This article explores the social frameworks guiding expert and nonexpert perspectives on medicines safety in the U.K. Scientific experts from the Committee on the Safety of Medicines and the Medicines Commission were interviewed, and three nonexpertgroups, including patients and health professionals, were studied by the administration of questionnaires and focused group discussions. The research examined to what extent these groups subscribed to technocratic or democratic approaches to medicines regula tion and how this might be related to values toward technological risk. (...) The results reveal that there is substantial divergence between expert and nonexpert perspectives on medicines regulation, and that this derives as much from value differences as from any informational deficits. However, there seems to be some scope for shared values between some experts and some nonexperts, especially as regards state secrecy. The article concludes by discussing how those values could be used to foster a new "social contract of expertise" in which scientists are more democratically accountable and patients take more responsibility in governing medical risks. (shrink)

As products of the "new biotechnology," genetically modified organisms have provoked a wide-ranging risk debate on potential harm, especially from herbicide-tolerant crops. In response to this legitimacy problem, the European Community adopted precautionary legislation, which left open the definition of environmental harm. When the U.K. proposed Europe-wide market approval of a herbicide-tolerant oilseed rape, the proposal encountered dissent from some countries and environmentalist groups. Further debate on normative judgments became necessary to implement the precaution ary legislation. In dispute were several (...) regulatory boundaries—of administrative re sponsibility, causality, acceptability, and evidence. The boundary disputes expressed divergentframings of biotechnological risk, each with its implicit model of the socionatu ral order. In this way, the disputes can illuminate the sorts of risk framings that have already become embedded and standardized in other regulatory sectors. (shrink)

As the distance between science and society is collapsed with the growth of contemporary knowledge societies, so a range of different approaches to the democratic governance of science superseding its Enlightenment government is emerging. In light of these different approaches, this article focuses on the figure of the scientific citizen and the variable dimensions of a new scientific citizenship. Three models of democracy - advanced consumer, deliberative and radical/pluralist - are put forward as both partly competing and partly complementary frameworks (...) within which the new rights and responsibilities of the scientific citizen can be articulated and discussed. In each case the theory and practice of scientific citizenship are viewed against the background of contemporary developments within the field of science communication; the rise of the public understanding of science movement; the new enthusiasm for advancing public engagements with science, and the legitimate place of different forms of public protest and dissent within new designs for democratic governance. (shrink)

The paper contributes to the current discussion on the role of participatory methods in the context of technology assessment (TA) and science and technology (S&T) governance. It is argued that TA has to be understood as a form of democratic policy consulting in the sense of the Habermasian model of a “pragmatist” relation of science and politics. This notion implies that public participation is an indispensable element of TA in the context of policy advice. Against this background, participatory TA (pTA) (...) is defended against recent criticism of procedures of lay participation which states that pTA is lacking impact on S&T decision making, that pTA instead of opening S&T policies to new perspectives is used as a means to support mainstream S&T policy and that in pTA procedure the authentic lay perspective is systematically contorted by dominant expert knowledge. (shrink)

As technology has the ability to displace power and politics, it needs to be at the centre of political concern. This article develops the idea that technological citizenship is an important concept in cultivating political sensitivity to technology. Rather than straightforwardly correcting for the displacement of power, technological citizenship must cultivate this displacement and engage with it through contestation. Drawing on insights from the critical theory of technology, this article reconceptualizes the political effects of technology as internal to both politics (...) and technology design, rather than externalities. By recontextualizing, the critical theory aims to reshape the input space of technology design, and include a broader range of values. This conflation of the political and the technical shows remarkable parallels with the generic concept of sustainability. It is thus concluded that technological citizenship is essentially sustainable citizenship. (shrink)

Since the introduction of the concept of “sustainable development” by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, a number of programs and policies have been offered, enacted, and pursued that profess to those ideals. The extent to which they actually accord with them, however, is the subject of a growing body of debate and literature. Some critics have argued that despite its promise, the concept of sustainable development has merely been reformulated and used to continue promoting the goal (...) of economic growth as the primary measure of progress. This viewpoint argues that sustainable development can never be more than sustainable economic growth under the current growth development paradigm. This article examines these arguments through an analysis of sustainable development as pursued in the United States. It focuses on the sustainable development component of the U.S. government's comprehensive approach to solving urban problems through the creation of empowerment zones. (shrink)

Sociologists of risk tend to presume that populations have static perceptions of risk that can be correlated with their degree of technical expertise or their structural relation to society. Such commentators show little interest in human agency unless it is the agency of professional risk communicators educating the public. This analysis of the conflict over a radioactive incinerator in Livermore, California, emphasizes the fluidity of public perceptions of the incinerator and the agency of activists in shaping those perceptions in a (...) battle for rhetorical position with the U.S. Department of Energy. At a historical moment when the media was publicizing decades of environmental problems in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, activists were able to defeat the incinerator by creating a transitory alliance with local developers and by using rhetorical strategies that slyly undermined the official discourse on risk. (shrink)