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

绝大多数关于风险、科学和民主之间关系的研究都局限于北美和西欧的发达工业国家。这个由科学、技术与社会（STS）项目资助的项目通过关注第三世界最大的民主国家印度来解决这一差距。本文考察了最近的三个争议，这些争议揭示了推动科学知识、专业知识、政策制定和实施之间相互作用的社会、经济和政治背景。这些争议是关于：a)印度的环境影响和危害分析过程（以决定在喜马拉雅地震地区修建一座大坝（Tehri）的案例为研究对象）；b)长期环境风险（如污染）的政策制定（通过德里的CNG争议案例进行探讨）；c)监管紧急风险（通过Bt棉花争议案例来解决）。该项目对三个部门（危害和影响评估过程；长期风险缓解；紧急风险）中每个部门的公众争议的所有公开数据来源进行内容分析。该项目解决了两个核心问题：a)发展中国家民主国家环境风险公共政策的过程和效力如何以及在多大程度上受到科学和政治“联合生产”的制约；b)印度或巴西等背景是否有一些独特之处，为STS理论在科学倡导和环境政策制定方面提供了新的见解。第一个问题对公共政策学者来说很重要，对他们来说，在工业化的第三世界环境政策的制定和实施中，科学与政治之间的相互作用是一个引人注目的新领域。第二个问题是引人注目的，因为几十年来，印度的政策制定和为此动员科学已经嵌入了一个复杂的、互动的、民主的过程，这与美国或西欧明显不同。除了这些对STS理论的学术贡献外，该项目还具有紧迫的政策和社会意义。关键的是，它是第一个系统的研究项目之一，帮助填补了关于科学专业知识在发展中国家民主国家的环境争议中所起作用的文献空白。这一差距之所以具有重大的社会意义，有两个重要原因。首先，在试图减轻快速工业化对环境的影响时，这些国家的政府往往根据专家咨询小组的建议采取行动，而专家咨询小组又往往从发达世界现有的环境政策制度中进行选择。学者或政策制定者并没有完全掌握这些结果的社会后果。其次，由于对此类监管机构的效力缺乏反思意识，特别是对将基于科学的专家判断策略嫁接到复杂的政治文化和社会经济现实中的局限性缺乏反思意识，这些国家解决其公民面临的环境风险或履行其全球环境义务的能力可以说是减弱了。

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.