Risk Sciences: Expertise for Decision-Making and Dispute

Abstract

dominant paradigm of systems analysis, alongside “costbenefit analysis, technology assessment, social forecasting and the like” (Hoos 1979, 192). From the moment it first took shape, risk assessment was considered to be a symptom of the emergence of “new forms of technology management, the most visible of which are detailed analyses of the anticipated impact of proposed developments” (Fischhoff 1977). Economic costbenefit analysis, general systems analysis, operations research, decisiontheory way of thought, and risk assessment all are “attempts at policy science” (Wynne 1975, 118). They comprise a “family of techniques ... conceived as ways of improving decisionmaking by broadening the role of logic and empirical inquiry” (Tribe 1972, 75). Rip (1986) later labeled this set of sciences “strategic” sciences, to convey the fact that they shared a similar interest in aiding decisionmaking. By shaping and embracing the quantitative assessment of health risks or the comparative economic analysis of their reduction, the EPA has placed itself in the ambit of these sciences, and of this particular way of understanding the administration of the environment and health, as a way of making rational decisions. Sociologists and philosophers, very often critical of these policy sciences, tend to argue that they are representative of an expanding technoscientific or technocratic ideology. This narrative, however, obscures the contextual and historical constitution of these sciences and of their techniques. They were born in the context of public controversies surrounding technologies and their hazards, as well as policies for managing them. Risk research, it appears, is knowledge formed to respond to public controversies about environmental and health hazards, with a view toward solving them. 1 Risk Sciences: Expertise for DecisionMaking and Dispute