Public Deliberation on South Korean Nuclear Power Plants: How Can Lay Knowledge Resist against Expertise?

Abstract

Through a public engagement exercise held in 2017, 471 Korean citizens decided to resume construction of two nuclear reactors. This article examines the white paper, academic articles, and interview accounts to discuss how distinct groups in their contexts articulated “lay knowledge” as the basis of participatory science and technology governance enacted in Korea. Reflecting on both Brian Wynne’s emphasis on public meanings and the STS literatures’ attention to lay actors’ knowledge-ability, the article reveals the articulation of “lay knowledge” as a process of simultaneously empowering and disempowering the lay public.

• public engagement
• lay knowledge
• nuclear power

Notes

¹ We also interviewed two SCC members and four discussion moderators to gain an overall understanding of the deliberation, although the interviews were not discussed in detail.

² Similar accounts on the participants’ capacity for learning and deliberation can be found in other Korean literature, such as Ha 2017 and Kim 2018.

³ Strictly speaking, lay citizens’ capacity to become well informed for ideal deliberation and lay knowledge, understood as the lay public’s expertise in details of everyday life, indicate two different things. Nonetheless, their convergence is commonly found in the discussion of PE because (1) the two notions are not mutually exclusive, and (2) they both provide legitimacy for the inclusion of lay public in decision-making processes. See, for example, Prior 2003; Brown 2006.

⁴ The understanding that the provision of proper briefing materials is a precondition for successful public deliberation also was expressed by members of the antinuclear camp, who were disappointed by the final vote. Hyung-geun Kim (2017), who was a member of the Ulsan Environmental Movement Coalition and who participated in the deliberation as a monitor, expressed his opinion that the government should have been more actively involved as an information provider: “I am quite disappointed and angered by the government’s and the ruling party’s hands-off attitude. The government was well aware that there was an accumulated imbalance of power and knowledge between anti- and pronuclear camps. For the public, the government should have played a central and active role to provide information and do the fact-checking.” From his perspective, the deliberation was a failure that was attributed to the government’s negligence in providing “proper” knowledge and offsetting the imbalance between pro- and antinuclear camps.

⁵ Ana Delgado, Kamilla Kjolberg, and Fern Wickson (2011) summarized the previous discussion on the values of PE with three notions. First, PE exercises can be instrumental when they achieve a predefined end, such as restoring public trust in science and technology. Second, PE can be justified through a substantial rationale, which maintains that democratic processes of decision making yield better solutions to technical issues. Third, PE can be motivated by a normative rationale, which sees PE simply as “the right thing to do.” The point we make here is that STS discussion provided multiple rationales for PE. Although some STS scholars might argue that PE can and should be justified solely on the normative values of democracy, that is not how PE has actually been advocated. Discussion on a substantive rationale, such as what diverse forms of expertise can do to produce better decisions than narrowly defined technical expertise, has been important in STS perspectives on PE (Rowe and Frewer 2000; Collins and Evans 2017).

⁶ One interviewee expressed her impression that the goal of the deliberation seemed to be the “improvement” of the public through information provision: “What we finally did was fill in the survey. But I felt it was a kind of a test. I felt as if I was obligated to study before a test. The whole deliberation seemed like a plan for learning and education. People who used to know nothing about nuclear power were assembled to learn something, take lectures, and study. I think the surveys were designed to demonstrate the participants’ improvement through the provision of certain knowledge” (Interview, 16 December 2017).

⁷ The interviewee referred to Lee Jin-sup, whose family members suffer from autism and cancer and won a lawsuit against the nuclear power plant near their home. Lee did not make a presentation as an expert but participated in the question and answer session as a panel member. Still, the interviewee expressed her impression that Lee’s appearance as an “expert” seemed inappropriate. STS researchers share the assumption that the public as stakeholders have the right, responsibility, and capacity to take part in scientific knowledge production while challenging scientific experts’ monopoly on truth. Yet this assumption does not always seem to provide a good fit for a society where science has historically been imagined as a government-directed means to lead the nation to modern rationality and prosperity (Fan and Chen 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sung Hwan Kim

Sung Hwan Kim is a general manager at Kakao, an internet platform company. He holds a master’s of science degree in journalism from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He was a journalist at Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper in Korea, where he wrote about energy, digital economy, and social changes in science and technology. He copublished Hankook Weonjeon Janhoksa 한국 원전 잔-사(The Cruel History of Korean Nuclear Power), a book about a South Korean nuclear scandal over fake safety certifications.

Hyomin Kim

Hyomin Kim is an associate professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research interests include the coproduction of knowledge and values around (attempted) management of energy, the body, and human capital.

Sungsoo Song

Sungsoo Song is a professor at the Institute of General Education of Pusan National University in South Korea. He is the former president of the Korean Association of Science and Technology Studies and the vice president of the Korean History of Science Society. His books include When Science and Technology Meet Culture (2009), In Search of Interfaces between Technoscience and Society (2011), Reading World History through Invention and Innovation (2018), and Industrialization and Technological Development in South Korea (forthcoming).