Science, Democracy and Environmental Policy in Developing Countries: The Case of India

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

The vast majority of research on the interface of risk, science, and democracy has been limited to the advanced industrial nations of North American and Western Europe. This project funded by the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program addresses this gap by focusing on India, the largest democracy in the third world. Three recent controversies are examined that cast light on the social, economic and political contexts that drive the interactions between scientific knowledge, expertise, policy making, and implementation. These controversies are about: a) the processes of environmental impact and hazard analysis in India (studied with the case of the decision about siting a large dam (Tehri) in a seismic Himalayan region); b) policy making on chronic environmental risks such as pollution (approached through the case of the CNG controversy in Delhi); and c) regulating emergent risks (addressed via the case of Bt Cotton controversy). The project undertakes a content analysis of all publicly available data sources on public controversies in each of the three sectors (hazards and impact assessment processes; chronic risk mitigation; and emergent risks). The project addresses two central questions: a) how, and to what extent, is the process and efficacy of public policy on environmental risks in developing country democracies constrained by the "co-production" of science and politics; and b) whether there is something distinctive about contexts such as India or Brazil that offers new insights for STS theory on science advocacy and environmental policy making. The first question is important to scholars of public policy, for whom learning about the interactions between science and politics in the making and implementation of environmental policy in industrializing third world contexts, is a compelling new frontier. The second question is compelling because the sheer fact that policy making, and mobilizing science for it, have, for several decades in India, been embedded in a complex interactive, democratic process that is distinctively different from USA or Western Europe. In addition to these academic and scholarly contributions to STS theory, the project has pressing policy and societal implications. Critically, it is one of the first systematic research projects to help plug the gap in the literature on the role played by scientific expertise in environmental controversies in democracies in the developing world. There are two important reasons that this gap is socially significant. First, while attempting to mitigate the environmental impacts of rapid industrialization, governments in these countries often act upon the advice of expert advisory teams, who, in turn, often select from existing environmental policy regimes in the developed world. The societal consequences of such outcomes are not fully grasped by scholars or policy makers. Second, as a result of a lack of reflective awareness about the efficacy of such regulatory institutions, and especially, of the limits of grafting science based expert judgment strategies onto complex political cultures and socio-economic realities, the ability of such countries to address the environmental risks posed to their citizens, or to meet their global environmental obligations, is arguably diminished.