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1 Introduction
Contestation in international environmental governance
M. J. Peterson
Sustainability has become both a goal to be attained and a guiding standard against which to assess the adequacy of international environmental governance. This shift in frame from discrete regulation focused on individual problems to more comprehensive governance began to emerge at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and received a major infusion of political energy at the Rio+20 Conference in 2012. New actors have become involved in international environmental governance and the policy frames organizing their thinking have become more comprehensive. Throughout this transition, the multilateral approach to global environmental governance emphasized identifying consensus scientific knowledge of physical processes and formulating policy guidance based on it. Policy-makers and citizens were encouraged to rely heavily on epistemic communities of physical scientists for guidance in formulating and implementing policy (e.g., Knorr Cetina 1991; Haas 1992; Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993).
Designing environmental governance to pursue sustainability requires a broad array of knowledge about natural systems, the interconnections between the physical consequences of human activity and natural ecological processes, and processes of promoting social change because transitioning to sustainability will require widespread change in individual and aggregate human behavior. The broader set of scientific knowledge of natural systems needed typically establishes multiple scientific communities as sources of authoritative knowledge about relevant aspects of the environment. The wide-ranging changes in individual-, household-, local-, national-, and global-level patterns of human activity needed to bring human societies within the limits of what the natural environment can absorb require understanding human interactions, making social science as relevant to environmental governance as natural science.
Yet other developments have raised serious questions about the validity of this vision of the place of scientific and other expert knowledge in improved international environmental governance. Social studies of knowledge have highlighted the often-contentious process by which a scientific community comes to consensus behind the theories and facts offered as “scientific knowledge” at any given moment while various political actors challenged the presumption that policy-makers and citizens should defer so extensively to the guidance of “science” or “the scientific community.” Questions of what counts as scientific knowledge, how scientific knowledge becomes “usable knowledge” that can be incorporated into policy processes, and whose knowledge is relevant to formulating and implementing policy became central questions for scholars and political actors alike.
Understanding the tension between contestation and consensus, both within epistemic communities of scientists and among the full range of actors engaged in the policy process, is vital for a better understanding of social learning and improving policy. Contestation over what knowledge and whose knowledge are relevant to international environmental governance is unlikely to be eliminated entirely. Yet without considerable convergence on what knowledge offered by whom provides a workable basis for proceeding among the actors involved, policy formulation and implementation are weakened and attaining sustainability becomes less likely. Developing the needed convergence requires a better understanding of the interplay between contestation and consensus during every phase of the governance process from problem definition through policy-making to implementation and evaluation.
Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this book seeks to help identify ways forward to more effective international agreements promoting sustainability by investigating how controversies about what set or sets of scientific knowledge are relevant to a particular environmental issue, how to incorporate both scientific and social scientific knowledge into the policy process, and how to include lay knowledge alongside expert knowledge have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns.
Contestation over definitions of relevant scientific knowledge
Disagreements, including protracted controversy, over the content and reliability of scientific knowledge can occur within any area of science. How those controversies play out depends on whether it affects the subset of scientific knowledge being drawn upon for governance – whether it involves an area of “esoteric science” distant from current public concern or in an area of “public domain science” currently viewed as directly relevant to public welfare (Goldman 2006: 14). Where the knowledge is within an esoteric domain, contestation is unlikely to attract attention from actors outside the scientific community involved, while contestation over what counts as knowledge in an area where science appears to be relevant to public welfare will attract attention from other actors perceiving themselves as having a clear stake in what is – or is not – accepted as authoritative scientific knowledge.
Contestation within the communities of scientists producing the relevant knowledge can take either of two forms. The first occurs within a particular scientific discipline or field. Science is a dynamic enterprise, and both the substantive content of knowledge and the extent of consensus about it in any discipline or field can change over time. Lack of consensus may be confined to the answers currently offered to particular questions but may run deeper and involve disagreement on the theories and analytical frameworks that should be used to make sense of observational data. Analysts have distinguished among four possibilities (Collins and Evans 2006: 71), each with different implications for the ease of reaching consensus on the relevant scientific knowledge:
1 “normal science” in which there is consensus on the theories and analytical frameworks and on the basic knowledge of the field;
2 “golem science” in which there is currently no consensus on theories, frameworks, and basic substantive knowledge but continuing scientific work appears likely to produce sufficient consensus to make it “normal science” in the near or medium future;
3 “historical science” in which there is unlikely to be consensus for a long time – if not forever – because the field it addresses is characterized by complex interactions and trends that cannot be studied through the usual short time intervals and general routines of laboratory experiments; and
4 “reflexive historical science” in which human activity affects the workings of physical systems and forces scientists to incorporate humans within their models of physical processes.
Each type of situation has distinct implications for the readiness of wider public to defer to scientific knowledge.
