Science, precaution and participation in governance of technological risk: from tension to synergy?
Andy Stirling – SPRU and Co-Director of STEPS Centre, University of Sussex, UK

Usually the debates that go on in the context I am familiar with, about risk, which we are turning to, are much more narrow and less ambitious than are the debates we been having in this morning about innovations which in India seems an especially fertile and dynamic arena.

But it’s fortuitous we should turn now to this less ambitious arena, because of the comments that we heard from Andy Hall and Shiv and others at the end of that last session where the challenge was put up - how do we engage these and more ambitious progressive, radical aspirations with the highly impoverished, existing institutions. And so it is in that context, I think it might be useful to look at risk as well as some of the intrinsic issues.

My title is to “look at the relationships tensions and synergies between discourses of sound science which I think are prominent across all our different contexts on the one hand and precaution and participation on the other”. In risk debates these things are routinely characterized, by all sides of the debate as in opposition.  And I would like to explore some ways in which there are synergies that can be useful to us tactically as kind of Trojan horses, to get into these debates that Brian for instance characterized as innovation governance.

I want to start with the Knowledge society, because that’s our starting point here from different perspectives.  So much of this impoverished debate about knowledge society, has the effect of suppressing, what we all agree we know about knowledge.  It suppresses our knowledge about knowledge. And actually I think that point can be made of the high status institutions that are discussing this but they also come back to us as well and our own knowledge.  

And what they make us do, is reflect on of some of the properties of knowledge, whether it be the incumbent privileged forms of knowledge or indeed our own more subaltern, or  I know of groups we wish to try to include subaltern forms of knowledge. And I’ll just very quickly label these into terrible injustice to very rich debates which many people out here would have been contributing to very deeply.

These properties tend systematically to be marginalized by power wherever that exists. The first one is the insufficiency of knowledge. The efficacy of knowledge is not sufficient to yield normative authorities. So we to go back to Aristotle in the western tradition and .  I am sure much older Indian thinking which I am not aware of - moral philosophy,  Habermas -- that know how is less important than know-why. So pharmaceuticals of course as we know are often ineffective in what they say they they do. But even where they are effective they do not have answer or  have effective knowledge about the operation ability, instrumentality of the pharmaceuticals, and it  does not tell us why we should employ that pharmaceutical rather than  some other practice, to address the same problem – know how is not know why.

The second one is incompleteness. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu has written about ignorance long time ago. Socrates in the Western tradition. Even in Economics in heartlands and again we go to the mainstream debate of Economics Knight and Keynes talked about how knowledge is a limited basis for action. Unknowns are as important as the knowns. Of course we are familiar with the questions about Nano technology and Health– everyone acknowledges, even the most elite institutions in that field acknowledge there are many unknowns about  Nano technology and health.

The third one, is indeterminacy which is  a word used in different contexts in  different ways.  I use  it in this context because it is picked up for instance even Mathematics for instance Gödel spoke about the way even when the knowledge is effective it does not preclude the possibility of surprise.

In economics it is well established in many traditions. It is an old debate of course in Social and Policy Science and many people here are leading in that. Donald Rumsfeld is often quoted “Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns” and it seemed actually that when power is forced to be a little bit more humble as Rumsfeld was at the moment facing the manifest failure of policies, you get it forced to be a little bit more humble a little bit less hubrous. But those discussions of unknown unknowns simply don’t capture the point that even where you think you know something you are most vulnerable.

So for instance household chemicals were an area which by definition were regulated in the fashion that we thought we knew very well what these routinely used materials do with health. But in fact then along in the 1990s comes the advent of  realization of new mechanisms - endocrine disrupting properties. And suddenly those things we thought we knew and which legislation and a lot of investment was based on our knowing them, suddenly was showing “we don’t know” because there is a new mechanism which we had not suspected.    

There's also a property which I will do violence to the English language and call “inversity”. It's an inverse relationship --. Knowledge and ignorance I thought have an inverse relationship. Ignorance is opposite of knowledge. But there are many contexts in which actually ignorance is increased with the knowledge. And surprisingly although much social science is predicated on this and has revealed and illustrated it,  Albert Einstein came up with a nice metaphor for this, when he talked about knowledge as a circle of increasing perimeter.  As the area of the circle grows so does the perimeter.  Our ignorance increases with our knowledge.  And so for instance, the advent of knowledge about non-linear mechanisms in climate change has increased our ignorance.

Then there is a property which I will call intractability. And Brian in particular has worked on this in some work going back a long time, where,by beyond all the points  I have just made,  the commitments that we make on top of knowledge   compound our vulnerability to our ignorance.  So it's not just as Einstein was saying that ignorance increases with knowledge, but when we then start making commitments on the basis of what we think we know, we become more exposed to the ignorance.  So, it's not the existence but our exposure to ignorance.

Nuclear, for instance, when we become exposed to the ignorance around the behavior of radio nucloids and other issues faced by the nuclear, when we start committing to nuclear infrastructures, like wise with GM.
And then finally in my little list of properties beginning with ‘in’ is incommensurability. Thomas Kuhn used this  term. Even in Economics, Kenneth Arrow in the heartland of high status neo-classical economics Kenneth Arrow has talked about incommensurability where cannot aggregate the different forms of ,he called it,  preferences but he was talking about knowledges. And Sheila’s work highlighting the increment ability of different epistemic positions, epistemic traditions. Knowledge is plural and conflicting. It is not something that we can add together. And of course issues we have been discussing around GM crops illustrate this.

So these predicaments of knowledge are totally excluded by existing discussions around the knowledge society. Insufficiency, incompleteness, indeterminacy, this inverse relation, intractability and incommensurability.  That may be a populist point or.concept… It also applies to us. Our own knowledges display those same properties. There is nothing privileged about any body of knowledge which renders it immune to those challenges.

