Suchergebnisse

AbstractBuilding institutional and procedural bridges between science and policy is a vital role for law. Fundamental to the success of this work is the development of more sophisticated, nuanced understandings of scientific knowledge production than those which are current in legal and policy spheres. In this paper, I consider scientific controversies that have emerged in the field of human and environmental health impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), notably around methodological approaches to identifying such chemicals and analysing the risks they pose. Building on literatures in the philosophy and sociology of science, I identify bases on which bridge-building between science and policy could proceed and discuss the role that legal normativity can play in those processes.

One of the greatest challenges facing environmental governance is the interaction between science and governance. Translation is proposed as a means to analyze these interactions. To achieve some consensus on the quality of translations, norms and criteria must be developed in order to guide translation, namely through linkage institutions that promote productive misreadings of scientific information by governance authorities and permit judgments regarding the quality and utility of these misreadings. Given the multiplicity of sites – state and non-state – that have access to scientific and other environmentally relevant information, the structures and processes through which translation of scientific knowledge takes place will be subject to ongoing contestation. Nevertheless, the acknowledgment that scientific knowledge must be interpreted and its meaning reconstituted within governance systems may foster a healthier division of labor between science and governance, one in which political and legal authorities assume their responsibility to make judgments and decisions.