Toxic Ignorance. How Regulatory Procedures and Industrial Knowledge Jeopardise the Risk Assessment of Chemicals

ABSTRACT

Science and Technology Studies research has shown that processes of producing ignorance have been structurally embedded in the evaluation and regulation procedures of the tens of thousands of hazardous chemicals present on the market. What is the role of industrial actors, regulatory experts and scientific data in the institutionalisation of ignorance? Analysing two European expert panels demonstrates that institutionalised ignorance makes it difficult to justify and implement stringent regulations covering all types of population exposure. First, experts get caught up in ways of using scientific data that tend to reinforce industry’s influence on the production of regulatory knowledge (and ignorance). Second, several constraints press experts to play by the rules of the ‘regulatory science’ game, even if this undermines their capacity to challenge the dominant rules of expertise and the relevance of data. Third, the routine functioning of regulatory science tends to favour industry-sponsored studies, while obscuring other knowledge that could have been useful for regulation. Together, these pressures illustrate the concept of toxic ignorance, which weaves together research on institutionalised ignorance, the political economy of science and the social study of toxics. This concept provides a fruitful way of exploring how ignorance is enacted in the public assessment of chemicals, as well as in other instances where the toxic consequences are indirect.

KEYWORDS:

• Chemical regulation
• regulatory science
• industry influence
• expertise
• toxic ignorance

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Jane Roffe for her suggestions and very helpful assistance during the copy-editing process.

Notes

1 This expression was first coined by NGO Environmental Defense Fund, in a report that highlighted the lack of safety testing for top-selling chemicals in the US (EDF, 1997). In using this term in a social sciences analysis, we want to emphasise the social logics underlying this lack of data on toxic substances, and prevailing in expert groups as they grapple with knowledge emanating from the industry.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henri Boullier

Henri Boullier is a CNRS permanent researcher affiliated with IRISSO, an interdisciplinary social sciences laboratory based in Paris, France. His book Toxiques légaux (2019) explores how regulatory science and bureaucratic procedures make it possible to maintain toxic chemicals on the market and he recently co-edited and contributed to Conflict of Interest and Medicine. Knowledge, Expertise, and Mobilizations (2021). His work investigates the dynamics of production and contestation of scientific and regulatory knowledge, in the fields of industrial chemistry, pesticides, and veterinary antibiotics.

Emmanuel Henry

Emmanuel Henry is a professor of sociology at Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL University, researcher at IRISSO and a former member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is currently working on the links between scientific knowledge, ignorance, expertise, and public policy, in the fields of environmental and occupational health. He recently published La Fabrique des non-problèmes. Ou comment éviter que la politique s'en mêle, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2021) and co-edited the Special Issue “Beyond the Production of Ignorance: The Pervasiveness of Industry Influence through the Tools of Chemical Regulation”, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 46 (5), 2021.