Luigi Pellizzoni

Responsibility and Environmental Governance

In the debate on governance the concept of responsibility is frequently invoked but remains underdeveloped. This article aims at showing its analytical relevance as a means of interpreting ongoing changes in policy approaches and for evaluating their ability to cope with environmental challenges. Four dimensions of responsibility are singled out: care, liability, accountability and responsiveness. The caring state has been overtaken, to a remarkable extent, by new arrangements centred on the expansion of liability and above all accountability, while responsiveness remains a rather neglected aspect. Such neglect represents a major reason for the debatable results of governance as regards environmental protection and the recovery of institutional and corporate legitimacy and social trust.

Knowledge, Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Public Sphere:

Radical uncertainty plays a major role in the transformation of the social production of knowledge by questioning the centrality of scientific-technical expertise. Important changes are occurring in the discursive and social divisions characterizing the production and management of knowledge, but the ability of these innovations to cope with the challenge of radical uncertainty is doubtful. This seems to call for a reassessment of the forms of knowledge-related social cooperation, but the late modern public sphere does not provide favourable conditions for this endeavour. Is there a way out of this impasse? The answer is difficult and conditional on many factors. However, Deweys theory of inquiry and of the public sphere may offer a useful standpoint for further investigation.

The politics of facts: local environmental conflicts and expertise

The relationship between expertise and politics has traditionally been described in terms of science speaking truth to power. Science strengthens governmental effectiveness and depersonalises power, linking legitimacy to the credibility of observation. The environment is a case in point: what we know about it is largely associated with science. Today, however, expertise is both increasingly sought and thrown onto the terrain of conflict. The politicisation of expertise breaks with the alleged alternative between democratic and technocratic policymaking. The concept of expertise and its politicisation in the context of contentious politics is elaborated. Three case studies show that expertise affects the discursive opportunity structure of controversies, that the ‘politics of facts’ intermingles in subtle ways with the politics of interests and values, and that there is no linear sequence between politicisation and depoliticisation.

TRUST, RESPONSIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY* *The article aims to reflect on some aspects of environmental policy Starting from its declining social legitimacy I argue for the analytical importance of the concepts of trust and responsibility. Empirical insight is provided by some results of a European study on public views of food issues.

ABSTRACT The article argues that the crisis of legitimacy of environmental policy is closely connected with its declining effectiveness and efficiency in front of the growing saliency of uncertainty. Trust and responsibility are relevant analytical dimensions for addressing this issue. Contrary to the former, the latter has been poorly explored in its applications to policy issues. To this purpose a typology is presented, which helps to understand the evolutionary logic and current weakness of environmental policy. Theoretical reflection is supported by a study on public views of food safety. Trust and responsibility confirm their relevance. Opinions about the different actors involved in the food chain and the regulatory and control systems are contradictory, while attempts to provide trust with solid grounds are confronted with attitudes of mistrust, suspicion and resignation. Overall, citizens’ concerns remain largely unanswered. This indicates that institutional and corporate unresponsiveness represents a major issue, negatively affecting the social legitimation of food policy.

Risk and Responsibility in a Manufactured World

Recent criticisms of traditional understandings of risk, responsibility and the division of labour between science and politics build on the idea of the co-produced character of the natural and social orders, making a case for less ambitious and more inclusive policy processes, where questions of values and goals may be addressed together with questions of facts and means, causal liabilities and principled responsibilities. Within the neo-liberal political economy, however, the contingency of the world is depicted as a source of unprecedented opportunities for human craftsmanship, rather than of possibly unmanageable surprises. Gene technologies offer a vantage point for reflecting on the consequences of the drift from discovery to invention as a master frame in the appraisal of human intermingling with the world. Biotech patenting regulations carve out a sovereign agency which, by crafting nature, also crafts the distinction between the manufactured and non-manufactured world. Difficulties in ascribing responsibility stem as a consequence. It is likely that politics and economy can be democratized and responsibilities rearranged not by ‘democratizing’ knowledge production, but rather the reverse.

