Scientific Expertise in Public Arenas: Lessons from the French Experience

Abstract

Sociological research on expertise sheds useful light on changes in this field since the late 1990s in France. It also shows the emergence of new games between actors, which have to be understood, and highlights the inertia of action systems and socio‐cognitive frames. The review of research on expertise allows the identification of three contrasted models of expertise which embed different notions of risks, knowledge, and patterns of interactions between experts, stakeholders, concerned groups and policy makers: the standard model, the cross‐examination model and the hybrid forum one.

While the proceduralization of expertise is an important trend, it would be dangerous to perceive it as the only goal of the democratization of risk management. This would mean forgetting that risks are situated at the intersection between two regimes of action: the first is short‐term and motivated by the urgency of threats and the need for preventive and corrective measures; the second is long‐term, with the transformation of technical systems and the creation of new competencies. The problematical situations – characterised by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity – are those in which the articulation between these two regimes is both indispensable and extremely difficult. In these cases the proceduralization of expertise must be coupled with a set of devices, still to be invented, which allow for the articulation of these two regimes of action.

Keywords:

• Scientific expertise
• public participation
• uncertainty
• proceduralization
• hybrid forum
• social sciences research

Notes

1. For instance, in Arendt's Human Condition (1958): ‘The very fact that natural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable “processes of no return” is a clear indication that (…) processes are started whose outcome is unpredictable, so that uncertainty rather than frailty becomes the decisive character of human affairs.’ (Arendt, 1958, pp. 230–232)

2. According to Fritsch, expertise exists only in the encounter between a problematical situation and specialized knowledge. It is therefore the problematical situation (a difficulty that cannot be overcome or even that cannot be pin‐pointed), requiring a specialist's knowledge, which will be formulated as an opinion and given to a principal for the purpose of making a decision (Fritsch, 1985). By definition, expertise is situated in the interactions between several systems of action (academic research, cabinet ministers' offices, central administrations, judiciaries, media, various associations, the market sector, etc.).

3. Two volumes published by the organization GERMES and a special issue of the general‐interest magazine Autrement (“Les experts sont formels ! La terre outragée”).

4. Interestingly, J.Y. Le Déaut, a Member of Parliement specialized in technological risks (nuclear, GMO, etc.) adopted the phrase coined by J. Ravetz and S. Funtowicz: ‘we have to take firm decisions on the basis of soft facts’ (Ravetz and Funtowicz, 1991).

5. For a clear picture of Roqueplo's role in the construction of the expertise theme, the reader is referred to all the research initiated by him in the late 1970s, and to his experience in nuclear counter‐expertise and his time in Bouchardeau's cabinet. On expertise, see in particular his work on acid rain (Roqueplo, 1988), his contribution to Arc et Senans (Roqueplo, 1991) and his book on climate change (Roqueplo, 1993).Finally, the ‘little red book’ on expertise by Roqueplo (1997) has had a considerable impact on the scientific community.

6. In his book published in 1997, P. Roqueplo talks of transgression: ‘the expert inevitably transgresses the limits of his own knowledge’ (1997, p. 20); ‘intervening as an expert in a complex domain, a scientist always functions, consciously or not, as the advocate of a certain cause’ (1997, p. 46).

7. Roqueplo notes that he uses the term ‘parliament’ rather than '‘forum’, to emphasize the institutional nature of this type of functioning.

8. It is also the position of Jasanoff when she proposes the concept of regulatory science (Jasanoff, 1987).

9. Note the difference compared to the work of Nelkin or Mazur who focus on public controversy as a process of politicization of science.

10. For a complete list of these studies, see the annex by Joly (2005).

11. These observations ought to be completed by further analysis of the professionalization of expertise (Trepos, 1996). Recent research tells us little about the way in which one become expert, the way in which experts deal with relations with their colleagues and other actors in risk management, the role that experts can play in defining certain problems as risks, etc. Yet, in the main, these limits are the outcome of the choice of a sociology of expertise rather than a sociology of experts, made in the 1990s.

12. Cf., in particular, the WTO agreements on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures. On this point see Noiville and Sadeleer (2001) and Noiville (2003).

13. The success of Roqueplo's little red book, a transcription of a lecture at INRA in the middle of the mad cow crisis (9 April 1996), illustrates a type of literature situated midway between academic and administrative literature.

14. Cf. Official Documents of the Agence Française de la Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments (AFSSA), Norme NF X 506110 of May 2003, etc.

15. Hauray's thesis on the evaluation of drugs shows the difficulties of applying the principle of independence in a sector in which the experts have close ties with the industrial actors (Hauray, 2003).

16. See the debate on the third wave of science studies in Collins and Evans (2002), and the response of Wynne (2003).

17. Is it a matter of completing traditional risk assessment with socio‐economic expertise, thus mobilizing social and economic scientists? Or would it be better to create an arena of debate in which the different stakeholders participate, with a view to organizing open deliberation on risk management?

18. On this point see the controversy between Collins/Yearley and Callon/Latour.