Democratic Science
Democratic Science
Enhancing the Role of Science in Stakeholder-Based Risk Management Decision-Making
by
Gail Charnley, Ph.D.
This report was prepared at the request of the American Industrial Health Council and the American Chemistry Council in response to their concern that the growing use of stakeholder processes in environmental risk management decision-making has the potential to compromise the integrity and importance of science as a guide to risk management. As stakeholders themselves, those organizations believe that all stakeholders should recognize that scientific information and science-based risk analysis are central elements of effective risk management. Their concern is that without the factual knowledge provided by science, risk management priorities will be misidentified and risk management resources will be misdirected.
This report seeks to draw lessons from case examples of stakeholder processes, both successful and unsuccessful. It focuses on the role of science in risk management decisions made by convening groups of stakeholders who met, debated, and either agreed or disagreed about appropriate actions. For example, it evaluates efforts by stakeholders convened to determine whether MTBE should be added to gasoline, to make decisions about cleaning up DOE weapons sites, and to preserve air quality in Alaska. This report does not focus on policy decisions made by regulators, debated in the media and in the courts, where different stakeholders disagreed about the nature of the scientific evidence related to the decisions. In other words, it does not evaluate EPA Administrator Browner’s chloroform decision, the events that led to the high-production-volume-chemical testing initiative, or the politics of using disagreements about scientific uncertainty as a trade barrier.
There is a notable absence of literature on the combination of science, stakeholder processes, and decision-making. Yet there is considerable debate about how science gets used in stakeholder-based decision-making, suggesting that this is an area ripe for study and empirical research. It is the hope of this author that the contrast between the somewhat haphazard information on which this report is based and the importance of this topic will provide an incentive to others to study this subject with greater rigor.
In addition to the American Industrial Health Council and the American Chemistry Council, who supported this project, I would also like to acknowledge the generous contributions of time and expertise of those who were interviewed for this report and who reviewed an earlier draft and provided comments. The case studies were drawn in part from interviews with George Busenberg, Bernie Goldstein, Dan Greenbaum, and Hank Topper, who also provided comments on the draft. Valuable comments were also received from Tom Beierle, Bill Bishop, Caron Chess, Jamie Conrad, Don Elliott, and Granger Morgan. Juliana Birkhoff, Terry Davies, Ortwin Renn, and Terry Yosie also provided valuable insights. I appreciate everyone’s willingness to share their time and abilities.
Gail Charnley, Ph.D.
HealthRisk Strategies
826 A Street SE
Washington, DC 20003
healthrisk@aol.com
1. Introduction and Background
2. The Problem: Uncertainty, Credibility, and Communication
3. Science, Precaution, and Risk Analysis: The Challenge
3.1 Evolution of risk assessment as the scientific vehicle for informing risk management
4. Striking the Right Balance: Approaches to Solving the Problem
5. Conclusions and Recommendations
Combining science and values in decision-making
Involving stakeholders in making decisions about the best ways to characterize and manage risks to our health, safety, and environment has been recommended increasingly over the past decade. This trend reflects a move towards increased democratization of risk management decision-making. One concern about increasingly democratic risk management decision-making is whether stakeholders have the ability to respect and preserve the role that science can play in informing decisions. Some argue that greater stakeholder involvement will marginalize science; others argue that decision-making is already tyrannized by science and scientific experts and that involvement of non-scientific, non-expert stakeholders represents a needed swing of the pendulum back towards an emphasis on social values.
Risk assessment has emerged over the last two decades as the dominant paradigm in the US, and increasingly elsewhere, for including science in regulatory decision-making about the best ways to manage threats to health and the environment. But because both science and judgment play important roles in risk assessment, decisions about the nature, extent, and appropriate response to risks remain controversial. This controversy is exacerbated by the inherent uncertainty of science, and by the concern that those in control of the science can use this uncertainty to serve their own ends. The case examples in this report illustrate the problem of resolving technically intensive policy disputes, as well as the challenges and difficulties associated with using risk assessment as one input to decision-making by stakeholders when the credibility of the underlying science is either in doubt or inconsistent with stakeholder concerns.
The successful case studies examined in this report used stakeholder processes to establish at the outset what the role of science would be in the risk management decision; in effect, practicing Democratic Science. In each case where Democratic Science was practiced, science played an important role, but a role that was shaped by stakeholder values to address their concerns and that was able to inform an evolving understanding of the scope of the problem. The report concludes that scientific integrity is maintained and its credibility is assured when stakeholders are involved in deciding how science is used to answer their questions and in obtaining the scientific information needed to answer those questions. In other words, the case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of implementing what the National Academy of Sciences report Understanding Risk called the “analytic-deliberative process” and what the Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management outlined with its framework for stakeholder-based risk management decision-making.
Making effective risk management decisions will continue to be a struggle as we seek to give fair consideration to both science and values and to find the right balance between analysis and deliberation. A Framework for Democratic Science is described here that uses stakeholder goals and concerns to guide the use of technical information in risk management decision-making as part of an iterative analytic-deliberative process. In the context of the Democratic Science Framework, stakeholder values help clarify concerns about potential risks and risk management goals. Questions that must be answered to address stakeholder concerns are articulated and the factual information needed to answer those questions is identified. Stakeholders then identify and agree on whom should be responsible for obtaining the needed factual information. After the needed scientific information is obtained, it is combined with other information and used either to re-frame the problem and risk management goals or to guide decision-making. In the case examples described here, a model that seemed to work well involved establishing a group of scientific experts that all stakeholders agreed to; by working closely together through collaborative analysis, the scientists were able to understand the basis for the stakeholders’ concerns and the stakeholders were able to understand the role that science could play and to participate in generating data. When the adversarial groups involved in a decision can jointly oversee and participate in the research needed to resolve scientific and other technical issues underlying a policy debate, they have the means to assure themselves that other stakeholders are not manipulating the analysis.
This report draws its conclusions from a few readily available case studies primarily because virtually all of the research that has sought to identify the determinants of successful public participation in environmental decision-making focuses on process-oriented social goals and does not evaluate the role of science. Not surprisingly, risk assessors have tended to focus on risk controversies and social scientists have focused on social dimensions; research in this area would benefit from teams comprising both risk assessors and social scientists. Research is needed that includes determinants of how science has been included in stakeholder-based decision-making and how its role has had an impact on process outcomes. An analysis of the social factors that contribute to differing interpretations of scientific information and how science weighs as a factor in decision-making is also worthy of more focused research. Finally, more rigorous study is needed to determine whether, as some cynics suspect, most risk management decisions are made on the basis of political expediency. The extent to which good science or efforts at stakeholder collaboration have any real influence remains to be determined.
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