Public and policy-maker deference to scientists’ reports and suggestions is greatest in areas of normal science. Here, the existence of scientific consensus allows fostering public confidence in both the information and the policy suggestions scientists provide. The lack of scientific consensus means deference is weaker in areas of golem science. Lack of consensus creates openings for choosing among competing groups of experts or for making policy decisions on other grounds. The extended debates on the acceptability of GMO foods are a good example. Continuing argument among scientists about the long-term effects of genetic modification allows publics and governments to base policy decisions on other considerations, producing strong divergences in the policies adopted in various parts of the world. Public deference to scientific knowledge is even weaker in areas of historical science because of the complexities of the pathways by which physical phenomena studied in historical sciences occur. Different analyses based on different models and inspired by different sets of values can have equal technical plausibility. Deference is lowest in areas of reflexive historical science because human activity is part of the process shaping physical outcomes, meaning that social science, as well as physical science, is directly relevant to answering “technical” questions, and the lower levels of scientific consensus in many areas of social science reduce the influence of whatever knowledge might be offered to citizens and decision-makers.
The second form of contestation about scientific knowledge stems from the actual or potential relevance of more than one set of scientific knowledge for understanding some substantive knowledge domain. The situations giving rise to this form of contestation have some surface resemblance to golem science in that there is no consensus at the moment, but the source of disagreement runs deeper because it results from applying more than one scientific discipline to the processes of theory-building, measurement-definition, observation, and inference from observation. When this form of contestation over the relevant scientific knowledge arises, citizens and policy-makers do not face the usual “lay-expert” problem, but a more complicated “lay-two experts problem” (Goldman 2006: 18). They must determine not only who among those claiming to be experts should be accepted as such, but also which set of experts possesses what relevant knowledge. This can be complicated because the various disciplines of contemporary physical science feature three distinct “ways of knowing” (Pickstone 2000: 10–13): natural history, analytical, and experimental. Natural history combines an element of taxonomy – classifying phenomenon through some sorting scheme – with an element of tracing change over time. Analytical science seeks knowledge by breaking things into parts whether the parts be static elements of a larger compound or the process by which some element flows through the system. Thus, analytical chemistry focuses on treating the world as a set of chemicals; thermodynamics focuses on energy flows; and histology focuses on processes common to all living tissue regardless of the species of animal from which they are taken. Experimental science involves placing elements under controlled conditions to analyze their physical processes under varying conditions or to create new entities out of new combinations of elements. Synthetic chemicals, antibiotics, and recombinant DNA are all well-known products of experimental science as creation.
Reliance on decomposing natural systems to analyze them part-by-part was strongly imprinted into Western science during the 18th and 19th centuries, initially as an effort to explain many physical processes with mechanical analogies (Schofield 1969), but later as an expression of confidence that simple covering laws could explain a wide array of similar phenomena (Cassirer 1951; Thackray 1970). Yet more holistic ways of thinking about nature never disappeared. The ecosystem concept was first introduced in the 1930s (Willis 1997) and became increasingly prominent in the late 20th century as grounding for claims that environmental concerns needed to be addressed in ways acknowledging the interrelations of natural systems (Smith and Smith 2012; Likens and Lindenmayer 2010). The emergence of ecology as a distinct scientific discipline also had another effect because it highlighted differences between analytical and dialectical reasoning. Each tradition runs deep, originating in the same historical era (c. 500–400 BCE). Each has distinct strengths and weaknesses as sources of “usable knowledge” for policy (Disheng 1990; Peng and Nisbett 1999; Nisbett et al. 2001) but combining them can be a challenge because each aligns most closely with different world-views (e.g., Holling 1998; Sarewitz 2004).
Focusing on sustainability has given rise to a third dimension of arguments about what constitutes policy-relevant knowledge: the place of social scientific knowledge. Humans are connected to the physical world through the physical characteristics of their own bodies and the dependence of their societies on a supportive natural environment. They also affect physical systems through their patterns of social life and economic activity. Social life and economic activity involve physical action but are shaped by human-created and human-alterable practices. One need not go to the extremes of regarding all actual or possible social practices as equally valid experientially or morally to acknowledge that studying human interactions with other humans requires different approaches than studying molecules interacting with other molecules. At the same time, lower levels of methodological and substantive consensus in the social sciences means that social science does not resemble “normal science” in the physical world, making the formation of policy-guiding epistemic communities unlikely. Attaining sustainability is likely to involve reflexive historical science since the physical processes of ecosystems are complex and human-affected. This suggests that efforts to attain general sustainability – as distinct from sustainability in a localized ecosystem or a defined type of human activity – will involve strong doses of controversy among experts and considerable room for choosing policy for other reasons.
Contestation over using scientific and other forms of knowledge
Once accepted as relevant for policy, scientific or social scientific knowledge can be used effectively in two situations. If, and for as long as, actors involved in the policy process believe that experts “know better,” they will defer to the knowledge the experts endorse. Whenever that belief weakens, knowledge will be used effectively only if those involved in the policy process understand the knowledge and its implications well enough to regard it as useful for the policy enterprise. In this context, “useful” is not likely to mean leaving aside other forms of knowledge; the impulse to defer to experts is not strong enough to occlude other perspectives and considerations.
Thus, whenever experts do not receive automatic deference, effective communicating between...
