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Journal of Environmental Management 90 (2009) 1644–1654

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Journal of Environmental Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jenvman

Toward an epistemology of public participation

Stephen Healy*

School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 30 August 2005Received in revised form 13 March 2008Accepted 24 May 2008Available online 10 September 2008

Keywords:Public participationEpistemologyExpertiseLay knowledge

* Tel.: þ61 02 9385 1597; fax: þ61 02 9385 8003.E-mail address: s.healy@unsw.edu.au

0301-4797/$ – see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2008.05.020

a b s t r a c t

This article uses an analysis of the ‘knowledge politics’ of the Botany Community Participation andReview Committee (CPRC) to argue that the Habermasian ideals framing the CPRC are flawed. Haber-masian communicative ethics centre upon the notion that fair, free and open forms of debate andcommunication ensure that no one form of reasoning and/or knowledge dominates others, and socommonly frame attempts to facilitate public participation in technical decision-making. However, inpractice, Habermas’ advocacy of ‘the power of the better argument’ (1984) supports adversarial debateand favours conventionally validated (i.e. scientific) forms of knowledge over others. This article iden-tifies this departure from the vision underpinning communicative ethics with the routine deployment ofa flawed conception of knowledge. This view – that knowledge is representational in character (that is, ineffect, a ‘mirror’ onto the world) – marginalises lay contributions by rendering them of secondary status(i.e. that they are ‘values’); diminishes them by insisting that they take conventional ‘expert like’representational form; and supports ‘deficit model’ approaches (the belief that public antipathy resultsfrom knowledge ‘deficits’ resolvable by expert mediated enhancements in technical literacy). A non-representational epistemology is used to argue that effective participation must rather account for howknowledge is constructed by and through processes, including those of participation/deliberation, ratherthan existing autonomously of them. The implications of this emphasis on processes, rather than on thesources of and formal characteristics of knowledge, are examined both for public participation and forthe dynamics of late-modernity more generally.

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Toward an epistemology of public participation

‘‘Science is not about Truth but about Reliable Practices.RiskAssessment is basically a social contract, not a scientific one’’(Selinger, 1995: 1–8/9)‘‘.public experiential science (which is already active but whichmust be further organized), accepted as legitimate knowledge andauthorized to make decisions.would have to ask ‘‘How do we wishto live?’’ and.hold the answers up as the standard for scientificplans and consequences. Only by developing such a science ina controversial and controlled manner.could the voices of law,politics, and, not least, ordinary citizens and daily life develop theirown judgement.and democratically monitor and oppose thetechnocracy of threat’’ (Beck, 1995b, p. 16).

1 ‘‘[O]ur technical project manager went along to all the community membersand he lost them, he just went over their heads’’ (Orica site Manager, interview withBenn, S., Botany, 30 September 2004). See also the comments by the GeneralManager Technology and Environment of Orica in Section 3 and the URS Senior AirQuality Specialist in Section 3.1. Irwin (1995, 2001) and Irwin and Wynne (1996)

1. Introduction

The Community Participation and Review Committee (CPRC)was established to provide for ‘ongoing public participation andreview’ (ANZECC, 1996, p. 17) of the management and disposal of

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the hexachlorobenzene (HCB) waste stored by Orica, Botany. Itbrings the company Orica, other industry representatives, BotanyBay City Council, local residents and observers from academia,government and peak environment groups together to fulfil thisremit, a key focus of which is the identification of a technologicalsolution for the safe disposal of the wastes. This has involvedcomplex, protracted, and technically charged discussion and debateover the treatment of HCB wastes that Orica have historicallyapproached in deficit model terms. However, treating publicantipathy as primarily a function of technical ignorance1 disregardscommunity concerns with issues such as those of openness, trust,credibility and accountability, which in this case gained legitimacy,and even prominence, over time marking this case study out fromothers. This article mounts an analysis of these developments to

give further detail on the ‘deficit approach’ that corresponds to the ‘banking modelof learning’ described by Carson (in this volume). The rationale for this approach isthe idea that once the public understand the knowledge informing decisions theywill then support those decisions.

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address a long-standing lacuna regarding how tensions betweenlay and expert insights might be addressed in public participationexercises.

