Community at Risk

Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security

Thomas D. Beamish

• Publisher: Stanford Business Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804794657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In 2001, following the events of September 11 and the Anthrax attacks, the United States government began an aggressive campaign to secure the nation against biological catastrophe. Its agenda included building National Biocontainment Laboratories (NBLs), secure facilities intended for research on biodefense applications, at participating universities around the country. In Community at Risk, Thomas D. Beamish examines the civic response to local universities' plans to develop NBLs in three communities: Roxbury, MA; Davis, CA; and Galveston, TX. At a time when the country's anxiety over its security had peaked, reactions to the biolabs ranged from vocal public opposition to acceptance and embrace. He argues that these divergent responses can be accounted for by the civic conventions, relations, and virtues specific to each locale. Together, these elements clustered, providing a foundation for public dialogue. In contrast to conventional micro- and macro-level accounts of how risk is perceived and managed, Beamish's analysis of each case reveals the pivotal role played by meso-level contexts and political dynamics. Community at Risk provides a new framework for understanding risk disputes and their prevalence in American civic life.

CHAPTER 1

Conceptual Footings of Risk and Governance

RISK AND ITS MANAGEMENT present the modern state with one of its most pernicious challenges. Its legitimacy largely rests on its dual capacity to authoritatively intervene and stem “external risks” to public security (foreign attack, disease, and natural disaster), while simultaneously guaranteeing the sanctity of democratic institutions and individual rights. Over time and through a range of interventions, modern industrial states like those in Europe and the United States have indeed conferred substantial benefit on society through the reduction of these types of risks. However, this has also resulted in unanticipated “manufactured risks” that have emerged with the development of a range of technological systems, from fossil fuels to biological, chemical, and nuclear technologies (Giddens 1999). What is more, the technocratic systems set up to secure contemporary society from risk have also frequently threatened the principles of democratic governance through their adherence to technocracy, secrecy and denialism, and nonlocal control. The increasing association of manufactured risks with efforts to manage external threats has sown great uncertainty among the public regarding how the common good is best served. Indeed, in risk society the line dividing external from manufactured risk is, perhaps, no longer applicable.

In the United States many have therefore come to doubt the anodyne statements about the failsafe plans that the government and its trustee institutions pursue in the name of protecting public safety and prosperity. State-sanctioned risk management plans have consistently evoked polarizing disputes over which risks are and are not acceptable when it comes to personal well-being and rights (Evans 2002; Gamson 1961; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Offit 2008; Pellow 2002).¹

Many scholars now argue that twenty-first-century United States, and postindustrial states like it, is a risk society characterized by a running debate over the promise and pitfalls of progress. According to this thesis, the central polemic for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political battles was the distribution of societal “goods,” while a prime basis for citizen mobilization since the late twentieth century has been escaping modernization’s “risks.” In this new era, the main social and political problem is therefore not simply wealth distribution but a contest over risk distribution, which is itself a by-product of the pursuit of societal development (Beck 1992; Freudenburg 1993, 2000; Giddens 1990; Lash, Szerszynski, and Wynne 1996; Short 1984).

In this chapter, I provide the conceptual footings for Community at Risk. I begin with a brief history of risk as a management tool for “rationally” ascertaining the benefits and liabilities of newly proposed programs, institutions, or technologies. Given its scientific and technical legitimacy in formal proceedings and settings, risk has also increasingly become a “forensic resource” for those engaged in technical controversies (Douglas 1990; Nelkin 1992). As a forensic resource, risk is routinely deployed as technical rhetoric in risk disputes to both justify and denounce the plans of adversaries.

Next, I explore how the political aspects of risk and its management took shape in the post-2001 debates that ensued over biodefense plans in Davis, Roxbury, and Galveston. In each community context, in addition to concerns with bioterrorism and the biolab technology proposed for each locale, a range of beliefs, value commitments, and governance expectations were at play that shaped both local understanding of what was at stake as well as public talk regarding the local university’s plans.

