Enhancing the Role of Science in Stakeholder-Based
by
Gail Charnley, Ph.D.
3. Science, Precaution, and Risk Analysis: The Challenge
The case examples in Section 2 illustrate some of the challenges and difficulties associated with using risk assessment as an input to decision-making by stakeholders when the credibility of the underlying science is either in doubt or inconsistent with stakeholder concerns. Despite such difficulties, risk assessment has emerged over the last two decades as the dominant paradigm in the US and elsewhere for including science in regulatory decision-making about the best ways to manage threats to health and the environment. Risk assessment is a way to organize scientific information in a form that is meant to provide a useful input-both qualitative and quantitative-to risk management decision-making. Risk assessment is not the only input to decision-making, of course; social, economic, feasibility, legal, equity, and political considerations also play important roles. The challenge is to maintain a role for risk assessment and to preserve the integrity of science when decision-making is influenced by many nontechnical factors. As the cases in the previous section show, doing so is particularly challenging when risk management decisions are conducted as collaborative efforts among stakeholders with differing technical knowledge levels, interests, goals, and world views.
3.1 Evolution of risk assessment as the scientific vehicle for informing risk management
Before risk assessment became a well-recognized and codified discipline, a precautionary approach often guided risk management decision-making in the US for many years. For example, in the 1950s the Delaney clause required the Food and Drug Administration to ban outright food and color additives that had been shown to produce tumors in humans or laboratory animals. In the 1970s, a legal basis for a precautionary approach was established when the Environmental Protection Agency was required by the Ethyl decision to proceed with its plans to ban leaded gasoline even if the science was not strong enough to be able to prove exactly what the benefits of removing lead would be (Ethyl Corp. v. EPA. 541 F.2d 1 (DC Cir.)(en banc), cert. denied, 426 US 941, 1976).
In 1980, however, the Benzene decision overturned the precautionary basis of the Ethyl decision and substituted a risk-based principle by establishing the need for some form of evaluation as a basis for deciding if a risk is “significant” enough to deserve regulation (Industrial Union Dept., AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Inst., 448 US 607, 1980). A series of Executive Orders requiring cost-benefit analysis of proposed decisions also fueled the demand for risk assessment, because the benefit of environmental regulation is typically the risk reduction that it is predicted to achieve.
To a large extent, the body of US laws that seek to establish practices that will ensure safety-or at least mitigate risk-from chemical or other contaminant exposures were established before risk assessment emerged as a discipline. Most of the methodology of risk assessment was developed in reaction to the calls by these laws to define limits on exposure that will “protect the public health with an adequate margin of safety” or lead to “a reasonable certainty of no harm”. That is, in passing the laws, the US Congress called on the regulatory agencies to develop means to assess risks so as to define exposure levels that would achieve the stated qualitative goals of health protection (Rhomberg 1997).
Thus, in response to the Executive orders, the Supreme Court, and Congress, the US has moved away from a precaution-based approach to regulation and risk management and substituted a risk-based approach, albeit one that incorporates precautionary assumptions. Until recently, however, little attention has been given to the complications of reconciling the scientific process of risk assessment with the needs of democratic procedure (Kasperson et al. 1999).
3.2 Role of science in risk management decision-making
Because both science and judgment play important roles, risk assessment is controversial. Often, the controversy arises from what we do not know and from what risk assessments cannot tell us, because our knowledge of human vulnerability and of environmental impacts is incomplete (Risk Commission 1997). Nonetheless, because of its scientific underpinnings, risk assessment generally constitutes the vehicle for including science in risk management decision-making. Thus, risk assessment is based on science to the extent possible and on judgment when necessary.
The importance of assuring a strong technical basis for risk management is well recognized. In Understanding Risk, the National Academy of Sciences acknowledged that reliable technical and scientific input is essential to making sound decisions about risk (NRC/NAS 1996). The report recognized scientific analysis as the best source of reliable, replicable information about hazards and exposures and as being essential for good risk characterization. Relevant analysis, in quantitative or qualitative form, strengthens the knowledge base for deliberations; without good analysis, stakeholder processes can arrive at agreements that are unwise, not feasible, or simply a reflection of who possesses greater political power. The chief challenges are to follow in practice analytic principles that are widely accepted and to recognize the limitations of analysis.
The Western Center for Environmental Decision-making concurs, stating that a “better environmental decision” is one that is based on a better understanding of the relevant science. Public attitudes can change public policies, but they cannot change the laws of nature, e.g., the chemistry of ozone depletion, the physics of air pollution, or the neurotoxicity of lead. The normal political processes of reaching decisions by compromise will produce bad results if they assume that a natural system or physical law can “compromise” as well. Risk managers have a special obligation to ensure that the public understands the technical constraints imposed by the natural world (Western Center for Environmental Decision-making 1997).
Scientific and technical experts bring substantive knowledge, methodological skills, experience, and judgment to the task of understanding risk. In addition to their specialized knowledge, scientists bring a capacity to build systematic and reliable ways of analyzing and interpreting information about new situations (NRC/NAS 1996). At the same time, the nontechnical public can contribute valuable knowledge and information to the factual basis of a decision. Some even argue that “local knowledge” has proven more useful than expert knowledge in many cases (Wynne 1992, Yearley 2000). It is important to elicit and facilitate the incorporation of such knowledge in a valid scientific framework.
