ORF 2010-2011 Full-Length Samples Erwin Van Rijswoud.Pdf

The “Knowledge Society” ― A Glocal Challenge Supplement to the OPEN REVIEW FORUM 20102011 Report ORF-OUTPUT FULL-LENGTH MANUSCRIPT SAMPLES Experts as Policy Entrepreneurs: SARS, Avian Influenza, Hurricane Katrina 1 OPEN REVIEW FORUM OUTPUT FULL-LENGTH MANUSCRIPT Experts as Policy Entrepreneurs: SARS, Avian Influenza and Hurricane Katrina as Focusing Events in Dutch Agenda Setting Erwin van Rijswoud Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (ISIS) Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Abstract: The idea that scientists provide sound scientific advice to politics, and that they communicate to the public in an unbiased manner suffered from the challenges that new crises posed for science. However, crises are not just a scientific, political and public challenge to scientific expertise; they also create an opportunity for agenda setting activities by experts. Experts then become policy entrepreneurs. In this article we study two cases in which Dutch virologists and water engineers used SARS, avian influenza and Hurricane Katrina as events that could be used for their potential to focus political and public attention into problems that should, according to the scientists, be resolved. By deploying a biographical-narrative approach, this article focuses on the individual problem assessments, actions and their underlying motives. The article demonstrates not just how the experts from the two cases interacted with the crises, but also how their role as policy advisors and public communicators was shaped by their work at the science-policy interface. Keywords: knowledge society; crisis; experts; policy making; public communication; agenda setting; virology; SARS; Avian influenza; civil engineering; Hurricane Katrina; the Netherlands 2 Erwin van Rijswoud March 2011 1. Introduction The close of the 1970s coincided with the emergence of new and unprecedented challenges for science, such as the HIV/AIDS1 pandemic, the disaster at the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island in 1979 in the United States and acid rain in the 1980s as a major environmental problem. These cases were exemplifications of crises that posed novel challenges to the ways in which techno-scientific problems were framed and addressed, and challenged scientific legitimacy as such (Weingart, 1999). These new challenges could not be resolved with normal, Kuhnian science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993; Kuhn, 1996 [1962]). The case of AIDS teaches us that classic virology and vaccine science couldn‘t grasp the disease mechanisms – and it still hasn‘t come to understand this. The success with which acid rain was handled, demonstrates that new challenges are not without new solutions. In all, the experts handling the new crises worked with incomplete methods, knowledge and frameworks when they were trying to tackle these new crises. But on top of that, the problems experts responded to were not just of a scientific nature. The challenges pointed out a need of policy making bodies for policy-relevant and science-based knowledge, and this created complex interactions between policy makers and experts. Sometimes technical expertise is constructed around desired policy options (Hellström, 2000; Weingart, 1999); in other cases there is a clear gap between the urgency with which policy knowledge is required and the pace at which relevant scientific knowledge can be made available (Collins & Evans, 2002; Hellström, 2000). In this situation, educated guesses and expert opinion stand in for the knowledge required, and as such, this articulates different demands on the individual scientists than during a situation in which an appeal is made on normal science. Finally, the public nature of events like this AIDS epidemic made an appeal on the experts to not just address and communicate with policy makers, but also with the public at large. This situation has been captured by Sylvio Funtowicz and Jeremy Ravetz with the catching phrase ‗post-normal science‘; ―[t]o characterize an issue involving risk and the environment, in what we call ‗post-normal science‘, we can think of it as one where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent‖ (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993, p.744). 1 Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; the virus causes the syndrome. In 1981 the first cases were reported. Experts as Policy Entrepreneurs: SARS, Avian Influenza, Hurricane Katrina 3 OPEN REVIEW FORUM OUTPUT FULL-LENGTH MANUSCRIPT Underlying these practical consequences of new crises for science and scientific expertise is the problem of governmental and scientific legitimacy, as perceived by Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. The first claims that when government cannot manage the crisis according to its own criteria, legitimation of government as such is in peril (Habermas, 1997 [1973]). The public realm then is an important space for maintaining legitimation; it has ―the function of directing attention to topical areas – that is, of pushing other themes, problems, and arguments below the threshold of attention and, thereby, of withholding them from opinion formation‖ (Habermas, 1997 [1973], p.70). The source of renewed legitimacy according to Habermas lies in consensus formation between actors. Lyotard locates the legitimacy problem – and hence the solution – within science itself. As science legitimated itself with an appeal to a master narrative of Enlightenment philosophy, and the postmodern age can be described as an ―incredulity toward master narratives‖ (Lyotard, 1999 [1979], p.xxiv), modern science consequently lost its legitimacy. In addition, the rise of manifold narratives or ‗languages games‘ rather than a single master narrative prohibits that legitimation can be regained by falling back on widely shared procedures for consensus formation and legitimation, as Habermas proposed before him (Lyotard, 1999 [1979], p.xxv). Rather, scientists could become participants in the many language games, and these language games provide a substitute for the loss of legitimation that accompanied the demise of the Enlightenment narrative. In line with Thomas Gieryn, we call this battle over public and political credibility or legitimacy ‗boundary work‘, which ―occurs as people contend for, legitimate, or challenge the cognitive authority of science-and the credibility, prestige, power, and material resources that attend such a privileged position‖ (Gieryn, 1995, p.405; see also Halffman, 2003). Summarizing, the position of science and scientific expertise in a post-normal situation is challenged on three axes: the scientific, the political and the public. On each of these axes problems pertaining to epistemology, policy advices, public communication and legitimacy have manifested themselves in complex interactions. Some scientists have acted on these three axes and handled the related challenges, and in this article we study some exemplary scientists to get insight in these new roles of science in the knowledge society. 4 Erwin van Rijswoud March 2011 2. Crises as perspectives for agenda setting In the careers and biographies of scientists as policy and public experts2, this complicated role manifests itself. In their efforts to respond to such crises, scientific experts are drawn into the public and political domains: experts are called in to advise policy makers and politicians on how to address emerging threats, explain to the public what the dangers involved are, what could expected for the future and what policy is required to handle the crises and minimize the (potential) damage. Scientists are expected to tell their stories, but in situations of great uncertainty. Once these experts have assumed such a role in dealing with such crisis events, some of them continue their role as policy advisors and public communicators. This for example goes for virologists who handled the outbreaks of HIV/AIDS and BSE3 in the 1980s. Being the first experts to address the risks involved in these outbreaks in a time when policy arrangements and communication channels needed to be developed, virologists grew together with these arrangements, a process in which public visibility of the crisis increased the public visibility of the experts and vice versa (Van Rijswoud, 2010, pp.163-164). In practice, however, there is more ambiguity in the response to crises. Scientific experts may also use such crisis events to get their issues on the political agenda, and these events are then deployed by policy entrepreneurs, including scientists themselves, for their potential to ‗focus‘ policy thinking in directions they deem necessary (Birkland, 1997; Kingdon, 1995). The posing of new challenges for science, the absence of frames or routines and the providence of a situation without clear solutions and meanings, created the opportunity for actors to add a symbolic, political and public value that is exogenous to the crisis itself. The aim of this article is to study the practices of agenda setting as described in the work of Thomas Birkland, and hence to study the role of experts as policy entrepreneurs. In trying to analyse how experts handled the 2 I use ‗scientists‘ and ‗experts‘ to denote different sides of the person, although it sometimes it is hard to draw a clear boundary between the two. Ideally, however, ‗scientist‘ refers to the professional occupation and professional identity, ‗expert‘ to the role of being someone who employs experience and expertise in policy making and public debate. Sometimes I use ‗scientific expert‘ to indicate, rather then to mask this

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