In exploring how public discourse and civic action(s) regarding biodefense were similar and different across the three community cases, I learned that, while timeless American political and cultural values were at play along with cognitive biases and limitations, they did not wholly explain important local differences. To fully understand these, it is necessary to take into account the immanent, distinctive local civics and political discourses expressed in each locale. I have therefore developed a theoretical perspective to account for the distinctive cluster of conventions, relations, and virtues native to each community I investigated.

A diverse collection of scholars and disciplines has sought to better understand the basis of risk disputes like those I have studied. Empirical studies have largely approached them as either problems of risk management or as matters of public perception. Those studying risk disputes usually ask questions like “What explains personal variations in risk perception?” (Kahan 2008; Kahan et al. 2006; Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; Slovic 2000a, 2000b); “What ‘conditions’ and ‘contexts’—material, political, cultural—explain variant community responses to risk?” (McAdam and Boudet 2012; Nelkin 1992; Wynne 1982); and “Why has the public increasingly come to view a range of projects, technologies, and developments as too risky?” (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Freudenburg 2000; Shrader-Frechette 1991; Sjoberg 1998; Sunstein 2005).

Risk studies have not, however, engaged in a sustained dialogue with a range of scholarship in sociology and anthropology that addresses community politics, community movements, civic political-culture, and issues of or relating to the local sequestration of well-being and the “common good.” This even though many of the concerns risk studies scholars seek to address involve overlapping issues and aspects. For instance, those focused on comparative politics and political culture ask, “What does it mean to be a worthy person, community member, and citizen?” “How do different types of social ties and community relations shape civic life, political engagement, and protest?” “What roles do social and cultural environments play in shaping individual perceptions and therefore civic behaviors?” “When and why do people participate in civic politics and protest at all (if they do)?” and “How do people understand and justify their participation in civic life and community politics?” (see Eliasoph 1998; Etzioni 2004; Lamont 1992; Lamont and Thévenot 2000; Lichterman 1996, 2005; Perrin 2006; Putnam 2001).

In short, although the cited scholars (and many others) have explored and sought answers to these and related questions, very few risk scholars have consulted the literature on comparative politics and political-cultures and likewise, very few of those focused on community based comparative politics and political-cultures have attended to the literatures and scholarship on risks, risk perceptions, and risk disputes. Therefore I conclude by engaging both literatures since they informed my effort to better understand the civically founded risk disputes I investigated. I also take them up to push both to engage in a conversation that has yet to manifest.

RISK MANAGEMENT, TECHNOCRACY, AND DEMOCRACY

Beginning in the 1970s, in an effort to reduce the level of social and political conflict surrounding what were increasingly viewed as hazardous technologies (such as nuclear energy, chemicals, and biotechnology), the U.S. federal and state governments required that any technical and potentially risky developments they funded would be “rationally managed.” By this, they meant technically assessed for their probable costs and benefits (Freudenburg 1986; Jasanoff 1986; NAS-NRC 1983). The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) states that all federal government agencies must prepare “environmental impact statements” (FEIS). Under this fiat, the intended benefits and probable future risks of any new publicly funded project and associated technology must be assessed, and the Environmental Protection Agency must grant approval before the project can begin. While intended to avoid social conflict, such requirements have created as much controversy as they have resolved. Uncertainties inherent to formally analyzing the risks associated with any given policy, technology, or technical systems frequently lead to public risk disputes. When definitive knowledge is not possible and many criteria are at play, multiple positions are the rule and disputes are very likely.

Conflicts like these are further amplified in democratic societies, where options for formal action are subject to legitimate political contest (Renn 2008). Democratic expectations clash with risk management orthodoxy for at least two reasons. First, risk management presumes that options and decisions reflect technical calculations and expert knowledge. As such, it is by design hierarchical and thus quite limited in its democratic potential (Beck 1995; Jasanoff 2005; Nelkin 1977; Slovic 2000a). Technical solutions to identified risks reflect “correct” search, assessment, and selection processes that are technocratically, not democratically, defined.² Second, risk management plans invariably require some level of localized sacrifice. This opens such plans to public scrutiny and therefore the “politics of risk.”

