Toward intelligent, democratic steering of chemical technologies: Evaluating industrial chlorine chemistry as environmental trial and error.

详细信息   

• 作者：Howard ; Jeffrey L.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2004
• 导师：Woodhouse, Edward
• 毕业院校：Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• 专业：Political Science, General.;Environmental Sciences.
• ISBN：0496897020
• CBH：3157092
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：14375788
• Pages：290

文摘

Extending social science scholarship on democratic steering of technology, the dissertation examines a long-running international controversy over industrial chlorine chemistry. Activist NGOs, the International Joint Commission, and others operating in a paradigm based on the precautionary principle argue that the basic environmental properties of chlorinated organic chemicals and the leading role these chemicals play in major environmental problems such as ozone depletion and endocrine disruption indict chlorine itself as an important root of environmental dysfunction. Meanwhile, chemical industry representatives and conservative commentators operating in a risk paradigm counter that abandoning chlorine chemistry would produce economic and social calamity and that focusing on chlorine itself rather than on specific chlorinated chemicals would be scientifically illegitimate. The dissertation draws on several elements of the Lindblom tradition and on concepts in Science and Technology Studies to theorize the political structure and broader political significance of the controversy. Using an incrementalist decision strategy, Intelligent Trial and Error (ITE), as an analytical lens, the dissertation demonstrates that chlorine chemistry is an inherently political undertaking; and it proposes a normative framework for interrogating and reframing chemical regulation---and chemical design---in line with democratic decision theory. In the process, it pays particular attention to the latent political dimensions of chlorine-related analyses conducted by scientists and engineers in Industrial Ecology, an emerging interdisciplinary field representing one of the leading practical manifestations of Ecological Modernization theory. The dissertation addresses three principal questions: First, what are the relative merits of the risk- and precaution-based stances on chlorine as viewed through a normative lens based on ITE theory? Second, how can ITE theory better address the reality that major technological systems already extensively developed and deeply entrenched can be the source of serious unforeseen environmental damage and even constitute a threat to sustainability? Third, how do tacit political assumptions shape Industrial Ecology scholars' analyses of chlorine chemistry and the controversy, and what are the implications for the field's future role in steering industrial chemistry? The research was supported by a graduate fellowship awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.