Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Fischer is a senior research scholar at the Albrecht-Daniel-Thaer Institute of the Humboldt University in Berlin and a research fellow in politics at Kassel University.

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"An impressive, interesting, and multifaceted work. Fischer provides the reader with a wide and fascinating range of theoretical and policy-oriented materials, weaves in real life problems of public participation (or lack thereof) from around the world, and effectively brings together important concerns."--Alan Mandell, State University of New York, Empire State College

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Citizens, Experts, and the Environment

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................................................ixPART I Citizens and Experts in the Risk Society.......................................................................................11. Democratic Prospects in an Age of Expertise Confronting the Technocratic Challenge...............................................52. Professional Knowledge and Citizen Participation Rethinking Expertise............................................................293. Environmental Crisis and the Technocratic Challenge Expertise in the Risk Society................................................474. The Return of the Particular Scientific Inquiry and Local Knowledge in Postpositivist Perspective.................................68PART II Environmental Politics in the Public Sphere Technical versus Cultural Rationality............................................875. Science and Politics in Environmental Regulation The Politicization of Expertise..................................................896. Confronting Experts in the Public Sphere The Environmental Movement as Cultural Politics.........................................1097. Not in My Backyard Risk Assessment and the Politics of Cultural Rationality......................................................124PART III Local Knowledge and Participatory Inquiry Methodological Practices for Political Empowerment................................1438. Citizens as Local Experts Popular Epidemiology and Participatory Resource Mapping................................................1479. Community Inquiry and Local Knowledge The Political and Methodological Foundations of Participatory Research.....................17010. Ordinary Local Knowledge From Potato Farming to Environmental Protection.........................................................193PART IV Discursive Institutions and Policy Epistemics.................................................................................21911. Discursive Institutions for Environmental Policy Making Participatory Inquiry as Civic Discovery.................................22112. The Environments of Argument Deliberative Practices and Policy Epistemics........................................................242Appendixes............................................................................................................................263Notes.................................................................................................................................279References............................................................................................................................299Index.................................................................................................................................329

Chapter One

Confronting the Technocratic Challenge

Much of the history of ... progress in the Twentieth Century can be described in terms of the transfer of wider and wider areas of public policy from politics to expertise.-Harvey Brooks

The language and iconography of democracy dominates all the politics of our time, but political power is no less elitist for all that. So too the technocracy continues to respect the formal surface of democratic politics; it is another, and this time extraordinarily potent means of subverting democracy from within its own ideals and institutions. It is a citadel of expertise dominating the high ground of urban-industrial society....-Theodore Roszak

Everywhere in the world, democratic institutions are gaining new adherents, with American democracy widely seen as the model to emulate. In the flush of such post-Cold War enthusiasm, however, the fact that U.S.-style democracy has been experiencing its own troubles has too often been overlooked. To be sure, there have been no shortages of analyses of such problems: Why do so many Americans show such little interest in voting? Why do they hold their political institutions in such low esteem (Dionne 1991; Barber 1984)? Why has the level of public discourse devolved to that of simplistic television commercials (Bennett 1992)? And so on. Following in this line of inquiry, this work seeks to take up a critical aspect of the question that has received far too little systematic attention; namely, how can citizens participate in an age dominated by complex technologies and expert decisions (Fischer 1990)? Indeed, no other aspect of the contemporary "democracy question" can be more important.

The basic question I pose here is scarcely new. In the 1920s, John Dewey (1927) forcefully raised it in his book The Public and Its Problems. Engaging the challenge to democratic governance in the emerging twentieth-century industrial society, Dewey asked how a mass public could deal with the increasingly complex nature of the problems presented by a highly differentiated, technologically driven society. How could citizens participate in political decision making so obviously dependent on the knowledge of experts?

Indeed, Dewey identified a paradox. As the importance of the citizen grew in the political realm-thanks to the expansion of basic rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-the phenomenon was paralleled by the growth in power of large corporate and governmental organizations directed by managerial and technical expertise. Thus in just that period in which the political influence of the citizenry was taking shape, it was undercut by the rise of bureaucratic organization and technical expertise.

Large-scale industrial society transformed the very nature of everyday life. No longer did most people provide their own necessities-grow their own food, supply their own means of transportation, build their own dwellings, and so on. In industrial society all these basic goods and services are mass-produced and marketed through large, highly interdependent, impersonal structures and functions ever-increasingly dependent on expert systems. Given these features of industrial society, in particular the central role of expertise, Dewey saw little future prospect of well-integrated political communities organized around a knowledgeable citizenry. Under these new social arrangements, individual citizens could no longer easily comprehend the processes through which their daily needs were satisfied. As a consequence, they could no longer be expected to easily determine their own interests. Such a situation, he worried, could lead large numbers of citizens to embrace simplistic or false ideas. In their search for social reassurance, such citizens could easily fall victim to ideas antithetical to democracy, fascism and communism being the primary twentieth-century examples.

How is it possible to overcome the challenge posed by this unprecedented level of social and technical complexity? The answer for Dewey was a division of labor between citizens and experts. On the technical front, experts would analytically identify basic social needs and problems. On the political front, citizens could set a democratic agenda for pursuing these needs and troubles. To integrate the two processes, Dewey called for an improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. Indeed, in his view, the need for such improvements was...