So then what do we say in relation to risk debates about that? Because it happens I believe that there are existing concepts even in the main stream citadels of risk regulation, inadequate though they be, which actually contain these…they have dealt with, they have managed these issues but they are there as little pearls in the mother of pearl in the oyster as it were. So risk is highly reduced. Risk applies where we have knowledge about the outcomes and knowledge about the livelihoods. That is what our knowledge is believed to secure on both fronts. It is inapplicable and there are two sides replicable engineering failure, transport safety, epidemiology of well known diseases. Risk assessment tools, conventional tools can be very powerful. And I think a part of the mix is to acknowledge that. But where we face uncertainty in a sense that is acknowledged, in risk regulation establishments, where by definition, we don’t know the likelihoods when we are familiar with the kinds of conditions for unfamiliar agents of harm, vectors of harm, excluded conditions, human actions, and human intentions all have the effect of rendering our probabilistic estimations completely misleading. The term uncertainty, strictly used, means we can’t use risk assessment. I’ll come to what we can use approaches in a moment.
    
Then on the other axis, there is ambiguity.  This is a condition where it is not the probabilities that are problematic,  it's our knowledge about the outcomes, the meanings about the outcomes. How we interpret them. Marginalized interests, marginalized forms of harms that are experienced by some groups than the others. Oppressed social aspirations are not matters about lack of knowledge about livelihood it's about the different possibilities that might occur or may happen.

So then finally is ignorance, where we don’t know what we don’t know. Where not only our knowledge of the likelihoods is problematic but our knowledge of the outcomes as well.

So, we are talking here about just novel forms of harm, unsuspected things like endocrine disrupting chemicals or PSE (Passive Smoke Exposure) was completely unsuspected. Subaltern trajectories – possible trajectories – for change which simply aren’t being followed.

So, it's not just methods there are our problem in risk regulation debates, it also of course the institutions. A lot of the risk debate misses out that it is the institutions that are a problem. So, thinking about these concepts-ignorance, ambiguity, uncertainty and risk.  We face the state of ignorance very often, where we don’t know what we don’t know. But political institutions, administrative institutions set agendas. They talk about evidence based policy. They conduct exercises like foresight. They accredit some expertise not others.  This has an effect of turning ignorance at least into ambiguity. We may still argue about the things we think we know. But they turn something intractable to something more tractable.

Likewise a company when it is talking about risks, talks about risk knowing that it benefits from Liability law. Liability law means that a company never has to worry about things it is not exposed to liability on - it’s responsible to share holders.  So, by definition a company can never be ignorant. Because anything that happens no matter how unsuspected will only impact on it by virtue of the bottom line. So it will appear as an impact on its bottom line. So, that's the effect of these institutions around agenda setting and evidence based policy. This is the effect of a liability law, definitions of harm, use of different indicators and matrix, different institutional remits. You know, don’t bother me. We are the Ministry of Environment . We don’t worry about health. Before you ever get to methods, these things in effect have been reducing our ignorance simply to uncertainty.

Likewise ambiguity, where there is disagreement, we have decision rules of different kinds. We have aggregated analysis, deliberative processes, and even participatory processes – usually reduce ambiguity to give a nice answer.   Political closer, peer review these are institutions that reduce ambiguity and can render it in these contexts as risk. And finally of course we have    risk assessment methods reductive modeling, rules of thumb, insurance as an institution. All move us into that top left box where we only see everything as risk.

So how do we move out from that? To close my talk I want to look at ways of engaging with these institutions and hopefully address some of the issues we have been discussing. Well, there are techniques, engineers’ use them - interval analysis, sensitivity analysis, there are quantitative techniques exploring the implications of different assumptions and they can have radical effects on the picture of risk. Now if we inform those through assessments of vulnerabilities, the most vulnerable people and use those conventional mechanist techniques ,  scenario workshops where we engage people and elicit the scenarios, the expectations, the fears, the ambitions that they have. Even those types of techniques can be very… as I said before, having a monkey wrenching effect in these institutions.

Likewise ambiguity where we hear a lot about public engagement, in Europe and in the European context you can’t escape from the risk of people talking about public engagement they usually mean public education. But there are more empowering forms of deliberation – citizen science, interactive modeling and co-learning which can be used to engage with existing risk establishments. Alongside are more radical discourses. And even with ignorance, where there is participatory epidemiology, participatory monitoring, surveillance, research. We talked about distributed and open innovation. When you face ignorance, learn by doing is what you do. So these things have an effect on reducing our ignorance about pathways we might follow. And it’s a point that came up this morning about also placing value in a diversity of pathways.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket for risk governance reasons. Think about portfolios and trajectories that we follow together -- not just doing one big thing but doing a multitude of things for risk governance reasons… because of ignorance…because ignorance gets forgotten. So my point is there is scope for broadening out the methods in risk governance, the options of the considered scenarios and opening up our attention and acknowledgement of more plural pathways. And there are quite concrete methods that we can begin with which then have the effect of encouraging more radical and wider forms of inputs. So in my terms, the terms in which I am trying to articulate these conventional debates about precaution – that’s what they mean. They mean broadening our attention to these forms of uncertainty and ambiguity ignorance using wider techniques.  And opening up not just participation to get one final answer,  but participation to reveal the plural pathways, the different possibilities that might be followed , to inform them of more diverse choices. And I think there are many direct connections between these more radical ambitious debates and risk governance institutions and problems that are uncontroversially acknowledged even by for instance characters such as Donald Rumsfeld. You can’t get much more establishment or constraint than he when pushed to a position of greater humility.    Thank you.