Thursday 13th February - Saturday 15th February 2003
Copenhagen, Denmark

Session 10: Politics, Ethics and Risk

Virginie Maris
The Deficiency of Insurance Schemes to Deal with Environmental Risk: the Case of Oil Spills
Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

On November 19th, 2002, an oil tanker shipping 17,000 tons of heavy oil was towed off the Atlantic coast of Spain where it broke up and sank. Whatever the impact of this accident on the coast, the ocean will be widely and durably affected by the toxicity of the oil. Oceans are not private goods, instead they are considered to be common goods that have the particular characteristic of being shared internationally. When a common good is damaged, one should address the question of damage distribution and ask if this distribution is equitable. This is what we are addressing in this paper, through the case study of risk pooling schemes implemented to deal with environmental risks such as oil spills.
Firstly, we will see how the present state of our society is characterised by an increase in the perception and importance of the risks that threaten it - notably through environmental risks - and we will question decision theory within the context of uncertainty.
Secondly, we will see how a risk pooling strategy can be an optimal strategy in this context, the importance of public intervention in this sector and the international characteristics of the risks linked to shipping oil.
Thirdly, three critics will be presented relative to this strategy, highlighting problems that arise in terms of excess negative externalities, damage quantification and dilution of responsibilities.
We conclude by offering three measures that may increase the prevention of these accidents, warranting better environmental protection and a fairer distribution of risk.

Download Conference Paper -

Mary Richardson
Ethical and Equity Issues in the Regulation of Genetically Modified Trees in Canada
Centre for Global and Social Analysis, Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada

One of the reasons often given in support of genetic modification of trees is that it can reduce pressures on natural forests. It is claimed that genetic modification could increase fibre production and quality and reduce wood costs, while providing environmental benefits. This reasoning raises a number of ethical and equity questions about the goals of genetic modification, the policy context in which it is practiced, and how its environmental safety is assessed. This paper focuses on one such issue, environmental safety assessment, as it arises in the Canadian forestry context. It is particularly difficult to assess the environmental safety of genetically modified trees in Canada, because they are likely to be used in plantation forestry, an area in which Canada has limited experience and has done little research. Furthermore, the safety assessment process relies on the concepts of “familiarity” and “substantial equivalence,” which have been criticized as being unclear and unworkable. An ethical analysis of the safety assessment process is conducted to determine whether it takes into account overall effects of proposed genetic modifications, both beneficial and harmful, under conditions of scientific uncertainty. Equally important is whether the process considers the distribution of any potential harms and whether they fall disproportionately heavily on certain populations or geographic areas. The paper concludes that assessments should take into account the likelihood that genetically modified trees will produce predicted benefits as well as avoiding unacceptable risks; that socio-economic criteria should be involved in the assessment; and that provision should be made for the participation of the public in regulatory decision making for specific genetic modifications of specific tree species.

Peter Robbins& Elisa Pieri
GM Scientists and the Politics of the Risk Society
Institute of Water and Environment, Cranfield University, Silsoe, Bedford United Kingdom & Reading University, United Kingdom

Beck suggests that modern societies are increasingly becoming risk societies, where authority can no longer be taken for granted. People make risk decisions reflexively based on their own biographical profiles, rather than by relying on institutional supports to ensure safety. Governments, biotech companies, and GM scientists respond to the crises of authority by launching public debates and providing information. This paper is based on in-depth interviews with 18 GM scientists as part of an ESRC project on scientific discoursal strategies. Our research suggests that GM scientists construct publics in several different, and sometimes contradictory, ways. The scientific construction of individuals who are generally in favour, is that they make a rational choice for GM. They are viewed as ‘balanced’, ‘rational’, ‘informed’, ‘mature’, and have a general trust in science and the market to deliver food safety. They believe that the ‘scientific facts’ merit support for the technology. There tends to be no critical reflection, in this construction, upon the role of bounded rationality due to imperfect or contradictory information, or of the implications of trust erosion. On the other hand, individuals generally against, in the scientist construction, tend to be led by ‘emotion’ rather than logic, ‘anti-scientific’ bias, ‘lack of information’, ‘irrationality’, ‘phobias’, and ‘immaturity’. For many scientists, since they ascribe to a rational choice model of risk decision-making, problems of dissent are solved through the provision of more information, but this does not engage with the issue of trust breakdown, nor of risk society politics more generally.

Achim Schlueter
Public Perceptions, Technology and the Distribution of Environmental Risks: Views from a Producer Town
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

This paper explores the relationship between public perceptions of environmental risks and technological changes, which have taken place over the last ten to twenty years in the chemical and petrochemical industry. It emerges out of a comparative ethnographic study looking at two ‘producer’ towns, Grangemouth in Scotland –known mainly for its BP petrochemical complex – and Ludwigshafen in Germany – the hometown of BASF. This paper focuses on the Scottish part of the study and explores how people living close to the industry construe technological change and how far they think it has altered their exposure to environmental risks. Although, in abstract terms a positive role in solving today’s problems may be attributed to technology, in the case of the petrochemical industry, technological change is largely perceived as augmenting the environmental burden on the community. From the perspective of the community, the environmental risks associated with technological change are predominantly framed within a distributive context. Technological change has led to the redistribution of associated costs and benefits. Local residents no longer reap the economic benefits which had, in the past, largely offset proximity to polluting and dangerous industry, but retain the problems associated with this environmental burden, thus altering the formerly accepted informal contract between residents and company.
Technological changes within the existing petrochemical industry regarded with hostility are compared with other modern technologies now coming into the town. For example, Biotechnology is not associated with any negative distributive consequences for this community, but, for others, might represent the ‘real’ environmental threat of today’s changing technology.

Download Conference Paper -