Several recent strands of work within science studies, risk analysis, the public understanding of science, and environmental policy analysis have focused on the significance of lay knowledge and expertise. In case after case, it has been suggested that “expert” accounts of physical reality have conflicted with local people's knowledge and that rather than local knowledge being routinely inferior and defective, it has commonly proven more sensitive to local “realities.” These cases have become favored sites for studying public discontents with expert knowledge. Though the primary style of analysis in this emerging tradition has consisted of the case study, two conceptual schema for clarifying this topic have recently been proposed by Funtowicz and Ravetz and by Wynne. This paper uses a case study in the local understanding of an air-quality model to undertake a conceptual and empirical assessment of these contrasting analytical frameworks.
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References
1.
Ulrich Beck , Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992), p. 166.
2.
Anthony Giddens , The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 124-134.
3.
and for an explicit evaluation of risk society notions, Brain Wynne, “May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Brian Wynne (London: Sage, 1996), 44-83.
4.
Brian Wynne , “Misunderstood misunderstanding: social identities and public uptake of science,”Public Understanding of Science1 (1992): 281-304.
5.
Alan Irwin , “Deciding about risk: expert testimony and the regulation of hazard,” in Environmental Threats: Perception, Analysis and Management, ed. J. Brown (New York: Belhaven, 1989), 19-32.
6.
and Sheila Jasanoff, “Civilization and madness: the great BSE scare of 1996,”Public Understanding of Science6 (1997) 221-232.
7.
on trust see also Steven Yearley, “Understanding science from the perspective of the sociology of scientific knowledge: an overview,”Public Understanding of Science3 (1994): 245-258.
8.
Steven Yearley , “The environmental challenge to science studies,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch (London: Sage, 1995), 457-479.
9.
On the concentration of radiation see Steven Yearley, The Green Case (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 163; biological systems can also concentrate radioactive material—for example, sheep and cows eating contaminated grass can accumulate the polluting materials, thus endangering meat-eating humans, and so on.
10.
See Steven Yearley. “What does science mean in the `public understanding of science',” in Between Understanding and Trust: The Public, Science and Technology, ed. M. Dierkes and C. von Grote, (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), 217-236.
11.
see also the initial attempt at systematization in Steven Yearley, “Understanding science from the perspective of the sociology of scientific knowledge: an overview,”Public Understanding of Science3 (1994): 245-258.
12.
and also Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).
13.
and “Science for the post-normal age,”Futures25, no. 7 (1993): 740-755.
14.
Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “A new scientific methodology for global environmental issues,” p. 143.
15.
Ibid., p. 144.
16.
Tim O'Riordan and Steve Rayner, “Risk management for global environmental change,”Global Environmental Change1, no. 2 (1991): 91-108.
17.
Sheila Jasanoff and Brian Wynne, “Science and decisionmaking,” in Human Choice and Climate Change Vol. 1, ed. Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L Malone, 1-87 (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Press, 1998), 1-87, and see pp. 11-13.
18.
Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “A new scientific methodology for global environmental issues,” p. 145.
19.
Ibid., p. 149.
20.
See Peter Bailey, Clair Gough, Michael Chadwick, and Gordon McGranahan, Methods for Integrated Environmental Assessment: Research Directions for the European Union (Stockholm: Stockholm Environment Institute, 1996).
21.
Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “A new scientific methodology for global environmental issues,” p. 148.
22.
Ibid., p. 146.
23.
Funtowicz and Ravetz make an attempt to deal with some of these issues in Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990).
24.
Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, “A new scientific methodology for global environmental issues,” p. 150.
25.
Ibid., p. 148.
26.
see also Steven Yearley, Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 124-130.
27.
and Brian Wynne, “May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide.”
28.
Ibid., (1992), p. 117.
29.
Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne, “Introduction,” in Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, ed. Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 1-17.
30.
Brian Wynne , “Uncertainty and environmental learning,”Global Environmental Change2 (1992): 111-127, p. 123.
31.
Brian Wynne , “May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide,” p. 57; original emphases.
32.
and David L. Morgan, Successful Focus Groups: Advancing the State of the Art (London: Sage, 1993).
33.
One of the referees noted that these data are not truly “naturally occurring,” since they arise from focus groups convened by researchers. The intention behind describing them as naturally occurring was to stress that the model was an operational one implemented and run in “real life” by a particular local authority, rather than something devised by the researchers to elicit people's responses. For further empirical details of the study see Steven Yearley, “Computer models and the public's understanding of science: a case-study analysis,”Social Studies of Science29 (1999): 845-866.
34.
In the transcription citations, the first figure in square brackets refers to the group number (1 is the city's “Environment Forum,” 4 is the public-sector group and so on; see the case-study-description section earlier in the paper for fuller details of the groups' composition) and the second figure refers to the page of the transcript. For anonymity's sake, group members are referred to only by number; the numbering is however consistent, so that, for example, utterances by “R2” in Group 4 are always by the same individual. Square brackets indicate words switched to preserve a measure of anonymity or other editorial substitutions. Curly brackets indicate actions or other non-verbal occurrences.
