Enhancing the Role of Science in Stakeholder-Based
by
Gail Charnley, Ph.D.
1. Introduction and Background
Managing risks to health, safety, and the environment is evolving beyond being the sole purview of regulatory agencies. More and more risk management decisions are developed and implemented using collaborative processes involving consultation and cooperation among stakeholders, including regulators, regulated parties, advocacy-based organizations, and the general public. This trend constitutes a move away from the unilateral, technocratic, regulatory model of risk management decision-making toward more inclusive, democratic, non-regulatory processes, reflecting the democratic ideal that people should be involved in their own governance (English 1996). Growing stakeholder-based decision-making is thought to be a response to a lack of public trust in risk management decisions made by government and industry; expanded public awareness of environmental, health, and safety issues; increased social expectations for improved environmental quality; changes in information technology; and the desire by business and government to demonstrate responsiveness to public concerns (Yosie and Herbst 1998s). At the same time, it is a natural outgrowth of the interest group pluralism model of administrative action in which regulatory agencies act as brokers for the many relevant interests and perspectives on problems within their jurisdictions (Stewart 1975).
A number of organizations have made recommendations concerning the need for increased stakeholder involvement in decision-making. In its 1997 final report, the Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management (Risk Commission) concluded that a good risk management decision emerges from a process that elicits the views of those affected by the decision, so that differing technical assessments, public values, knowledge, and perceptions are considered (Risk Commission 1997). The Risk Commission’s report also stated:
Stakeholders bring to the table important information, knowledge, expertise, and insights for crafting workable solutions. Stakeholders are more likely to accept and implement a risk management decision they have participated in shaping. Stakeholder collaboration is particularly important for risk management because there are many conflicting interpretations about the nature and significance of risks. Collaboration provides opportunities to bridge gaps in understanding, language, values, and perceptions. It facilitates an exchange of information and ideas that is essential for enabling all parties to make informed decisions about reducing risks.
In its 1996 report, Understanding Risk, the National Academy of Sciences carefully avoided using the term “stakeholder” but noted that risk management processes must have an appropriately diverse participation or representation of the spectrum of interested and affected parties, of decision-makers, and of specialists in risk analysis, at each step (NRC/NAS 1996). The report defined “affected parties” as people, groups, or organizations that may experience benefit or harm as a result of a hazard, or of the process leading to risk characterization, or of a decision about risk, noting that such parties need not be aware of the possible harm to be considered affected. “Interested parties” were defined as people, groups, or organizations that decide to become informed about and involved in a risk characterization or decision-making process (and who may or may not be affected parties).
The Western Center for Environmental Decision-making asserts that public involvement can help gather information; create forums for the exchange of technical information and public opinion; help participants make better decisions about environmental problems; accelerate (but not guarantee) change; and begin to reclaim the legitimacy of government by demonstrating a recommitment to public debate (Western Center for Environmental Decision-making 1997). The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends building stakeholder partnerships for environmental improvement because doing so promotes voluntary environmental management, shifting the responsibility for environmental quality from government to a partnership that includes industry. It also opens up the evaluation and assessment process to those parties-customers, workers, and local communities-affected by the choices that industry makes (US EPA 1995). Building on that theme, the American Chemistry Council requires as part of its Responsible Care® program that member companies seek and incorporate public inputs into their products and operations (American Chemistry Council 1999). In addition to EPA and industry, states, municipalities, the governments of other industrialized nations, and the US Departments of Energy and Defense, among others, all rely increasingly on stakeholder processes to help make decisions about their activities that have potential environmental health impacts.
Despite the common-sense appeal of stakeholder-based processes, they have been criticized for several reasons. These include the substantial investment of time and resources required; the likelihood that they will heighten, not alleviate, conflict; the difficulty in identifying and facilitating the inclusion of truly representative stakeholders; the possibility that they are actually counter-democratic due to increased representation of special interest groups; and the concern that when nontechnical people are included in decision-making, the scientific or technical and factual basis of a problem or solution will be distorted, trivialized, or ignored. The latter concern arises partly because of the difficulty scientists have communicating technical information as part of stakeholder deliberations and partly because decision-makers often perceive nontechnical stakeholders as being more legitimate representatives of social values (US EPA 1995). It can also be attributed to nontechnical stakeholders’ suspicion that science can be distorted to support different stakeholders’ points of view.
