Responsibility in Uncertain Times: An Institutional Perspective on Precaution

Luigi Pellizzoni and Marja Ylönen
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Luigi Pellizzoni: Luigi Pellizzoni is associate professor of Sociology of the Environment at the University of Trieste, Italy. His research interests focus on risk, environment, technology and democracy. His publications include "The Myth of the Best Argument. Power, Deliberation and Reason," British Journal of Sociology 52 (1) (2001); "Uncertainty and Participatory Democracy," Environmental Values 12 (2) (2003); "Knowledge, Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Public Sphere," European Journal of Social Theory 6 (3) (2003); and "Responsibility and Environmental Governance," Environmental Politics 13 (3) (2004).
Marja Ylönen: Marja Ylönen is a junior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is finalizing her Ph.D. dissertation on crimes against the environment. Her publications include "Les crimes contre l'environnement en Finlande," in Les annales de la rescherche urbaine. Nro. 84/84 (1999); and "The Formation of a Power Relationship in an Environmental Conflict," in All Shades of Green. The Environmentalization of Finnish Society, edited by E. Konttinen et al. (1999).

Global Environmental Politics, 2008, vol. 8, issue 3, 51-73

Abstract: 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 people's 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. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2008
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