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Abstract
Regulatory authorities in charge of environmental and health risk management are increasingly faced with problems of legitimacy in the public view. As socially restricted and technical expert systems, regulatory networks tend to exclude wider public groups from policy discussions and standard setting. This paper focuses on a particular environmental and health risk domain in a specific national context: regulations pertaining to the agricultural use of pesticides in Denmark. Drawing on the analytical concept of ‘regulatory science’, as developed by Irwin, Rothstein and others, the study is situated within discussions on the control of agrochemicals at European and national levels. Through qualitative interviews, the ways in which Danish pesticides experts participate in and evaluate the workings of regulatory science networks are analysed. To highlight the issues of public legitimacy, experts' preoccupations are contrasted with views from ‘ordinary’ citizens on pesticide regulation. Four major themes emerge: the political economy of pesticides regulation; increasing Europeanization of regulation; variation between risk domains; and the place of uncertainties in risk assessments. Tying these themes together, actor categories ‘at risk’ of exclusion from regulatory networks are highlighted: politicians, academic researchers, NGOs and the general public. Some implications for attempts to increase public legitimacy are sketched out.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (Miljøstyrelsen) who provided a grant and thereby the necessary time to conduct the research project that forms the background for the analysis presented in this article.
Notes
1. Interviews were mainly individual, involving eight lay-people and eight experts, respectively. In addition, two focus group interviews were conducted, one involving six lay-people, the other involving a ‘mix’ of three lay-people and three experts. More information on the selection procedure for experts is provided in the fourth section of this paper.
2. Important alternative perspectives can be said to include: studies of ‘national styles of regulation’, often comparing European and US legal-political risk institutions (e.g. Vogel, Citation1986); studies inspired by Ulrich Beck's notion of ‘risk society’, often emphasizing ‘sub-political’ civil society actors (e.g. Beck, Citation1992); and studies on ‘risk regulation regimes’, highlighting intra-state variations across risk areas (e.g. Hood et al., Citation2001). While these perspectives differ from the ‘regulatory science’ perspective in terms of analytical emphasis, the authors would contend that they should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. Indeed, in the second section, certain insights from the ‘national styles of regulation’ and ‘risk regulation regimes’ perspectives are integrated into the analytical framework.
3. Other concepts often referred to in these contexts include ‘mandated science’, ‘trans-science’ and ‘post-normal science’ (cf. Carolan, Citation2006; Jasanoff, Citation1990).
4. In fact, critique of such ‘boundary work’, keeping from sight the embedded value judgements in risk assessments, is a major preoccupation of much SSK literature on the science–policy nexus in risk regulation (e.g. Jasanoff, Citation1990; Jasanoff & Wynne, Citation1998).
5. The authors use the UK as the starting point, and include EU risk regulation for comparisons.
6. Ideas of Denmark as a pioneering country in ‘ecological modernization’ formed an integral part of the policy pursued by the ambitious Danish environmental minister during the 1990s, Svend Auken (cf. Jamison, Citation2004).
7. Throughout this presentation, few direct quotes are employed from interviews; they are used instead as a more general background for analysis. While interpretations are thus empirically based, using only indirect quotations is a way of emphasizing the importance of the analytical framework to the way the material is further narrated. When referring to specific interviews, the following form is used, applicable to the authors' internal transcripts: (Int. [Person name], [page no.]). Note that cover names are used, which means that the interviewees have got new (first) names, e.g. Anita, instead of their own.
8. In broad terms, this and other expert interviews confirms the above depiction of intra-European variation, as most experts perceive Denmark as possessing comparatively restrictive regulations. These issues are revisited in the analyses in the fourth section.
9. This two-tiered approval system is set out by the 1991 EU Plant Protection Products Directive. Active ingredients are the molecules responsible for the pest-controlling action of pesticides. Actual products will consist of an active ingredient together with so-called ‘inert ingredients’, including solvents, antioxidants and dispersion-enhancing materials.
