Incorporating Science, Economics, and Sociology in Developing Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards in International Trade Proceedings of a Conference (2000) / Chapter Skim
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4 Technological Risk and Cultures of Rationality
4 Technological Risk and Cultures of Rationality
Pages 65-84
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From page 65... ...
With this shift, scientific knowledge became an ever more essential prerequisite for credible policy making, and governments vastly expanded their capacities for producing and assessing relevant technical information. The policy system's greatly enlarged dependence on science can be charted through the emergence in recent decades of new areas of research (e.g., environmental health, climate change)
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From page 66... ...
Numerous explanations have been offered for these persistent policy divergences, which reflect in turn underlying differences in societal perceptions and tolerance of risk. The simplest causal factor advanced by social scientists is economic interest most plausibly invoked when the burdens and benefits of regulation fall disparately in different national contexts.
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From page 67... ...
In the following section of the paper I briefly outline the principal dimensions of variance among national approaches to regulating technological risks. In the subsequent section I outline the major ways in which comparative social scientists have tried to systematize the notion of political culture.
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From page 68... ...
In late modernity, as our historical moment is sometimes called, governments of advanced industrial societies have been required to deal with many common policy problems at roughly similar points in time. Examples with a significant scientific or technical dimension include, most recently, the global environmental crisis, the instability of global capital, economic restructuring after the Cold War, arms control, new epidemics, and the uneven social vulnerability to human as well as natural disasters.
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From page 70... ...
The components of a nation's regulatory style may include, in brief, the means by which the state solicits input from interested parties, the opportunities afforded for public participation, the relative transparency of regulatory processes, and the strategies employed for resolving or containing conflict. Comparative research over the past two decades has highlighted the relatively sharp stylistic differences between the United States and other industrial countries.
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From page 71... ...
During this time, significant energy went into the development of sophisticated analytic techniques designed to produce reliable quantitative estimates of risk and, eventually, the uncertainty surrounding such estimates (NEtC, 1994~. European countries facing presumably comparable problems avoided the use of formal quantitative techniques in favor of more qualitative appraisals based on the weight of the evidence (Jasanoff, 1986)
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From page 72... ...
legislation and public policy, whereas European nations have tended to attach greater consequence to the precautionary principle. These terms not only reflect subtly different notions about the purpose and scope of environmental protection, but they also entail different approaches to the public justification of environmental policy.
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From page 73... ...
By contrast, expert advisory bodies in other industrial nations are often more explicitly representative of particular interest groups and professional organizations. Tripartite arrangements, including government, industry, and labor, are especially commonplace; in newer regulatory frameworks, participation has sometimes been broadened to include representatives of social movements, such as environmentalists and consumers.
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From page 74... ...
By contrast, in most European countries, the right to be recognized as a stakeholder is neither automatic nor achieved through self-selection, but must be officially acknowledged through legislation or administrative practice. Entry accordingly tends to be limited to groups or actors who have established longstanding or politically salient working relations with governmental agencies.
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From page 75... ...
This approach places primary emphasis on the need of societies to make sense and meaning of their collective experience, taking into account changes in knowledge and human capacity produced through science and technology. Interpretive social theorists including specialists in science and technology studies are particularly interested in the instruments of meaning creation in society, including most importantly various forms of language or discourse.
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From page 76... ...
Given these pressures, it is not surprising that United States policymakers have opted over time for more explicit and formal analytic techniques than their counterparts in other advanced industrial states. Examples include quantitative risk assessment of chemical carcinogens, cost-benefit analysis of proposed projects, detailed economic analysis of regulatory impacts, and environmental equity analysisall of which are more extensively used, and also debated, in the United States than in other liberal democracies.
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From page 77... ...
In particular, institutions such as the insane asylum and the workhouse and social analytic techniques such as statistics and demography are thought to be instruments developed by states in order to enable and maintain policies for social order (see, for instance, Foucault, 1979; Porter, 1986; Nowotny, 1990~. One of the best known attempts to understand cultural variations in the management of risk arises from a blending of anthropology and political science in work initiated by Douglas and Wildavsky (1982~.
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From page 78... ...
Science is seen more as a resource to be controlled by the dominant cultural types than as a source of distinctive knowledge and persuasive power. Nonetheless, cultural theory valuably calls attention to the socially constructed character of beliefs about nature and to possible connections between longstanding social relations and the perception and management of risk.
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From page 79... ...
In focusing on particular substances, for example, QRA necessarily ignores others. Despite scientific arguments to the contrary, industrial chemicals are taken to be of greater public health concern than similar substances to which people are exposed by nature.
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From page 80... ...
more precisely through formal analytic techniques. Thus, British policy has historically relied on a tested cadre of public servants whose integrity and judgment are considered beyond doubt (Jasanoff, 1997~.
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From page 81... ...
the "same" risk of disease from the "same" agent were undercut by the discrepant perceptions of farmers, parents, food producers, government scientists, independent scientists, public health officials, agriculture ministers, politicians facing reelection, antiEuropean Britons, and the Brussels bureaucracy. Quantitative analysis proved inadequate for bridging these far-flung interests, as ministers wrestled week after week to agree on a single magic number the number of cows that would have to be culled to render the beef supply adequately safe for all uses.
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From page 82... ...
Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared to have learned little from the BSE episode as he tried to reassure Britons by saying that he personally would be happy to consume genetically modified foods.
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From page 83... ...
1986. Risk Management and Political Culture.
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From page 84... ...
1979. Studying elite political culture: the case of ideology.
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