Assessing the impacts of stakeholder processes to date requires clarification of the many different types of processes that have been conducted and evaluated. Stakeholder involvement can range from national and multinational decision-making, such as that associated with implementing the Clean Air Act or the North American Free Trade Agreement, to community-based decision-making, such as that associated with the cleanup of contaminated sites. It can mean negotiated rulemaking efforts (“reg-negs”), such as that which created the microbial disinfectant by-products rule for drinking water, or comparative risk projects such as those conducted by states to help set risk management priorities. They can be directed towards setting exposure limits for chemicals, as were a number of attempts by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set workplace Permissible Exposure Limits, or towards identifying the sources of public health problems in a disadvantaged urban area, like South Baltimore. Some types of stakeholder processes convened by regulatory agencies require consensus and some do not; some are binding and some are not. That is, some result in recommendations from the majority of participants that regulatory agencies are not required to implement, but may take into account when making the ultimate risk management decision. Stakeholder processes inform regulatory decision-making, but do not constitute decision-making; regulatory agencies may benefit from the outcome of a process but must, in the end, take the final, legal responsibility for a decision. As a result, evaluating the “success” of a stakeholder process can be somewhat difficult. Of course, stakeholder-based risk management does not have to be initiated or conducted by regulatory agencies. Regulated parties, for example, may initiate risk management efforts on their own in collaboration with other stakeholders, as the electric utility industry did when it invited Environmental Defense to help them identify cleaner power production technologies.
Much of the concern about how science is used in risk management decision-making results from how science is used or abused when risk management policies are debated by stakeholders in the absence of a formal process. For example, the global controversy over the safety of genetically modified organisms and the reactions in the UK to bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), in Belgium to dioxin in chicken feed, and in the US and Europe to phthalates in toys are all situations where stakeholders-government regulators, the media, advocacy organizations, industry, and consumers-are debating appropriate risk management actions in the absence of an organized framework. Deciding what risk management actions are appropriate generally depends on some agreement about the nature and extent of the risks; in those cases, stakeholders disagree about the nature and extent of the risks mostly because they disagree about the underlying science. Some stakeholders argue that because the science is uncertain and the risks potentially severe, extreme risk management actions are warranted. Those stakeholders assert that it is up to the proponents of a potential risk (e.g., toy manufacturers) to demonstrate its safety; they also tend to mistrust any proponent-sponsored scientific research or claims of safety. Other stakeholders argue that the science is not uncertain, or at least not uncertain enough, to warrant extreme actions; these stakeholders also tends to argue that the consequences of extreme risk management actions are disproportionate to their benefits. In either case, Paul Slovic argues that whoever controls the definition of risk controls the rational solution to the problem at hand; defining risk thus becomes an exercise in power (Slovic 1999).
In general, many decisions that people make about risk management in our daily lives are not made on the basis of science or facts, but on the basis of perceived fairness. If people made decisions on the basis of scientific facts or quantitative risk estimates alone, they would not smoke cigarettes or eat doughnuts, and would drive only reluctantly. Science and concepts of risk are not irrelevant; many people have stopped smoking, many who continue to smoke know that they are at increased risk of lung cancer, and people know that doughnuts are not good for them. However, risk is also a social construct, with most people making decisions about risk based on a complex set of perceptions that include familiarity, harm, benefit, values, dread, voluntariness, and other factors (Slovic 1987), and on what they hear from a few people quoted in the newspapers or on television. Newspaper and television reporters cover risk on the basis of rarity, novelty, commercial viability, and drama, not on the basis of relative risk (Graham 1998). In the absence of formal stakeholder processes in which nontechnical stakeholders work together with technical stakeholders so that the former come to understand the technical issues and the latter come to understand the nontechnical issues, the self-interest of all parties-described as the Rashomon effect, in which different parties give differing accounts of the same situation, suiting that party’s interests (Mazur 1998)-will dominate risk debates.
Much of the literature on stakeholder processes focuses more on providing guidance for establishing and conducting them and less on evaluating their successes, failures, and impacts. While the emphasis on the former is not misplaced, more research is needed on the latter. Resources for the Future has a project underway that is identifying the successes, failures, and impacts of public participation in environmental decision-making by evaluating about 250 case studies (RFF 1999) using an evaluation framework based on social goals (Beierle 1999). More typical (but also valuable) is a report from the Western Governors’ Association assessing the value of local stakeholder involvement efforts at two sites (Belsten 1996). The 1998 report by Yosie and Herbst, based on case studies and extensive interviews, is probably the most recent and comprehensive analytic evaluation of the issues and challenges associated with managing stakeholder processes (Yosie and Herbst 1998b). In general, the literature indicates that stakeholder processes vary substantially in terms of process quality and influence on policy outcomes. Most studies also agree that stakeholder processes are not a transitory phenomenon but an important development that reflects a fundamental change in the way environmental risk management decisions are made.
This report relies primarily on case examples. Although there is a good literature on science and decision-making and on stakeholder processes and decision-making, there is very little that examines all three aspects together. The report uses information from the case examples to draw conclusions and make recommendations about ways to improve or enhance the role of science in stakeholder processes. By focusing on science as part of a decision-making process and not solely as an outcome of a process, the report attempts to avoid the difficulties inherent in identifying objective measures of scientific or technical quality. It relies instead on whether stakeholders can resolve scientific conflicts as the basis for evaluation.
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