ABSTRACT
Risk communication developed as a normative field defining how institutions should reach society at large when dealing with risks and crises. Over the last decades, norms and guidelines of the field have changed, progressively taking into account the large array of social factors affecting relationships between different groups of concerned people. This chapter examines the actual risk communication practices developed in the A(H1N1) pandemic and 2014 Ebola outbreak contexts, both of which provided concrete opportunities to apply risk communication guidance. Based on combined data from official documents and interviews with professionals affiliated with the World Health Organization and public health agencies in Switzerland and the United States, the chapter describes the different challenges encountered by front-line risk communicators. They include difficulties encountered with actually reaching out to fragmented publics and understanding their needs, struggles with sustainability and coordination of risk communication activities, issues related to professionalization of risk communication, problems met within organizations and frustrations related to reputation management. The analyses suggest that these challenges reflect the crucial but underappreciated importance of non-technical matters in responses provided to re-emerging infectious diseases. These relate to power relations between disciplines within institutions and more broadly across the global health field, that keep prioritizing medical expertise over social science expertise. Being aware of the complexity of epidemic responses calls for reinforcing communication across disciplinary domains and organizational settings. Furthermore, recurrent tensions between the global health agenda and locally embedded realities of health and illness emphasize the need to reinforce the role of socio-anthropological knowledge in the development of adequate responses to epidemics.