The existence and character of tensions and disconnectsbetween lay and expert knowledge, and ways of knowing, havebeen a significant feature of the SSK/STS literature (see e.g.: Irwin,1995, 2001; Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Irwin and Michael, 2003;Wynne, 2002), which has developed terms such as ‘situatedknowledge’ (Irwin, 2001, p. 96) to emphasise the situated andexperiential form of lay insights and others such as ‘citizen science’(Irwin, 1995), ‘civic epistemology’ (Wynne, 2003) and ‘lay episte-mology’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003) to denote the legitimacy andvalue of such insights. However, this literature is dominated byanalysis and critique and limited attention has, consequently, beenpaid to how these tensions and disconnects might be resolved inthe context of public participation. Particular features of the CPRCmake it a well-suited case study for this purpose.

In an analysis of a community in a situation comparable to thatin Botany Simmons (2003, p. 90)2 finds ‘‘the most widespreaddisposition observed in affected communities.where there isa conspicuous and obtrusive source of risk.combines.distrust,powerlessness, and vulnerability’’. Simmons (2003, p. 90) notesthat the four adaptive responses to risk identified by Giddens (1990,pp. 134–137) – pragmatic acceptance, sustained optimism, cynicalpessimism and radical engagement – ‘‘accord with the reportedresponses to the presence of hazardous sites’’ but that ‘‘theresponse of radical engagement is rarely found and usually shortlived’’. This claim is at odds, however, with the energetic and sus-tained commitment to critical, technical discussion and debate,displayed by CPRC community members that has, over time, notonly legitimated their concerns but also, arguably, significantlyaffected outcomes. For example, it is unlikely that the protractedprocess leading to the 2004 Independent Review Panel decision todestroy the wastes off-site (see below) would have been takenwithout lay mediated deconstruction of the technical underpin-nings to other, primarily Orica, perspectives on the future of thewastes. This relatively unusual example of ‘radically engaged’commitment therefore provides a specific opportunity to addressthe lacuna outlined above, with this analysis specifically focusedupon the facilitation of affirmative lay participation in similar,future exercises and the implications of this for late-modernitymore generally.

The sections below give some background to the CPRC and itsapproach to knowledge; describe the conceptual framework usedto provide a ‘post-representational’ reading of CPRC ‘knowledgepolitics’; present specific detail and some analysis of this ‘politics’;and, deepening this analysis, explores the broader implications ofthese insights. The empirical basis of this article includes: 5 years asparticipant/observer of the CPRC, and other related, meetings;primary material from these meetings including minutes andsundry reports; primary documents including the Geomelt Envi-ronmental Impact Statement; the Commission of Inquiry Report(Jensen-Lee, in this volume); the 2004 Independent Review Report;and interviews with key informants.

3 Geomelt involves passing an electrical current through a material to producea melt whose off-gases have to be captured and purified so as to leave behind an‘inert’ vitreous material (which in the case of HCB disposal was reported to besuitable for use as ’road base’). Never previously used for HCB disposal it had beenused for the in situ disposal of radioactive waste at the former nuclear testing rangeat Maralinga in outback Australia. This was curtailed after an unexplained explosionin one in situ pit that the operators believed to have been caused by discardedmunitions but whose unexplained nature was seized upon by resident CPRCmembers as a means to point to potential shortcomings with Geomelt.

1.1. Rationale for the CPRC

Attempts to establish a national high temperature incinerator todestroy Australia’s stockpile of intractable chemical wastes wereunsuccessful during the 1970s and 1980s (see McDonell, 1997) andled the Australian and New Zealand Environment and Conservation

2 Simmons (2003) discusses the ‘performance’ of safety at the Longfield chemicalplant in the UK detailing a ‘‘community liaison committee’’ (2003: 83) apparentlysimilar in structure and, explicit, function to the CPRC.

Council (ANZECC) to adopt the National Strategy for the Manage-ment of Scheduled Waste in 1994. This was supported by theScheduled Wastes Management Group, consisting of senior exec-utives of Commonwealth and State/Territory environmentalagencies and the National Advisory Body (NAB) that broughttogether a range of interested stakeholders to advise ANZECC onscheduled waste issues. As part of the development of a WasteManagement Plan (WMP) for HCB the NAB conducted a communityconsultation program involving initial meetings with key stake-holders (Botany Council, Orica (then ICI), and local communityorganisations) followed by a series of public forums during 1995and 1996 in order to finalise the HCB WMP. This was endorsed byANZECC in November 1996 and established the CPRC.

