Regulating GM crops
Risk, precaution and science: towards a more constructive policy debate
Precautionary principle and risk management: which way?
Authors:
A. Stirling (ed)
Publisher:
EMBO Reports, 2009
Sound scientific techniques of risk assessment offer a comprehensive and rational set of ‘decision rules’ for use in policy. These science-based approaches yield a robust and practically operational basis for decision making under uncertainty.
This paper looks at the precautionary principle as a basis for decision-making in risk assessment and management. The author argues that if applied to assessment, the precautionary principle threatens a rejection of useful and well-established risk assessment techniques. Most criticism of the precautionary principle is based on unfavourable comparisons with established ‘sound scientific’ methods in the governance of risk. These conventional methods are assumed to offer a comprehensively rigorous basis for informing decision-making. The author further argues that when considering the relative strengths and weaknesses of the precautionary principle, we must also give equal attention to these conventional approaches to risk assessment.
The paper concludes that, although falling short of prescriptive decision rules, the precautionary principle suggests a range of more modest, open ended, but nonetheless highly effective methodologies and general qualities, which offer ways to complement and improve on conventional risk assessment. The precautionary principle is of practical relevance as much to risk assessment as to risk management. Precaution does not automatically entail bans and phase-outs, but instead calls for deliberate and comprehensive attention to contending policy or technology pathways. It also offers a way to be more measured and rational about uncertainty, ambiguity and ignorance. Precautionary appraisal is inherently comparative - therefore it is as likely to spur favoured directions for innovation as to inhibit those that are disfavoured. In prompting more rational, balanced and measured understandings of ‘sound science’ rhetorics on uncertainty, precaution has arguably made its greatest contribution.
