{"title":"Codifying the Risk Assessment–Risk Management Framework","authors":"","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"to different degrees. By the early 1980s, the notion of risk encapsulated a first design, according to which the agency produces decisions that are adjusted to the level of risk, determined by toxicological and statistical analysis and concurring policy assumptions about the nature of these risks. This design was embodied by cancer risk assessment methods. It was advanced by a fringe of the agency’s scientists and adopted by a couple of its programs. It materialized in guidelines and improved communication between scientists, who were calculating the risks and estimating the hazards, and the various other actors involved in writing rules and standardseconomists, policy analysts, lawyers, or office chiefs. Another design, a commensurative one, aimed at comprehensively reviewing agency activities against risk, cost, and benefit indicators, with a view to taking control over the agenda of the agency’s offices in order to produce a more controlled and integrated image of what the agency was addressing. One design responded to industry judicial challenges against the ban of its chemicals, using the uncertainty surrounding carcinogenesis; the other tried to limit controversies stemming from the application of various risk criteria by separate regulatory offices to similar chemical conditions. At the end of the 1980s, the risk assessment guidelines developed by the EPA— as well as other agencies— sparked more controversy. They displaced the legitimacy problem of the agency. It was no longer an issue of whether the agency had the authority to ban chemicals, but whether its mode of reasoning and making decisions about chemicals was right. For the chemical industry, these guidelines embodied an overly conservative and stringent regulatory philosophy of risk elimination, producing many false positives, and the action on cancer and chemicals was misguided. The chemical 4 Codifying the Risk Assessment– Risk Management Framework","PeriodicalId":151441,"journal":{"name":"The Science of Bureaucracy","volume":"372 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115901598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Rise and Fall of Comparative Risk Assessment","authors":"Bill Reilly, T. Davies","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"sent what the agency knows and what it does effectively. There are different ways of formalizing its generic object, the kinds of knowledge it uses to make its decisions, and how it manages to forge decisions on highly disputed issues. These designs vary according to the political configuration in which the agency is caught— the networks of supporters or adversaries that form around environmental issues and its action on these uncertain issues, and the inevitable controversies that ensue. The ambition to systematically measure the risks, costs, and benefits associated with decision projects lasted for most of the 1980s, despite some doubts as to the importance that William Ruckelshaus’s successor, Lee Thomas, would grant to this technology, particularly after the departure of Alvin Alm, the deputy administrator who championed costbenefit analysis and instilled the motivation in the agency to use that kind of information. At the end of the 1980s, in a new configuration marked by renewed controversies over the EPA’s priorities— stemming from its treatment of the discovery of supposed widespread risks from exposure to the gas radon and the pesticide alar, pressures on its budget in an aggressive Republican administration, and a changing national environmental agenda— the commensurative design assumed greater importance. During the term of Thomas (1985– 1989), and even more so during the stint of Bill Reilly (1989– 1993), efforts were made to create new knowledge representations and technologies to link risk assessors of various program or regional offices, so as to extinguish the uncertainty caused by these offices’ nebulous and variegated ways of deciding which risk matters, and closing subsequent controversies concerning the EPA’s inability to focus on the right subject. This mainly 8 The Rise and Fall of Comparative Risk Assessment","PeriodicalId":151441,"journal":{"name":"The Science of Bureaucracy","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126721318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scientization and the Reform of the Risk Assessment–Risk Management Framework","authors":"","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":151441,"journal":{"name":"The Science of Bureaucracy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130376929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Risk Sciences: Expertise for Decision-Making and Dispute","authors":"","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"dominant paradigm of systems analysis, alongside “costbenefit analysis, technology assessment, social forecasting and the like” (Hoos 1979, 192). From the moment it first took shape, risk assessment was considered to be a symptom of the emergence of “new forms of technology management, the most visible of which are detailed analyses of the anticipated impact of proposed developments” (Fischhoff 1977). Economic costbenefit analysis, general systems analysis, operations research, decisiontheory way of thought, and risk assessment all are “attempts at policy science” (Wynne 1975, 118). They comprise a “family of techniques ... conceived as ways of improving decisionmaking by broadening the role of logic and empirical inquiry” (Tribe 1972, 75). Rip (1986) later labeled this set of sciences “strategic” sciences, to convey the fact that they shared a similar interest in aiding decisionmaking. By shaping and embracing the quantitative assessment of health risks or the comparative economic analysis of their reduction, the EPA has placed itself in the ambit of these sciences, and of this particular way of understanding the administration of the environment and health, as a way of making rational decisions. Sociologists and philosophers, very often critical of these policy sciences, tend to argue that they are representative of an expanding technoscientific or technocratic ideology. This narrative, however, obscures the contextual and historical constitution of these sciences and of their techniques. They were born in the context of public controversies surrounding technologies and their hazards, as well as policies for managing them. Risk research, it appears, is knowledge formed to respond to public controversies about environmental and health hazards, with a view toward solving them. 1 Risk Sciences: Expertise for DecisionMaking and Dispute","PeriodicalId":151441,"journal":{"name":"The Science of Bureaucracy","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114710023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Risk Management: The EPA as a Decision-Making System","authors":"","doi":"10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12248.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":151441,"journal":{"name":"The Science of Bureaucracy","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130729656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}