The ongoing history of the CPRC, and the HCB wastes whosemanagement the CPRC oversees, is complex, and this brief outlinecovers events central to the analysis of this article only. At theOctober 2000 CPRC meeting Orica announced that its chosentechnology for the destruction of the HCB wastes was Geomelt3, tobe implemented at its Botany site. This resulted in the (mandatory)preparation of a detailed Environmental Impact Statement (EIS),released for public comment in July 2001 and on which a Ministe-rial decision was expected by November 2001. However, as is notunusual in significant developments such as this, on November 5the Minister announced a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to examineOrica’s proposed facility (Jensen-Lee, in this volume), which in mid-2002 recommended to the Minister that the Facility should goahead. However, no ministerial decision was forthcoming until theMinister convened a 3 person Independent Review Panel (IRP) tofurther examine the proposal in late 2003. Their report, supportingGeomelt but at a remote location rather than at Orica’s Botany site,was submitted to the Minister in July 2004 and presented to theCPRC by the IRP in September 2004.

With the benefit of hindsight many of CPRC’s later problems areevident in the way the CPRC was initially constituted (see inparticular: HCB Consultation Panel, 1996). While given extensiveresponsibility:

‘.to receive, request and distribute information; consult thelocal community; participate in relevant processes; and reviewand advise EPANSW and ICI on relevant proposals, includingmonitoring and implementation of the management plan’(ANZECC, 1996, p. 17),4

‘the extent and source of funding [was].not.defined’ (HCBConsultation Panel, 1996, p. 30) and this remains a significantproblem. In general Orica has funded, and continues to fund, theCPRC (although Botany Council hosts the meetings and providesrefreshments). However, these matters, while fundamental to theoperation of the CPRC, are tangential to this article’s focus upon theCPRC’s ‘knowledge politics’.

The HCB Consultation Panel, whose 1996 report was the maininput into the form taken by the CPRC, saw ‘Relevant independentexperts’ as necessary to the CPRC (ANZECC, 1996, p. 17) and also put

4 The WMP (ANZECC, 1996) not only elaborates upon these responsibilities insome detail but further underlines ‘‘.this.is.for guidance only and should not beseen either as complete or as a means of restricting issues for consideration by theCommunity Participation and Review Committee’’ (21). The breadth of intendedresponsibility is further underlined by the HCB Consultation Panel (1996).

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great store by the need for ‘a strong, neutral, widely-respectedchair’ (1996, 29). These concerns both reflect ‘principle 10’, that:

‘‘we will: stimulate conciliatory and constructive exchange ofviews and genuinely attempt to address, without prejudice, themajor issues involved in the management plans’’;

of the ‘National protocol for community consultation on scheduledwastes’ (HCB Consultation Panel, 1996, p. 43–45), upon which thecommunity consultation program to finalise the HCB WMP, andwhich established the CPRC, was based. These recommendationsexemplify the Habermasian assumptions commonly framingparticipation exercises such as the CPRC. The notion that fair, free andopen forms of debate and communication ensure that no one form ofreasoning and/or knowledge dominates others (Habermas, 1984)amounts, in practice, to giving a representative range of stakeholdersa seat at the table and facilitating unhindered and open forms ofdiscussion and information exchange between them. Carson (in thisvolume) is sympathetic to these assumptions while Healy (2003b)further elaborates the critique of them advanced here.

A particular problem with such approaches is that many keyimpediments to inclusive, fair and balanced debate and discussion,such as trust deficits (see Lloyd-Smith this collection) and asym-metries of power and resources between stakeholder groupsremain unaddressed. From the Habermasian perspective it issimply assumed that these are dissipated by the facilitation ofopen, un-coerced forms of communication. Analogously prob-lematical is the approach taken to knowledge. While asymmetriesin knowledge are commonly recognized they tend to be regardedas resolvable by means of straightforward, education andcommunication exercises, designed to even up the gap betweenthose assumed to be knowledge ‘haves’ and those taken to beknowledge ‘have-nots’ (i.e. via the provision of ‘independentexperts’). The pervasiveness of this ‘deficit’ logic is underlined bythe widespread use of the term ‘information’, rather than knowl-edge, exemplified in the ANZECC (1996, p. 17) outline of CPRCresponsibilities above and in Lloyd-Smith’s (in this volume)discussion of the community information system (CIS). Ultimately,the failure to address impediments and approach taken toknowledge asymmetries commonly means that those enduringtrust and power deficits lose out, while those controlling infor-mation/knowledge resources benefit. However, in order to betterunderstand the grounds for these concerns it is first necessary toexplore some, taken-for-granted, fundamentals of Westernepistemology.

