Brian Wynne: Climate Scientism and Public Policy
"Scientism," writes Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at Lancaster University, is "the ingrained assumption that scientific evidence is the only authority that can justify policy action."
From Wynne's review ("When doubt becomes a weapon," in Nature, sub. req.) of the book by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming:
If a policy commitment is reduced only to a question of whether the science is right or wrong, then evidence can easily be made to unravel.
Paradoxically, this happens when science attains its greatest political influence, when it goes beyond supplying the facts to defining the public meaning of problems. Public-policy issues always have dimensions beyond science, and require more than technical responses.
While recounting Oreskes and Conway's description of how a small group of U.S. scientists have "paralysed policy action on various environmental and health issues," Wynne praises Oreskes and Conway for documenting "the relentless drive of this doubt-casting juggernaut" – and faults them for failing to "grapple with the larger question of why science is vulnerable to such manipulation."
In "Strange Weather, Again: Climate Science as Political Art," an article in the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on changing climates, Wynne claims that the frequently heard call for better science communication, or "translation," is part of the problem:
After the previous political impasse for a decade or more over the very acceptance of the established and increasingly urgent IPCC scientific knowledge of anthropogenic climate change, it has become more sharply evident that there are many other profound and ill-understood obstacles to relating scientific knowledge, and abstract belief in principle, to real grounded practice consistent with that scientific knowledge. I will suggest here that the usual understanding of this as a problem of ‘translation’ of that knowledge is itself a key part of the problem. ...
[I]t becomes important to ask what kind of knowledge we understand ourselves to have … [and] whether the intensely scientific primary framing of the issue, combined as this is with an intensely economistic imagination and framing of the appropriate responses, may engender profound alienation of ordinary human subjects around the globe from ‘owning the issue’ and thus from taking responsibility for it.
From the review of Merchants of Doubt:
A more enlightened institutional culture around science and policy would foster wider debate about the implications of interventions, and of burdens of proof weighed against social benefits and the costs of erroneous outcomes.
For now, I'll add only that localized experiments in social and political deliberation are essential for fostering this "wider debate." States – and regions and ecosystem-based management jurisdictions – are, after all, the "laboratories of democracy."
Thanks especially to Greg Hill for all our conversations on this topic. Related P&P articles include:
- Sheila Jasanoff on climate, experience and understanding
- Thomas Dietz on integrating science and deliberation
- Harry Collins and Robert Evans on expertise in the age of amateurs
- The U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution report on "Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution"
- "Communities of Practice and Place"
This second issue of P&P on social and ethical approaches to thinking about climate change will wrap up soon. As always, your thoughts are welcome.
