Reasoning about safety management policy in everyday terms: a pilot study in citizen engagement for the UK railway industry

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Abstract
This paper reports on a pilot study in citizen engagement which formed part of a broader stakeholder engagement and consultation programme addressing safety decision‐making for UK rail industry activities. In addition to developing tools to support engagement initiatives, the study was concerned specifically with investigating everyday lay notions of what is a ‘reasonable’ basis for establishing safety. In view of the technical complexity of this issue, the exercise therefore presented an important methodological challenge: how to ‘translate’ specialised economic and legal issues in such a way that lay citizens were able to grasp, and reason about, these issues in an informed and considered way. The engagement exercise worked well in terms of its capacity to promote such a process of informed consideration, and in being ‘user friendly’ for participants. Despite the exercise involving a relatively small number of discussion group meetings, the quality and depth of the evidence collected allows some cautious provisional conclusions to be drawn regarding lay sensibilities concerning certain technical aspects of rail safety management.