BSE: risk, science and governance
Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone
Abstract
This book presents a systematic analysis of how BSE policy was made in the UK and EU, 1986%#x2013;2004. The main focus is on the role of scientific expertise, advice, and evidence in policy-making processes, and its use by officials and ministers as a political resource. The central argument is that highly political and highly problematic policy decisions were often misrepresented as based on, and only on, sound science. Those tactics required the selective highlighting of scientific uncertainties. Since many of the most crucial policy-sensitive uncertainties were concealed or discounted, rese ... More
This book presents a systematic analysis of how BSE policy was made in the UK and EU, 1986%#x2013;2004. The main focus is on the role of scientific expertise, advice, and evidence in policy-making processes, and its use by officials and ministers as a political resource. The central argument is that highly political and highly problematic policy decisions were often misrepresented as based on, and only on, sound science. Those tactics required the selective highlighting of scientific uncertainties. Since many of the most crucial policy-sensitive uncertainties were concealed or discounted, research to diminish those uncertainties was not undertaken. Since the claim had been that it was impossible for BSE-contaminated food to cause a human spongiform encephalopathy, when such cases emerged in 1996, the policy-making regime was comprehensively undermined and a crisis ensued. The BSE policy saga is used to develop and refine a general analytical framework with which science-based policy governance can be analysed, providing resources with which the book specifies the conditions under which such policy-making may achieve and reconcile scientific and democratic legitimacy.
Keywords:
BSE,
risk,
regulation,
expertise,
scientific advisory committee,
mad cow disease
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198525813 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2009 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198525813.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Patrick van Zwanenberg, author
Senior Research Fellow, Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Erik Millstone, author
Reader in Science Policy, Science and technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
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