10. As pointed out by Rothstein et al. (Citation1999, p. 257), member states will often use ecological variables as grounds for objecting to common approvals. According to the EPA respondent, national variations in the types of crops produced, as well as factors such as climate and temperature, serve here as legitimate parameters for national deviations from EU standards.
11. The panic concerned an alleged connection between local groundwater contamination and cases of human spinal disorder. This connection was later officially deemed non-existent.
12. As this is a qualitative study, ‘representation’ should obviously not be understood in terms of being statistically representative in social terms. Rather, ‘representation’ should be understood at the level of diversity in viewpoints. Needless to say, any one interviewee simultaneously fulfils some combination of all the mentioned socio-demographic criteria, meaning that characteristics cannot be ‘singled out’ for (statistical) comparison.
13. In other words, there will be no attempt to critically ‘unmask’ certain perspectives (say, industry or NGO) as false or ideological. This is not to deny, of course, that (material) interests play an important role in shaping actors' perspectives on pesticide risks.
14. The distinction between ‘partisan’ and ‘bureaucrat’ experts is borrowed from Swedish sociologist Göran Sundqvist and his study of environmental experts in Sweden (Citation1992, p. 155).
15. As seems to be the case, in a different risk domain, with recent Danish media ‘story-lines’ about the role of industry ‘self-reporting’ in the regulation of European tobacco companies (cf. Politiken, 16 April 2005).
16. The phrase “down in the EU” contains, apart from a simple geographical hint to Brussels as the European ‘capital’, connotations of an entire Danish identity politics. In Danish EU discourses, ‘Europe’—or ‘Brussels’—is often cast as a distant entity, remote from Danish reality. Needless to say, pesticides experts are themselves embedded in such wider frameworks of meaning.
17. This comment is made in connection to practices of using the herbicide atrazine in public areas such as station approaches. According to the respondent, this practice has been discontinued in all other places of Europe.
18. See the later section ‘Risk Assessment, Standardization and Uncertainties’ for further discussion on these different ‘calibrations’ of risk assessment methods.
19. Notably, both of these ‘EU-critical’ comments are preceded by statements pointing to their controversial character. The EPA respondent remarks that she “needs to be careful” with what we—as researchers—quote her for. Likewise, the governmental researcher jokes that we need to turn off the tape recorder first. As these reactions show, potentially negative EU influence on Denmark is a highly sensitive part of Danish identity politics.
20. Such is the case at the moment at least. The EU REACH process aims at changing this comparative lack of public registration and environmental assessment efforts concerning industrial chemicals.
21. Following a sustained and heated controversy on “sceptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg and his defence of cost-benefit analysis (cf. Jamison, Citation2004), a few experts refer to such prioritizing efforts as “applying the Lomborg angle” (e.g. Int. Flemming, p. 11). For an analysis of such economic value judgements in experts' approach to risk, see Jensen et al. Citation(2004).
22. Concomitantly, what it means to ‘do a risk assessment’ is historically and contextually variable. This is illustrated nicely in the interview with the water supply representative, who talks about doing “risk assessments” in terms of “having pesticides in groundwater or not” (Int. Maj-Britt, p. 37). In most other expert interviews, this procedure is seen exactly as an exemption from risk analyses.
23. Incidentally, the biography of the NGO respondent illustrates the point. Having previously worked in the EPA pesticides office, she possesses sufficient expertise to occasionally interfere with regulatory decisions from her new NGO platform. This expertise, however, is entirely person-bound, with little chance of becoming institutionalized in her organization.
24. Symptomatically, a recent Danish EPA publication on risk communication guidelines highlights dialogue and public engagement as both necessary and desirable (EPA, Citation2004, p. 56).
25. Very briefly, the authors' see the mixed lay–expert focus group as evidence that, under the right circumstances, face-to-face dialogue between lay-people and experts is both productive and desirable.