2. Representationalism, practice and knowledge/power

Mainstream Western epistemology conceives of knowledge interms of independent cognitive representations of the world, usuallycodified in the form of propositional statements (see: Tanesini, 1999Chapter 1 for a straightforward account). From this perspective the‘facts’ of natural science are considered unambiguous representa-tions of a non-human, material world, while knowledge in thehumanities and social sciences is analogously taken to represent‘context’. Variously understood, in terms of either representations ofan ‘internal’ human world (e.g. ‘preferences’, ‘values’, ‘interests’, etc.),or of a broader socio-cultural one (i.e. social structures such aseconomic class or patriarchy, socio-cultural constructs such as‘discourses’, or broader socio-cultural parameters such as ‘power’,etc.), ‘context’ is routinely viewed as a setting for ‘facts’. In thisrepresentationalist perspective autonomous knowing individualsare usually treated as the possessors, or site of residence, of thecognitive representations constituting knowledge, generating quiteproblematical understandings of knowledge generation, transferand flow. Irwin and Michael underline this in their description ofquestionnaire research as treating people ‘‘as a repository of

knowledge [t]hat is.cognitive containers [from] which one can.-extract golden nuggets of correct knowledge.putrid lumps ofincorrect knowledge, or detect the absence of any knowledge alto-gether’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 26).

The principal epistemological features of the CPRC, and similarexercises, follow logically from this representational perspective. Akey challenge is then to redress knowledge asymmetries, such asthe knowledge ‘deficits’ commonly identified with lay participants,via the facilitation of a transfer of representational information.However, after such ‘deficits’ are addressed lay stakeholders thentend to be primarily viewed as a source of contextual inputs (i.e.‘preferences’ or ‘values’), whose main function is to ensure a viable‘context’ (i.e. setting) for the ‘facts’, pre-determined by the requi-sitely technically qualified stakeholders. This subsidiary lay rolefollows directly from how the representational segregation of thematerial (‘fact’) from the cultural/symbolic realm (‘context’) istaken to accord with many further dichotomous categorisations(e.g. nature/culture, fact/value, subject/object, content/context,expert/lay, etc.), whose relationship is assumed to reflect theprivilege traditionally accorded ‘fact’ over ‘value’ (see: Latour(1993) for an influential account; and Healy (2003a,b, 2004a,b) forfurther exploration of these points). Lay participation is thussystematically diminished in a number of ways.

Lay stakeholders face an elemental problem in that theirinsights frequently transgress the representational model by notdistinguishing between ‘fact’ and ‘context’. Lay insights arecommonly situated and experiential, rather than generic andabstract, reflecting, for example, the way ‘factual’ specifics play outin terms of the particulars of place, time and broader circumstance(Irwin et al., 1999, p. 1318–1319). The quarterly CPRC meetings oftenfeatured exchanges in which Orica reassurances of safety werecountered by details of recent incidents involving unusual smells,flames and loud sounds (usually late at night) and, once, unex-plained wind-blown quantities of polythene sheeting adorningresidential back-yards adjacent to Orica. While such incidents mayhave been of limited consequence residents were motivated bypotentially far higher consequence historical incidents such as anevident chlorine leak one Christmas during the 1980s (ABC, 2002:see section 3). As a result while Orica tended to act as though the‘facts’ spoke for themselves locals were most particularly con-cerned with the ‘context’ of the ‘facts’ employed to reassure them.In particular they sought to certify the credibility of Orica’s ‘facts’ by,for example, ascertaining the validity of their source, thatarrangements were in place to ensure their veracity and so on.However, the representational perspective readily lends itself to thetrivialisation of such concerns by the simple expedient of flaggingthem anecdotal, subjective and/or value-laden. Such problems arecompounded by the, often institutionalised, insistence that layviews must be codified in a form analogous to the decontextual-ized, representationally encrypted form characteristic of expertknowledge in order to be credible.

