Can policy actors learn from academic scientists?

Abstract

Results from an embedded survey experiment administered to practitioners who advise landowners on decontamination practices are analyzed. These professionals play a key role in the area of soil decontamination, an issue that science has made particularly tractable and which calls for new technologies and policy approaches. Powerful interests, however, work against the rapid deployment of these new technologies and approaches. Our survey experiment, designed to overcome major difficulties in the study of policy learning, shows that exposure to new scientific knowledge can positively influence the attitude of practitioners to new technologies, independently of other confounding forces. This finding suggests that learning from science provides a potential pathway toward increased use of environmentally beneficial soil decontamination methods. The results contribute to research on the politics of environmental protection, as well the literature on policy learning.

Keywords:

• policy learning
• science and politics
• soil decontamination
• phytoremediation
• survey experiment

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the financial support of Genome Quebec and Genome Canada. They also thank the members of Genorem for their contribution to this research, as well as Monika Smaz and Irena Nedeva for excellent research assistance. They also thank André Blais and Alexandre Morin-Chassé for useful comments on a previous version.

Notes

1. http://www.epa.gov/ncea/roe/docs/roe_final/roe_final_landchap4_46contam_land.pdf

2. Group balance was in fact tested and confirmed. The test consisted in running a logistic regression on the presence of participants in the experimental and the control groups on eight independent variables (the same variables as those used in Figure 6). Balance, or randomness, was confirmed by the failure of every single independent variable to predict the attribution of the participants to one group or the other. The regression coefficients and t-statistics (in parentheses) were: women 0.255 (0.48), age −0.0273 (−0.91), experience 0.0277 (0.71), accreditation 0.470 (0.97), engineering −0.429 (−0.89), knowledge test −0.104 (−0.48), environmental values 0.0432 (0.24), acceptability of phyto 0.140 (0.95), constant 0.253 (0.14). N = 90 and adj. R² = 0.03.

3. To ascertain this finding, we included an interactive term to verify whether respondents in the experimental group who were more accepting of phytoremediation at the outset were also more likely to learn. The term was statistically insignificant.