Risk Government: Putting Industries Back in the Analysis of Science-based Regulatory Tools - I

Abstract

Public policies governing economic activities involving health and environmental risks bear a major contradiction. They are supposed to protect human health and the environment without hindering economic development. This panel seeks to analyze the production of these policies “from below”. It focuses on the development and implementation of science-based regulatory tools aiming at managing these risks. The panel considers that regulatory tools are both technical and social devices, and that they convey a certain representation of the world and the problems deemed important to deal with. It builds on STS scholarship on expertise, and aims to extend it, in particular by examining the relationships between the making of expert advice and the construction of markets. Far from being mere instruments of constraint, regulatory tools may constitute a resource for industries to compete against each other and shape new markets. Thus, the panel seeks to highlight the struggles that health and environmental regulations generate within industries, and how industries participate in their construction and use. The panel is especially interested in two sets of analytical questions:

1° What is the career of regulatory instruments, the logic of their development, their links with certain scientific and regulatory communities, their use and circulation in different national and transnational spaces?

2° What is the role economic actors in the construction of regulatory instruments? How do they use them? What are the effects of these instruments in terms of market transformation and innovation?

Chair

• Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris

Discussant

• Barbara Allen, Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus

Individual Presentations

• Becoming a Legitimate Lobby: How the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Has Handled Representatives from the Chemical Industry, 1971-1982 - Valentin Thomas, INRA - IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine

• Industry Quiet Power: Shaping WHO/FAO Food Additives and Contaminants Expert Committees' Work in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s - Nathalie Jas, French National Institute for Agronomical Research (INRA)

• Negotiating Information Visibility and Consumer Ignorance: The Digital Disclosure of GM Food in the US - Bastien Soutjis, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès - LISST-CERS

Session Organizers

• Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris

• Valentin Thomas, INRA - IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine