[Sci-tech-public] Upcoming STS event, Les Levidow, May 18

[Elta Smith]

Science and Society Colloquium Series on Science, Policy and the 
Democratic Imagination:

"Europeanizing Expert-based Policy: The Case of Agri-biotech Regulation"
Speaker: Dr. Les Levidow,  Open University

Wednesday May 18, 2004
4:00 pm -- 6:00 pm

DELAND ROOM (L332), Littauer Building, 3rd Floor
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Sponsored by the Kennedy School's Program on Science, Technology, and 
Society, in collaboration with:
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and The Center for 
Population and Development Studies.


Abstract

Since various crises of food safety in the 1990s, EU authorities have 
sought to regain public credibility for regulatory decisions.  
Institutional reforms have extended earlier efforts to Europeanise 
expertise, i.e. to reconcile or overcome national regulatory differences 
through expert procedures, thus avoiding obstacles to the internal 
market.  In establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the 
EU was informed mainly by a model of 'science-based regulation', whereby 
expertise can transcend 'technical' differences in regulation.  As an 
alternative model, calls to 'democratise expertise' recognise the 
inherently value-laden, normative content of advisory expertise.

EU policy has a prior commitment to help business to exploit 
biotechnology, while relying upon 'science-based' regulation for 
societal decisions about technological development.   Within this policy 
framework, the wider public controversy over agri-biotech has been 
continually translated into disputes over evidence of risk, safety or 
uncertainty.  EFSA's Scientific Panel on GMOs has generally framed 
scientific uncertainties in such a way that they can be resolved by 
extra information or can be deemed irrelevant to any risk. Its expert 
advice has been used to justify 'science-based' approval, often 
contrasted to the 'political' basis of any dissenting governments.

Advisory expertise was restructured so that risk assessment would be 
'independent, objective and transparent'; EU food law aimed to harmonise 
regulatory criteria.  Yet those aims undergo tensions  between expertise 
versus independence, between transparency versus objectivity, and 
between harmonisation versus precaution.  More fundamentally, in 
Europeanising expert-based policy, regulatory practices undergo tensions 
between the contending models of 'science-based regulation' and 
'democratising expertise'.  In this way, EFSA extends regulatory 
conflicts as well as mediating them.
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