Science and environmental policy: the role of nongovernmental organizations.

THIS PAPER ADDRESSES THE ROLE OF NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS, or NGOs, in the science-policy nexus. I shall draw on my 21 years of experience working for a nongovernmental organization, Environmental Defense, my earlier experience as a research scientist, and my recent experience as a professor, the latter two positions at large universities. I hope this quasi-anecdotal approach is informative, but in addition, it is a necessity because there have been relatively few academic studies of nongovernmental advocacy organizations.

I shall begin by considering a question arising from the opening section of this volume: Is the special objective role of science in the policy arena, presumed by many observers to have existed in an earlier political era, about to disappear into the dust bin of history, and if so, should we act to restore such a role?

My view is consistent with Daniel Kevles's paper: science in the current policy world has just as much to do with regulation of corporate activity and, to a lesser extent, people's lives, as it does with the means to wage war or develop consumer goods like computer games. This development dates to the revolution in environmental regulation in the 1970s, as well as the expansion of regulatory attention to foods, drugs, and health care. If science formerly was viewed as a servant of people's wants and needs, science-based decision making now also functions as something of a master over people and companies by dictating restrictions. So it was inevitable in a free society, organized in part along the lines of special interests, some empowered by large financial resources, that a melee should ensue. And that is what we have today on many issues, particularly global warming, aided and abetted by a related phenomenon: government that is often disingenuous.

I argue that there is no point trying to put the genie back in the bottle, no point trying to regain an imagined status of science operating in splendid objectivity and isolation, rendering untainted judgments. It probably never was so, and I doubt it ever will be. Furthermore, it should become apparent from this paper that proposals to create a neat division between regulation and science, resembling Alvin Weinberg's earlier notion of a science court (Jasanoff, 1990), are tinged with elitism while satisfying neither side, and if they were proposed (and I have heard such rumblings) many scientists, including me, would be strongly opposed.

The relation of science to government has indeed worsened, and needs to be fixed, but whether or not the good old days ever existed, we should not aspire to return to them. To deal with current problems of the environment, science needs to be inclusive rather than exclusionary, as usually has been its tendency. We need to recognize that values and viewpoints are an inevitable part of scientific judgment in the zone where science interacts with government over many environmental problems, where systems are complex, uncertainty is endemic, and learning is …