Biotechnology
Can food safety policy-making be both scientifically and democratically legitimated? If so, how?
Is food safety policy an obstacle or driver of GM uptake?
Authors:
E. Millstone (ed)
Publisher:
Science and Technology Policy Research, Sussex, 2006
The politics of food safety is a highly contested field. Not only are there disputes about the safety and acceptability of particular products and processes, there are also disputes about how food safety should be appraised and how policy issues should be decided.
This paper provides an analysis of the evolution of thinking and talking about the role of scientific knowledge and expertise in food safety policy-making, and in risk policy-making from the late 19th century to the present day. It highlights the defining characteristics of several models that have been used to represent and interpret the relations between policy-makers and expert scientific advisors and between scientific and political considerations. It identifies conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses of the models, focusing on the ways in which they deal with scientific uncertainties and social choices.
The author argues that the contrast and relationship between scientific legitimacy and democratic legitimacy remains contested. Political issues may be settled democratically if all eligible protagonists can contribute to decision-making and if the majority view prevails. Science and policy need to be more explicitly and effectively interrelated; their interactions are inevitable and so those interactions should be open and accountable. Due to this a co-evolutionary model of science in policy-making has been adopted. In the model, the scientific and non-scientific considerations are seen as mutually interacting rather than inhabiting entirely separate domains.
The author concludes that, the co-evolutionary model of the relationship between scientific considerations on the one hand and political and ethical considerations on the other provides a more accurate and adequate representation of how in practice politics, ethics and science interact in food safety policy-making. The model acknowledges that there are up-stream as well as downstream interactions between science, scientific representations of food safety risks are framed by prior evaluative judgements.