The SSK/STS literature argues that the representationalperspective ‘‘removes scientific questions from their social andcultural context’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 27) and underlines animperative to open up ‘‘the operating assumptions of scientificinstitutions.to the same scrutiny as has.previously applied tomembers of the public’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 27–28). In thisregard Irwin and Michael argue that:

‘‘.lay people may not only possess knowledge, but haveknowledge of how they know: they are able to reflect upon whythey take on board some ‘scientific facts’ but not others; they arecompetent in accounting for why they prefer some sources ofknowledge (e.g. personal experience) over others; and they canjustify why they trust some expert authorities and are suspi-cious of others’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 28).

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This ‘‘process of ‘lay epistemology’’’ (2003: 28) is thus a crediblesource for opening ‘the operating assumptions of scientific insti-tutions.to.scrutiny’ because it:

‘‘.is not concerned with exercising formal criteria by which todetermine what is true and what is false. Rather, it is concernedwith the way that people are engaged in a complex of judge-ments about trustworthiness, credibility, usefulness, power –judgements which reflect, for example, social identity, practicalcircumstance, personal responsibility and communityautonomy’’ (2003: 28).

These insights thus suggest a further critical role for lay insightsin public participation, a role which, in effect, asks ‘‘‘‘How do wewish to live?’’ and.hold[s] the answers up as the standard forscientific plans and consequences.’’ (Beck, 1995b, p. 16). However, thisrole requires that lay insights are engaged in a fashion compli-mentary, rather than subsidiary, to that of conventional expertise,and necessitates further conceptual resources. In particular itrequires an epistemology granting lay insights a footing compa-rable, rather than secondary, to that of expert grounded ‘facts’ or‘content’. An epistemology of this form is described below.

2.1. Knowledge as practice & knowledge/power

‘‘Instead of serving as knowledge repositories, local peopleactively create forms of understanding as they negotiate theconditions of everyday life’’ (Irwin et al., 1999, p. 1322).‘‘Knowledge is established not only in relation to a field ofstatements but also of objects, instruments, practices, researchprograms, skills, social networks and institutions’’ (Rouse, 1994,p. 110)‘‘Power is only effective in enabling or constraining actionthrough dynamic alignments that bring action to bear uponanother. Knowing is likewise only informative through dynamicalignments that enable one thing (a statement, a model, a skilfulperformance, and so on) to be taken correctly to be aboutanother.’’ (Rouse, 1998, p. 450)

Lay knowledge, as discussed and illustrated above, is commonlyfocused by the practices comprising the ‘context’ of ‘factual’knowledge rather than by the constitutive statements these prac-tices generate or employ, and that passes as knowledge for repre-sentationalism. So for example, in Section 3, we will see howa leading resident CPRC member, disregards the emphasis of Oricaand others upon the detail of the content of the Geomelt EIS,instead raising doubts about its legitimacy on the grounds thatproject proponents were the source of this detail. Knowledgeunderstood this way, which is in terms of the many practices thatits generation, reproduction and application involve, rather thansimply in terms of the representations resulting from and inform-ing these practices, constitutes power. This knowledge/powernexus is examined below after a brief outline of the ramifications ofunderstanding knowledge in terms of practices.

The non-representational perspective provides a compellingalternative to representationalism that doesn’t deny cognitiverepresentations but instead of ‘‘.start[ing].thinking aboutknowledge from representations. They come last, rather than first,in the account’’ (Tanesini, 1999, p. 11). It offers a dynamic under-standing of knowledge that stresses the consequences of a complexof practices rather than the representational content of the state-ments informing or resulting from this complex. The representa-tional segregation of ‘fact’ from ‘value’ involves rendering thecomplex of practices generating the codified cognitive represen-tations that representationalism takes knowledge to be opaque(see: Tanesini, 1999; Rouse, 1987, 1994, 1996, 1998; Latour, 1999:ch. 2). ‘Facts’ purified of ‘context’ are achieved at the expense of

removing from view, and thus critical scrutiny, the commonly‘impure’ practices involved in generating them (until, as in the caseof the Geomelt EIS someone, in this case the above mentionedcommunity activist, points them out). Bringing this complex ofpractices back into the picture opens them to critical scrutiny and isthus a prerequisite for effective accountability. However, it must beunderlined that the term practices is not used simply in the sense ofregularised patterns of human activity but rather to describedynamic, situated, embodied, spatially and temporally extendedalignments of people, things and their many attributes andaccomplishments (matters such as skills, theories, interests, insti-tutions, social networks, texts, equipment and so on). Knowledge,in the non-representational view then, is constituted in, by andthrough complex heterogeneous fields of socio-material practicesshaped by interdependent human and material considerations.