Responsibility in Uncertain Times: An Institutional Perspective on Precaution

Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the related social positions and responsibilities. The way uncertainty and its role in the policy process are understood is crucial. For some precaution is a flawed concept, to be accommodated to the current expert-based cooperative scheme. For others it is a major innovation requiring a rearrangement of the latter. Precautionary policies may evolve in different directions. They may either strengthen the role of means-ends rationality, increasing peoples dependence on expert knowledge and shrinking the opportunity and scope of public debate or, on the contrary, enhance the role of value-commitments, leading to a decline in the legitimacy of established hierarchies and an intensification of intractable controversies.

In search of community.Political consumerism, governmentality and immunization

Political consumerism is consumer choice beyond self-interest. Allegedly blurring the public–private threshold and overcoming the limits of traditional politics, it epitomizes in many respects late modern governance. Reflecting on the meaning and scope of consumer political agency, scholarship has engaged with the governmentality perspective. Important studies have ensued, together with irresolvable disputes and a neglect of the relationship that consumers establish with their objects of concern. To address this question, and drawing on the philosophical contributions of Roberto Esposito, the article elaborates on the notion of immunization. Being immune means having nothing in common with others, no obligations towards them. This analytical register may significantly broaden our understanding of current changes in political agency. A review of three main issues (responsibility-taking, downshifting, and the public) shows that the paradox of political consumerism – like other forms of governance that replace political obligations with private autonomies – is that it endeavours to (re)establish or strengthen the communal ties while at the same time using immunization as its fundamental resource.

Environmental Knowledge and Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy is spreading in environment-related policy-making as a reply to the legitimacy crisis of traditional policy processes; a crisis where the saliency of uncertainty plays a major role, and which brings into question the dominant division of labor between science, politics, business and society at large. In this chapter the basic understandings, features and limits of public deliberation as applied to environmental issues are discussed. ‘Proper’ deliberations are difficult, there are systematic mismatches in the way uncertainty is addressed, and the traditional expert-layperson divide is usually reproduced within deliberative arenas. Innovative perspectives have been proposed, yet they downplay what dismantling the institutionalized separation between production and uses of knowledge may imply, possibly decreasing public scrutiny and undermining ‘weaker’ interests and insights. The potentialities of deliberative democracy are likely to flourish not only as a result of procedural refinements, but of broader societal reforms.

Cosa significa partecipare

The article is devoted to a reassessment of the concept of participation, recently brought back to the fore by a variety of novel participatory experiences at public, corporate and civil society level. Such flourishing calls for keen analytical and evaluative tools. To this purpose a mapping of the concept is provided first. The dimensions of will and agency are applied to set the boundaries of participation, allowing to distinguish it from interaction and cooperation. Different levels of participation are also singled out, according to its decisional import. The internal articulation of the concept is subsequently addressed. Justifications of the usual distinction between political, social and economic participation are often debatable. A semantic space is singled out by elaborating on two conceptual oppositions: civil/political and public/private. The former prefers to power; the latter to salient thirdness. By combining these dimensions four basic types of participation are singled out. Actual processes may go through different stages, tracing a sort of «participatory circe». The current revival, however, mainly concerns «public» participation, as an attempt to move the threshold between private and public affairs. The challenge is to understand the extent to which this may represent an effective, unambiguous answer to the legitimacy crisis of institutions and the decline of social solidarity.

Revolution or passing fashion? Reassessing the precautionary principle

Precaution has been for years a controversial issue. Some regard it as a major regulatory innovation, others as an inherently flawed concept. Some consider it an approach still in its infancy, others believe it is a passing fashion. A narrow understanding of its relationship with knowledge and its distributional effects may explain why discussions on the US-EU divergence and on Europes own ambivalence about precaution fail to provide a consistent picture. This paper makes a case for a broader perspective: the issue of precaution is related to the social division of labour, namely the intimate connection between knowledge and power. The modern narrative, drawing a sharp divide between (science-based) production and use of knowledge, has faced growing public criticism. The controversy on precaution mixes up tradition and innovation in an ambiguous way, gaining special saliency in Europe vis-a-vis the elaboration of its social model. If tradition is increasingly in trouble, innovation has perils of its own.