(Page 9 of 17) - EU Expansion, Scientific Debate, and Transatlantic Environmental Governance authored by Briggs, Chad.

local levels, and how environmental risks are often disproportionately imposed upon those
segments that cannot themselves access the policy process or contribute to the environmental
discourse formation. If the EU is creating a process whereby more legitimacy is to be based upon
reference to the external, supposedly objective advice of scientists, it is worth asking whether this
desire for perceived legitimacy may, like the US, result in increasing disunity in the
environmental issue agenda.

The experience of North America and Africa

Although Jasanoff wrote that these pressures to justify action by reference to an external,

objective truth given by science were stronger in the United States (1986, 1997), policies were
enacted in the US which helped to ensure that the processes of scientific research remained at
least moderately transparent in the political system. These policies, most notably the 1946
Administrative Procedures Act (APA), 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and
1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), have served to open debate in the
US and give policy access to many actors who otherwise would be unable to do so. Yet despite
the multiple layers of government, oversight, and the relatively strong role played by the courts
system in the US, extensive evidence exists of political manipulation of scientific evidence and
pressures to change scientific conclusions in government.

The ability of the US federal government to decrease reliance on the instrumentalist

vision, in favor of a more democratic and open dialogue, has met with mixed and often
disappointing results. American politics is rife with examples of citizens managing to stop
projects through the EIA process, or by legal standing granted to stakeholders by NEPA or
similar legislation, yet the darker side to this ability has been the NIMBY approach to refusing
any possible development that may create environmental disturbances. Since this creates
dislocations in project placement, those areas with less political and economic power are often
the ones burdened with potentially risky environmental issues. This process, now more widely
recognized under the rubric of environmental justice, should not only be of great concern in the
US but to the EU as well.

Centralization of decision-making, often done on the basis of instrumental legitimation,

also has the effect of stifling dissent and often hurting the quality of scientific research used
under its auspices. The most recent of these charges was leveled by the Union of Concerned
Scientists against the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), who charged that a recent survey
of USFWS scientists claimed that political pressure was brought to bear against making
endangered species listings in a substantial percentage of cases (UCS 2005). Other examples are
frequently cited by the legal whistleblower’s group Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility (PEER), whose white papers and related work by Wilkinson (1998) describe a
federal structure that constantly struggles with both overt and unseen pressures to change the
nature of scientific findings. It should be noted that such pressures always exist in a political
setting, but of the different types of bias described by Shrader-Frechette and McCoy (1993) and
frequently found in scientific studies, deliberately changing or suppressing research findings is
the most severe and problematic form of bias. Similar processes of scientific data manipulation
and misrepresentation have been documented by Hutchings et al. (1997) for Canadian fisheries
policy.