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Why Public Participation in Risk Regulation? The Case of Authorizing GMO Products in the European Union

In recent years there has been renewed interest in the participation of lay people in regulatory procedures. The debate peaked in the 1980s with the anti-nuclear movements and again more recently as a reaction to the food scandals of the mid-1990s. In the wake of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis there has been a proliferation of European Community rules on the production, processing and retailing of food products, along with the multiplication of scientific committees in order to cope with increased regulatory demand. Parallel to the increase in regulation, a number of normative questions have been raised. One of the most frequently raised questions is what place, if any, should lay people and their opinions be given in the regulative process, especially in cases where policy decisions rely heavily on scientific expertise (Bulmer, 1998; Gottweis, 1999; Radaelli, 1999; Liberatore and Funtowicz, 2003). This issue is often put in terms of ‘democratizing risk’, the idea that lay people should have their say on what risks they are willing to take and on the regulatory procedures to reduce such risks. Moreover, some (Hunold and Young, 1998) have argued that issues of risk mitigation and distribution across the population should be subject to democratic accountability. Much has been written on the pros and cons of strengthening democratic participation in institutions of risk regulation, yet the recent debate highlights the need to differentiate between various aspects and forms of participatory strategy (Joss and Brownlea, 1999; Rowe and Frewer, 2000; Klinke and Renn, 2002; Bora and Hauseldorf, 2006; Hansen, 2006). This article contributes to this debate and argues that more clarity on the goals of participation can lead to a better assessment of such strategies. In the literature, the demand for democratization of risk regulation procedures often conflates two distinct, although correlated, claims: Science as Culture Vol. 16, No. 4, 377–395, December 2007