Although, to a great extent, science provides the factual basis for decision-making, it may not always be neutral and objective as a decision-making tool, even when it meets all the tests of scientific peer review. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NRC/NAS 1996):
Good scientific analysis is neutral in the sense that it does not seek to support or refute the claims of any party in a dispute, and it is objective in the sense that any scientist who knows the rules of observation of the particular field of study can in principle obtain the same results. But science is not necessarily neutral and objective in its ways of framing problems [or] in its choice of assumptions . . . Evidence that science has been censored or distorted to favor particular interested parties has long been a source of conflict over risk characterizations.
Nonetheless, scientific data and knowledge form the building blocks necessary to ground consensus-seeking deliberations and to promote confidence in the process and its outcome (Adler et al. 2000). Objectivity and subjectivity are relative, not absolute, and scientific knowledge is considered more objective than other systems of belief about the natural world. And while science has its subjective elements, modern science does discover real features of nature-viruses, ions, planets, gravitational attraction, electromagnetic radiation, supernovas-in a way that other methods of knowing cannot (Mazur 1998).
Integrating science into a multifactorial decision-making process is challenging because science alone is not an adequate basis for a risk decision. Risk decisions are, ultimately, public policy choices. A specialist’s role is to bring as much relevant knowledge as possible to participants in a decision, whose job it is to make the value-laden choices. Good science is a necessary-in fact, an indispensable-basis for good risk characterization, but it is not a sufficient basis (NRC/NAS 1996).
3.3 Science, judgment, and democracy
The role of experts and technical knowledge in a democracy is frequently debated, particularly in the context of environmental health and ecological risk management. The debate centers on conflicts between the “world of values, ethics, politics, and life philosophies” and the “world of information and technical expertise” (Yankelovich 1991). Scientists have been accused of failing to place their efforts in an adequate social context, believing that science is separate from social factors or that social factors play minimal roles (Brown and Mikkelsen 1990). Others have set out philosophical grounds for allowing greater citizen participation in, and control over, science (Laird 1993). Some describe the choice as one between “Almighty Science versus Nature” (Jackson 1999), where Nature represents all that is good and democratic and science is evil because it “subdues” nature, presumably through empiricism. Even Isaac Newton recognized that hypotheses about nature that are not based on empirical evidence “have no place” in science, however (Van Doren 1991). Others assert that “new frontiers of scientific knowledge developed not from a value-free forward march of science but from conscious decisions to examine data in a new light and to seek new sources of data” (Brown and Mikkelsen 1990); few, of course, would suggest that science is value-free and most would equate the re-examination of data and the search for more data with the scientific method itself.
Properly understood, the distinction is essentially one between information and judgment. As Daviel Yankelovich has somewhat tendentiously put it, “In its eagerness to exalt the truths of science, empiricism has, crudely and blindly, undermined other modes of knowing, including public judgment . . . American culture grossly overvalues the importance of information as a form of knowledge and undervalues the importance of cultivating good judgment. It assumes, falsely, that good information automatically leads to good judgment” (Yankelovich 1991).
There is a fallacy that people sometimes succumb to, which is to assume that if only the “right” science were known or generated, the “right” answer or course of action would become apparent. This belief arises in part due to misunderstanding science, in part due to attempts to mask needed judgment as science, and in part because of the legal tradition in the US that relies heavily on establishing a factual basis for decision-making. Regulatory decisions in the US have to be justified by an extensive factual record that is subject to judicial review. The factual basis for a risk management decision is highly valued because, in the absence of a complete factual basis or record, decisions are easily challengeable. As a consequence, the judgmental or less factually based component of risk management decision-making is perceived as being less highly valued, contributing to Yankelovich’s assertion that “In present-day America, a serious gap exists between the point of view of the experts and that of the general public” (Yankelovich 1991).
Nonetheless, both information and judgment are recognized as being essential components of decision-making (Yankelovich 1991):
Although the struggle between experts and public has become adversarial, there can be no such thing as the “victory” of one side over the other. If the experts overreach themselves and further usurp the public’s legitimate role, we will have the formal trappings of democracy without the substance, and everyone will suffer. If the public dominates and pushes the experts out of the picture altogether, we will have demagoguery or disaster or both. A better balance of power and influence is needed, with each side performing its function in sympathy and support of the other.
The movement over the last several years towards more inclusive and democratic environmental health risk management decision-making processes reflects an attempt to develop better ways to integrate social, political, economic, and technical issues into fair risk management decisions; in effect, to balance the scientists’ facts and the public’s judgment. As Yankelovich put it, “When the proper balance exists between the public and the nation’s elites, our democracy works beautifully. When that balance is badly skewed, the system malfunctions. The chief symptom of imbalance is the nation’s inability to arrive at consensus on how to cope with its most urgent problems” (Yankelovich 1991). It is certainly the case that consensus on how best to manage risks to health and the environment is seldom achieved. It is also not surprising that, as we struggle to seek the right balance in order to achieve consensus, decisions often will be skewed, with scientific and factual knowledge playing roles of varying importance and influence.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. contends that the issues of environment and democracy are intertwined and inseparable, and that the environmental movement and the laws it spawned gave us “true democracy in this country for the first time” (Kennedy 1998). He argues that the body of 19 major federal environmental statutes passed since 1970 essentially re-enacts the ancient doctrines of nuisance and public trust and acknowledges that while we need industry, we also have a right to a clean environment. Risk assessment can play a role in helping us decide how much risk society will tolerate if it justifies the destruction of an absolute right.
Some argue against the wisdom of delegating environmental risk management decisions to either public stakeholders or experts, proposing market-based policies instead. Markets are considered truly democratizing means of decision-making due to the broad extent of public participation. However, few of us are willing to rely on “democratic participation” stakeholder processes to manage the financial risks associated with our savings and pensions, for example; we should be unwilling to do the same with regard to health and environmental risks (Shogren 1998).
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