Governing Uncertainty: the Contribution of Social Sciences to the Governance of Risks in Environmental Health”
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Conference “Governing Uncertainty: The Contribution of Social Sciences to the Governance of Risks in Environmental Health” 6 – 7 July 2009 Conference Afsset - R 2S “Governing Uncertainty” 6 – 7 July 2009 - 1 - Opening Remarks Martin GUESPEREAU Director General, AFSSET Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wish to thank you for attending this symposium at this time of the year: we will address how the governance uncertainty, as well as the contribution of social sciences to the governance of risks in environmental health. I am pleased to welcome your on behalf of the French Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safty, which I am honoured to head, and on behalf of Olivier Borraz, Head of the Risk and Society Network (R 2S). This conference is the result of an encounter between R 2S network and the Afsset, between social sciences and the expert assessment of risk in environmental and occupational health. In view of the impressive number of attendants, I have no doubt you support the issues raised by this symposium. This is an unprecedented endeavour for the Afsset and R 2S to try and combine so-called hard sciences and social sciences. I do believe these two worlds would greatly benefit from such exchanges, which we will try and prove over these two days. More than 400 people have registered to attend, and Olivier Borraz will unveil our ambition. I would like to say a few words about the French Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety, as some members of the audience might not know it well. We provide scientific expertise for decision makers. When addressing scientific controversies that simply cannot be managed nor wielded, our aim is to turn it into something wieldable. Our fields of activities relate both to occupational and environmental health – anything to do with our environment and health, be it chemicals, asbestos, electromagnetic waves, nanotechnologies, sick building syndrome and so on. These are also the challenges that we shall address in the five workshops over the next two days. Our method for doing this is a response to the 1980s and 1990s health crises. The dogma is that nobody owns the truth. We gather scientists from all scientific mainstreams, from all disciplines with pertinent views on the topic. To give you an idea of how important this is, we have 150 people working in-house, with another 400 experts collaborating intermittently on our external works: this is proof of the importance of casting a wide net and get a wide range of different opinions. They join forces to try and achieve a convergence of views in order to reach a conclusion. The agency follows a number of principles: - Principle of transparency: all our works are made public and we mark out diverging opinions; - Principle of independence; - Principle of competence: we must be competent. We need to be competent in terms of the substance of the case. Such method is our know-how, and it works well; however, with this symposium, we expect to be challenged by you, by your ideas. By answering some questions, for instance on participation and a number of subjects that we will address, we shall be enriched. Conference Afsset - R 2S “Governing Uncertainty” 6 – 7 July 2009 - 2 - What does human and social sciences mean? It means riding a bike and looking at yourself as you ride the bike. We want social sciences to be part and parcel of everything. There are things that have rocked the boat of our highly hard sciences French practices, with European developments such as REACH – and you will be familiar with this European directive on chemicals. The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA, the European counterpart of AFSSET) is in charge of coordinating chemicals and contains two different scientific committees: one in charge of risk assessment and another in charge of socio-economic analysis regarding restriction proposals. These two committees work on a par with each, because, if you do not have a convergence and equality between the two committees, you cannot make sound decisions about chemicals without classifying them. For the first time at the Afsset, we have integrated economic and social sciences expertise as a prerequisite of the Committee of specialised experts on REACh. As I said, therefore, we are riding a bicycle and watching ourselves ride the bicycle, so human and social sciences are now absolutely necessary in order to call our own model into question and see how we can improve it. We therefore take un-wieldable, controversial issues and make sure that decisions can be made. Our model is based on developments that emerged in the 1990s, which is already quite some time ago. Things have changed in ten years, in particular the emergence of expertise and skills in the world of NGO’s and associative sector unknown ten years ago especially on the issues of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and mobile telephony. There are therefore people who are true activists and they have the right skills, with a level of skills that was absolutely unprecedented just 10 years ago. The issue of participation (of the Aarhus Convention type) now belongs in the debate on how expertise operates. Various models have been proposed, particularly with regard to the high authority on biotechnologies according to latest GMO-related laws and, of course, everyone is welcome to pitch in their opinion. These examples show that this is exactly what the Afsset wants in terms of this confrence. We want to establish a robust social science that will contribute to the decision-making process, not by mixing but by adding things. How do we spark off a dialogue between social sciences and hard science? How do we pitch this in? How do we propose it and put it forward in terms of our model? Of course, these efforts transcend geographic borders, and we must extend them to the European scale. That is why we wanted this symposium to be truly European in scale, as vouched by the programme and the participants. We will be holding four very important sessions. - We will talk about quantitative health risk assessment – how to assess health risks. That is the basic foundation of our work. What does this mean today in terms of uncertainty? - We will then have a session on the various kinds of uncertainty. We need to get to the heart of the matte. - We will look at uncertainty reducing tools (cost/benefit analysis and so on). - We will then have the conclusions and will make sure that everything is measured on the basis of what actually happens in the field, and that is where we shall have our workshops. I thank you. Conference Afsset - R 2S “Governing Uncertainty” 6 – 7 July 2009 - 3 - Olivier BORRAZ President, Risk and Society Network (R²S) Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is my pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the Risk and Society Network (R²S), and I would like to say a few words about the network and tell you exactly what we do, and then present the conference. R²S is a group whose purpose is to promote research in the social sciences on collective risks and crises. The association relies on research that has been carried out since 1984, first as part of a programme, then as part of a GIS (Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique) under the responsibility of Claude Gilbert and Isabelle Bourdeaux. R²S is a network of researchers and practitioners who have come together over the years and we hold seminars and conferences on different topics. However, we are more than just an association. We represent a relatively original approach in the study of collective risks which was presented in a summary report which came out in 2005 and which was then published in the Journal of Risk Research in 2007. Our approach is based on various fields of expertise – sociology of organisations, policy studies, studies of technology and science, as well as history, law, anthropology, management, geography and so on. It seeks to ensure that risk analysis captures the broader issues, such as for example, the production of scientific research, how public policy problems are defined, or the day-to-day operations for organisations when dealing with risks. This symposium is an opportunity to address a little-represented topic – uncertainty. Most of the time uncertainty boils down to a lack of scientific knowledge. However, we believe that that is too narrow a definition regarding health and occupational risks, and that we need a broader definition of uncertainty. That is why we would like to put forward the fact that risk is just one instrument that can be used to manage uncertainty, and that there are other ways of looking at the problem. For this to happen, social sciences need to extend and better define the concept of risk and uncertainty so that we can manage uncertainty more effectively. The symposium is based on these questions. We shall address the various aspects of this question on the first day and talk about the very foundations and uses, as well as the construct of the concept of uncertainty, in various fields. Later, during the plenary session and in the course of five simultaneous workshops, we will explore the ways in which social sciences can shed further light on occupational health and environmental health issues. This will be an opportunity to go above and beyond the usual expectations – that is, we will not work solely on public perceptions or on how the public debate should be organised; there are other approaches in terms of social sciences that can help us understand the issue and these will be presented in the workshops.