluate their radiological situation and to come 4 times a year during 3 years to help them to improve their protection and their living conditions Altogether the ETHOS team spent more than 60 days of presence in the village

During the first two missions of the Project, the French team mainly listened

to and learned from the villagers about their concerns Then, after discussion and negotiation with the villagers, 6 working groups involving about 100 volun-teers were created with the specific objective to try to respond to the concerns considered as priorities (Hériard Dubreuil et al., 1999):

l the “young-mothers” group aiming at the radiological protection of the children;

l the “ milk-producers” group focused on the production of clean milk;

l the “ meat-producers” group aiming at restoring the marketing of privately produced meat;

l the “ teachers” group working on the development and diffusion of a practical radiation-protection culture at school;

l the “waste” group dealing particularly with the management of the nated ashes resulting from the burning of contaminated wood in stoves; and

l the “teenagers” group aiming at shooting a video presenting the life in the village

Each group, with its own rhythm, went through a process of collective learning and assessment of the local situation with the help of the French team and, when necessary, with the support of local professionals and authorities The local radiological situation was assessed by means of ambient dose rate and foodstuff measurements managed directly by volunteers It is to note that, although, sev-eral monitoring systems had been put in place by the authorities, none of them were providing back information to the individuals These measurements that were analyzed collectively by each group allowed passing progressively from

a very fuzzy and negative appreciation of the radiological situation to a more contrasted and reliable picture with sometime good surprises and sometime bad ones Altogether this common expertise (coexpertise) and requalification of the radiological situation allowed identifying many possible protection actions to

be implemented locally with a minimum of additional resources to improve the protection of the inhabitants, and particularly the children, and the qual-ity of food products The concrete implementation of these actions sometimes required the population to make difficult choices between conflicting interests and wishes For example, a typical dilemma for the villagers was to abandon the

secular tradition of consuming products of the forest It also often called for the involvement and support of local authorities and, for some actions of national ones In the course of the process, new villagers, but also representatives of local professionals (medical doctors, nurses, teachers, technicians…), joined the working groups to bring their expertise but also to try to solve their own problems either as professionals or individuals.

It is beyond the objective of this paper to present in more details the coexpertise process and its results The experience of the “young mothers”

is described in Lochard, 2000 and the experience of the “milk producers”

is described in Lepicard & Hériard Dubreuil, 2001 From the radiation tection point of view, one of the most interesting results, beyond the dem-onstration of the feasibility to directly involve villagers in the day-to-day management of the radiological situation, was the development by the group

pro-of “young mothers” pro-of local criteria to help individuals to behave safely as far the ambient dose rates in the environment and the daily intake of contamina-tion through food products were concerned These criteria were established following long discussions on the interactions between the local radiological situation as resulting from the numerous measurements (in houses, gardens, recreational areas around the villages, food products growing in the village) and the local habits and customs of the villagers including their diet, private and professional activities, as well as considerations concerning the natural background and the official dose limits set up at the national level

More concretely, the first phase of the ETHOS Project resulted in a significant improvement of the radiological quality of the milk and the whole body con-tamination of the children The cooperation between the private farmers, the local collective farm, the District authorities, and the national administration allowed

to increase the production of milk with contamination below 111 Bq/l (national limit at that time) from 25% to 55% in winter and from less than 10% to 80% in summer between autumn 1996 and autumn1998 As a concrete consequence, the milk from Olmany was again collected by the Stolyn’s dairy from March 1999 This reaccess on the market, which was interrupted after the Chernobyl accident, became a source of income for private farmers that brought them new opportuni-ties in terms of restoration of their living conditions The quality of the meat was also improved with the possibility to sell part of the village production on the local market In particular, a protocol was elaborated between the private farm-ers, the collective farm of Olmany and the slaughterhouse from the city of Pinsk,

to ensure the private farmers with the provision of clean food for their animals

as well as the follow-up of the radiological quality of the meat These ments largely favored a change in attitude among many families who decided to directly manage the radiological exposure of their children through a better con-trol of the contamination of food products A positive dialogue and cooperation between the mothers of the villages and the medical staff of the District hospital led to a reduction of the internal contamination of the children under school age

improve-by about 30% in average With regard to education, 6 projects were performed improve-by

the teachers of the school allowing the pupils to get knowledge of the experience gained in the different projects implemented in the village and to develop the basis of a practical radiation protection culture for living day-to-day in a contami-nated environment Another positive result was the recovery of self-confidence and initiative among many villagers and a noticeable restoration of confidence in the authorities Unexpected at the beginning of the Project, this change in the atti-tude of the population was certainly one of the strong incentives for the authori-ties to develop further the cooperation between all concerned stakeholders.

17.3.3 Phase 2: 1999–2001

Considering the achievements during three years in Olmany, the local and national authorities proposed the French team during the summer 1999 to extend the ETHOS Project for 2 more years with the objective to evaluate the conditions and means of the diffusion of the approach in other villages of the Stolyn district A key point for this new phase was to test the ability of the local professionals and authorities to implement the coexpertise process developed in Olmany with the support of Belarus institutes After discussions on the radio-logical situation in the district, the villages of Belaoucha, Gorodnaia, Retchissa, and Terebejov volunteered to participate (see Map above) and the villagers

of Olmany decided to continue with the Project A new cooperation protocol between the authorities of the 5 villages, the District, the National Chernobyl Committee, 2 Belarus scientific institutes, and the ETHOS team was signed

in March 2000 validating the joint commitment of all partners and clarifying their means and resources For this second phase, in addition to the support of the European Commission, the Project received complementary supports from French organizations (FERT, IPSN, EDF, and COGEMA) and from the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs In total, the French team participated in 8 missions representing more than 40 days of presence in the 5 villages

In this new phase, the main role of the French team was to train and to help the local professionals to implement practical projects with voluntary inhabit-ants in the selected villages concerning:

l the improvement of the radiological protection and the health surveillance of children;

l the production by the private sector of good quality foodstuffs and their marketing; and

l the development of a practical radiological protection culture at school

A seminar was organized in March 2000 in Stolyn to provide the dosimetrists, physicians and nurses, teachers, agronomists, local authorities, involved in the Project, as well as members of the Belarussian Research Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry (BRISSA) and the Brest Branch of the Research Institute of Radiology (BB-RIR), with the basic necessary skills to set up these practical projects in cooperation with the villagers