Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T07:46:50.897Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Epistemic Subsidiarity – Coexistence, Cosmopolitanism, Constitutionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Sheila Jasanoff
Sheila Jasanoff*
Affiliation:
Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Harmonization is an essential instrument of international risk governance. It is the process through which disparities among national regulatory standards are ironed out, producing uniform outcomes that all participants in a regime can accept and that facilitate the free exchange of regulated goods in commerce. Contrary to conventional belief, however, harmonization requires not only technical but also political cooperation, since standards themselves are not direct mirrors of reality but are co-produced responses to technoscientific and political uncertainty. Attempts to harmonize standards across national borders therefore pit alternative political cultures and their systems of public reasoning against one another. Put differently, harmonization calls into question the underlying models of subsidiarity that provide the foundation for robust international regimes. This paper examines three models of epistemic subsidiarity – coexistence, cosmopolitanism, and constitutionalism – and discusses each scheme's capacity to protect a nation's fundamental political commitments while advancing the goals of international risk governance.

Type
Transnational Risks and Multilevel Regulation: A Cross–Comparative Perspective
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 133 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Jasanoff, Sheila, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar

2 Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Busch, Lawrence, Standards: Recipes for Reality (Infrastructures) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).Google Scholar

3 Brickman, Ronald, Jasanoff, Sheila, and Ilgen, Thomas, Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Vogel, David, National Styles of Regulation: Environmental Policy in Great. Britain and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

4 Report, evidence and supporting papers of the inquiry into the emergence and identification of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and the action taken in response to it up to 20 March 1996 (The BSE inquiry) (London: The Stationery Office, 2000), available on the Internet at <http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk> (last accessed on 18 April 2013).

5 Nicholas Wade, “Scientists Complete Rough Draft of Human Genome”, New York Times, 26 June, 2000.

6 Nelkin (ed.), Dorothy, Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1992).Google Scholar

7 Pew Charitable Trusts, “Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology Finds Public Opinion About Genetically Modified Foods ‘Up For Grabs’”, Washington, DC, 26 March, 2001, available on the Internet at <http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=33482> (last accessed on 18 April 2013).

8 Stephanie Strom, “Major Grocer to Label Foods With Gene-Modified Content”, New York Times, 8 March 2013, p. A1.

9 Jasanoff, Sheila, Science and Public Reason (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012).Google Scholar

10 Jasanoff, Sheila, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Jasanoff, Sheila and Kim, Sang-Hyun, “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Regulation in the U.S. and South Korea”, 47 Minerva(2009), pp. 119 et sqq.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Thaler, Richard and Sunstein, Cass, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).Google Scholar

13 Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (2005).

14 Winickoff, David E., “Judicial Imaginaries of Technology: Constitutional Law and the DNA Round Up”, in Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetics Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).Google Scholar

15 Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, supra note 10.

16 Brickman et al., Controlling Chemicals, supra note 3.

17 Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch, supra note 1.

18 Jasanoff, Sheila, “Product, Process, or Programme: Three Cultures and the Regulation of Biotechnology”, in Martin Bauer, ed., Resistance to New Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 311– 331.Google Scholar

19 Beck, Ulrich, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).Google Scholar

20 Rowe, Gene and Frewer, Lynn J., “Evaluating Public Participation Exercises: A Research Agenda”, 29 Science, Technology and Human Values (2004), pp. 512 et sqq.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Wynne, Brian, “Public participation in science and technology: performing and obscuring a political–conceptual category mistake”, 1 East Asian Sci Technol Soc Int J. (2007), pp. 99 et sqq.Google Scholar; Wehling, Peter, “From invited to uninvited participation (and back?): rethinking civil society engagement in technology assessment and development”, 9 Poiesis and Praxis (2012), pp. 43 et sqq. CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Jasanoff and Kim, “Containing the Atom”, supra note 10.

23 Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, supra note 9, at pp.

24 Lezaun, Javier, “Bees, beekeepers and bureaucrats: parasitism and the politics of transgenic life,” 29 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2011), pp. 738 et sqq.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York : Basic Books, 1983), at p. 234.Google Scholar

26 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977 (New York: Random House, 1980).Google Scholar

27 In re: Union Carbide Corporation Gas Plant Disaster at Bhopal, India, 634 F. Supp. 842 (SDNY 1986).

28 Jasanoff, Sheila, “Bhopal's Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance”, 42 New England Law Review (2008), pp. 679 et sqq.Google Scholar

29 Busch, Standards, supra note 2.

30 Winickoff, David E., Jasanoff, Sheila, Busch, Lawrence, Grove-White, Robin, and Wynne, Brian, “Adjudicating the GM Food Wars: Science, Risk, and Democracy in World Trade Law”, 30 Yale Journal of International Law (2005), pp. 81 et sqq.Google Scholar

31 Jasanoff, Sheila, “In a Constitutional Moment: Science and Social Order at the Millennium,” in Bernward Joerges and Helga Nowotny (eds.), Social Studies of Science and Technology: Looking Back, Ahead, Yearbook of the Sociology of the Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 155 et sqq. CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

33 Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch, supra note 1.

34 Jasanoff, Sheila, “Judgment under Siege: The Three-Body Problem of Expert Legitimacy,” in Peter Weingart and Sabine Maasen (eds.), Democratization of Expertise? Exploring Novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-Making, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2005), pp. 209 et sqq.Google Scholar