In risk disputes such as those that locally arose over biodefense plans (circa 2000s), local concerns are often contrasted with common good arguments, with state actors and trustees arguing that the risks are negligible or that the greater good should outweigh local sacrifice. Of course, local populations frequently disagree. Thus, state-sponsored and/or -vetted risk interventions, justified for their capacity to stem societal threats, are regularly questioned by those who claim the proposed solutions are the real problem (Bauman 1992). Indeed, the association of solutions with problems has severely eroded the “legitimacy of the state” (Habermas 1975), as well as other associated trustee institutions insofar as their plans and promises to manage risk on behalf of society have resulted in unanticipated and manufactured risks that have frequently erupted as public risk disputes.

Public Risk Disputes and Governance Expectations

Similar to other kinds of social and political conflict, what I term “risk disputes” are also predictable struggles over who gets to control the anticipated benefits of a given project and avoid the liabilities. In the contemporary United States, risk disputes often center on the physical threat represented by a new technology or policy. Just as often, however, they include a focus on the performance of the trustee institutions involved, their associations and track records, and, consequently, any social trust or distrust of them. In such disputes, the public often questions them because they are understood to be both the sponsors and the benefactors of the policies, programs, and/or technologies being proposed.

In the context of community dialogue, civic groups and individuals as members of the public often ask similar questions: What relationship does the trustee have to their community? How has the community fared in previous encounters with the same or associated trustees? What kind of social and political interests are associated with the effort? What are the moral and ethical implications of the project and those proposing it? Local history, ongoing local social and political relations, and local value commitments frequently provide answers to these and related questions or at the very least strongly shape those answers. Such questions, and the interpretations and debates that found them, are therefore highly relational, reflecting collective issues of authority, control, equity, and trust. Yet, in a clear majority of the risk-related literatures, such civic mobilizations are explained away with reference to “individual misperceptions,” “misplaced public fears,” and therefore the propensity to reflect “risk panic” (cf. Kahan 2008; Mazur 2004; Sunstein 2002, 2007; Wildavsky 1988; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). While conflicts over risk and its management might involve heightened levels of anxiety—and even fear—this terminology does a disservice to the political and cultural practices involved, reducing them to emotional, irrational reflexes. Risk disputes are a complex and vexing form of societal disquiet; reducing them to personal psychology, emotional reaction, or decontextualized forms of “cultural cognition” leaves a great deal unexplained.

Risk disputes are also, to some degree, distinct from other kinds of political contests. They are relatively new in historical terms, emerging in the 1960s and expanding in the 1970s with the introduction of a range of technologies, chemicals, and worrisome environmental trends. Risk disputes gained prominence with the emergence of the environmental, antinuclear, and antitoxins movements, each of which called into question basic premises central to ideas, beliefs, and worldviews like progress, modernity, and nationalism (Bullard 1994; Freudenberg and Steinsapir 2000; Gamson 1961; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Mazur 1981, 1998, 2004; Nelkin 1971, 1992; Perrow 2013; Szasz 1994). Though initially associated with a “left-of-center critique”³ of the state and societal development, risk disputes have spread across the political spectrum as scientific advances and technological innovations have opened up formerly sacrosanct aspects of individual and collective life. For example, the language and framework of risk have structured debates over procreation and birth practices as well as life-extending medical technologies (Harthorn and Oaks 2003; Luker 1984; Nelkin 1985, 1992; Tribe 1990). What is more, in the highly politicized context of risk society, risk as both a technology and political rhetoric has become a powerful forensic resource for those who wish to challenge established authority and its plans (Douglas 1990). Yet, risk has also served trustee institutions equally well as they have sought to justify their plans and risk interventions in society’s name (Hamilton and Viscusi 1999; Levy 2012; Shrader-Frechette 1985, 1991).

Risk disputes are also distinctive insofar as they typically focus on the distribution of harm rather than benefit and often involve complex technical considerations. Regarding harm versus benefit, a key justification for trustee-sponsored risk management plans has historically been their capacity to mitigate threats to society. This...