THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE IN CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND POLITICS

Andrew Jordan and Timothy O'Riordan

This chapter outlines the history of the Precautionary Principle and discusses its current status in national and international environmental policies. We need to know about the genesis of the principle before considering how to improve its application in the future. To this end, we open this chapter by discussing the broad meaning of the Precautionary Principle as it has emerged in the last twenty years. We discuss the origins of the principle in the environmental policy of the former West Germany. We go on to outline seven "core" elements of precautionary thinking and the extent to which they find expression in contemporary environmental policy. Finally, we begin the process of considering how to improve existing tools of decision making to incorporate precautionary thinking. Paradoxically, we conclude that the application of precaution will remain politically potent so long as it continues to be tantalizingly ill-defined and imperfectly translatable into codes of conduct, while capturing the emotions of misgiving and guilt. Indeed, as we move into an era of greater scientific engagement with various political interests over the application of precautionary measures in particular decision-making situations, and when futures have to be selected rather than decreed, so the Precautionary Principle will become part of the mainstream and the more participatory politics of the transition to sustainability.

DEFINING THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE

The modern environmental movement proceeds by capturing ideas and transforming them into principles, guidelines, and points of leverage. Sustainability is one such idea, now being reinterpreted and implemented in the aftermath of the 1992 Rio Conference (for reviews see O'Riordan, Jordan and Voisey, 1998; O'Riordan and Voisey, 1998). So too is the Precautionary Principle being reinterpreted and implemented. Like sustainability, it is neither a well-defined nor a stable concept. Rather, it has become the repository for a jumble of adventurous beliefs that challenge the status quo of political power, ideology, and environmental rights. Neither concept has much coherence other than it is captured by the spirit that is challenging the authority of science, the hegemony of cost-benefit analysis, the powerlessness of victims of environmental abuse, and the unimplemented ethics of intrinsic natural rights and intergenerational equity. It is because the mood of the times needs an organizing idea that the Precautionary Principle is getting attention.

To stop the sustainability concept from becoming completely meaningless, Norton (1992, 98) calls for the following:

a set of principles, derivable from a core idea of sustainability, but sufficiently specific to provide significant guidance in day to day decisions and in policy choices affecting the environment.

Precaution is one such principle, for it provides an intuitively simple approach to ensuring that human intervention in environmental systems is made less damaging. Admittedly, precaution lacks a specific definition. As yet, it cannot prescribe specific actions or solve the kind of moral, ethical, and economic dilemmas that are part and parcel of the modern environmental condition. Nonetheless, the Precautionary Principle has much efficacy because it captures an underlying misgiving over the growing technicalities of environmental management at the expense of ethics and open dialogue; of environmental rights in the face of vulnerability; and of the manipulation of cost-benefit analysis by powerful vested interests supporting development.

So what kind of practical steps does the Precautionary Principle require decision makers to take? To date, precaution provides few, if any, operable guidelines for policy makers nor does it constitute a rigorous analytical schema. Yet, it is accepted by many national governments and supranational entities such as the United Nations (U.N.) and the European Union (EU), for example, as a guiding principle of policy making. It is found in the climate convention and the Rio Declaration (Cameron, 1994). There is little doubt that for the big global issues of climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss, the Precautionary Principle carries much greater legal (and by extension political) weight than it does in day-to-day local environmental issues. What remains desperately unclear is how this high-level interpretation of precaution can be translated to the areas of pollution control, risk management, and waste minimization and assimilation, especially where trans-border policies are...