The vast majority of research on the interface of risk, science, and democracy has been limited to the advanced industrial nations of North American and Western Europe. This project funded by the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program addresses this gap by focusing on India, the largest democracy in the third world. Three recent controversies are examined that cast light on the social, economic and political contexts that drive the interactions between scientific knowledge, expertise, policy making, and implementation. These controversies are about: a) the processes of environmental impact and hazard analysis in India (studied with the case of the decision about siting a large dam (Tehri) in a seismic Himalayan region); b) policy making on chronic environmental risks such as pollution (approached through the case of the CNG controversy in Delhi); and c) regulating emergent risks (addressed via the case of Bt Cotton controversy). The project undertakes a content analysis of all publicly available data sources on public controversies in each of the three sectors (hazards and impact assessment processes; chronic risk mitigation; and emergent risks).
The project addresses two central questions: a) how, and to what extent, is the process and efficacy of public policy on environmental risks in developing country democracies constrained by the "co-production" of science and politics; and b) whether there is something distinctive about contexts such as India or Brazil that offers new insights for STS theory on science advocacy and environmental policy making. The first question is important to scholars of public policy, for whom learning about the interactions between science and politics in the making and implementation of environmental policy in industrializing third world contexts, is a compelling new frontier. The second question is compelling because the sheer fact that policy making, and mobilizing science for it, have, for several decades in India, been embedded in a complex interactive, democratic process that is distinctively different from USA or Western Europe.
In addition to these academic and scholarly contributions to STS theory, the project has pressing policy and societal implications. Critically, it is one of the first systematic research projects to help plug the gap in the literature on the role played by scientific expertise in environmental controversies in democracies in the developing world. There are two important reasons that this gap is socially significant. First, while attempting to mitigate the environmental impacts of rapid industrialization, governments in these countries often act upon the advice of expert advisory teams, who, in turn, often select from existing environmental policy regimes in the developed world. The societal consequences of such outcomes are not fully grasped by scholars or policy makers. Second, as a result of a lack of reflective awareness about the efficacy of such regulatory institutions, and especially, of the limits of grafting science based expert judgment strategies onto complex political cultures and socio-economic realities, the ability of such countries to address the environmental risks posed to their citizens, or to meet their global environmental obligations, is arguably diminished.
The United States, through AID and other official agencies, as well as through the philanthropic aid advanced by private foundations, expends considerable amounts of funds to enable the people of developing countries improve the quality of their lives. Aid efforts, especially in science and technology and infrastructures, are extremely important aspect of foreign policy. However, despite the best motives, development initiatives in the third world sometimes backfire, causing environmental damage and popular resentment. The research in this project, which focuses specifically on India, showcases how environmental conflicts (with or without aid) occur in such contexts. This project will soon result in a book entitled: Engineered Conflicts: The Environment and the Politics of Expertise in India. The book, now in draft, and being prepared for review for MIT Press, has there parts. The first, addresses natural resource management regimes, such as forestry and irrigation. It begins with a quick overview of colonial and post-colonial state systems, and the politics of exclusion that they en- gender. The rest of this section focuses on case studies of the many experiments with new hybrids, some involving US collaboration, that seek more inclusive and democratic pathways, and analyzes how they build alternative approaches to infrastructures of expertise. The second section examines disasters. Building on my own past work on the Bhopal Gas Disaster, caused by the US multinational company, Union Carbide, and with reference to developments since then, it describes and analyzes the concept of what I call ‘missing expertise.’ In particular, I describe three different types of missing expertise — contingent expertise (the inability to respond adequately to the immediate challenges posed by a novel event, such as Bhopal); conceptual expertise — the lack of capacity to innovate when faced with a conceptually wicked problem (such as devising alternative economic livelihood plans in the context of reduced work capacity consequent to inhaling poisonous gas); and ethnographic expertise — the ability to listen carefully to the concerns of the governed. The third part of the book examines institutional responses to emergent environmental threats. It includes a study of the Indian Supreme Court’s use of experts in two cases — relating to urban air pollution and the safety of dams; an analysis of multiple, contrary expert claims in the controversy over GMO risk regulation; an examination of the contingent dynamics of relief and rehabilitation following natural events such as floods and cyclones; and a description of the safety and siting debate in conflicts over nuclear power. The book concludes with an analysis of how inclusive infrastructures of expertise can be scaled; problems of missing expertise addressed systematically, and normative principles mobilized to address institutional responses to emergent environmental risks, as opposed to institutional cultures that consist in cherry picking randomly amongst a wide range of opinions, practices and processes. It offers a new template with which to plan interventions in technology and expertise in developing countries such as India.