This perspective resonates with recent work in anthropologythat clarifies the distinction between knowledge and information:

‘‘.information may be communicated, in propositional or semi-propositional form, from generation to generation. But infor-mation, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any moreknowledgeable through its accumulation. Our knowledgeabilityconsists, rather, in the capacity to situate such information, andunderstand its meaning, within the context of a direct percep-tual engagement with our environments’’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 21).

So Ingold is asserting that knowledge does not take the form ofpropositional statements, as representationalism insists, but thatthis is merely information. Knowledge is rather the situated formsuch information takes when used and applied in specific circum-stances. As a result it must encompass the many matters attachingto these such as those of power, trust, credibility, legitimacy and soon, including those identified with ‘lay epistemology’ (Irwin andMichael, 2003) above.

While the pivotal concern of representationalism is withmatters of justification – that is with the legitimation of repre-sentations (i.e. whether they are ‘true’ or not) – of primary concernto this practice focused account is matters of significance. That iswith matters such as ‘‘what is at issue and at stake,.to whom andto what it matters, and hence with how. [it].is appropriately orperspicuously described’’ (Rouse, 1998, p. 449). This focus uponmatters of significance resonates with the emphasis of lay CPRCmembers upon matters of accountability, responsibility, liabilityand transparency rather than the representational emphasis ofOrica and others upon ‘facts’. So while ‘context’ is only of periph-eral concern for representationalism for the non-representationalaccount provided here it is of fundamental significance and cannotbe divorced from matters of ‘fact’ but is rather constitutive ofthem.

Rouse (particularly Rouse, 1987) has developed the mostcomprehensive application of these ideas to natural science. Heargues that the practical success and apparent universal validity ofscience do not result from a unique ability to generate accuraterepresentations of an enduring material reality but rather fromthe extension of laboratory (or field site, clinic, etc.) practices to themacro-world. This is not to argue that the macro-world is remadeas a laboratory analogue but rather that macro-level practices arerefashioned (e.g. through ‘universal’ systems of measurement) tothe degree necessary to accommodate the refined and standardisedversions of laboratory phenomena eventually deemed ‘mature’enough for broader application. So, while once only in laboratoriesdid electrons flow in wires and genes ‘code’ for proteins in unfa-miliar organisms, currently these phenomena occur across themacro-world because we maintain socio-material frameworks andconditions that permit these things to occur.

The distinction between knowledge related practices and therepresentations to which these give rise or employ equates closely

5 Interview with Orica’s General Manager Technology and Environment. Con-ducted by Suzanne Benn at Sydney Airport 20/10/04.

6 From the transcript of: ABC Radio National – Background Briefing: 16 June 2002 –‘Chlorine Capers’, archived at <http://www.abc.net/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s584708.htm>.

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with Foucault’s distinction (Rouse, 1994, p. 110) between ‘‘.adiscursive field of knowledge (savoir).[and].the specific state-ments held true at specific points within that field (connaissances)’’.In this Foucauldian view knowledge results from complex, dynamicalignments of people and things, rather than merely reflectingparticular statements arising from and within this field, and powerarises from and is exercised across analogous alignments. Wherethese alignments meet and overlap knowledge and power cometogether and co-constitute each other. Foucault famously describedthe emergence of such mutually defining sets of relationships withregard to madness, sexuality and the forms of domination anddiscipline implicit in modern society and its institutions, and Rouseextends this analysis to the case of natural science. So whilerepresentational thinking commonly conceives of power as some-thing that powerful people or institutions exert over others, powerin this Foucauldian sense is an effect spread across, and resultingfrom, networks of relationships (this is not to deny the existence ofpowerful people or institutions but rather to identify their powerwith the maintenance of multiple relationships).

Rouse’s argument that the instrumental success of scienceresults from an extension of laboratory practices to the world atlarge is an argument about power. Many of the changes thisinvolves are such fundamental features of the contemporary worldthat they go largely unnoticed. Matters, such as the systems ofuniversal quantification of time, length, and mass and the globaldistribution of mechanisms for measuring and imposing thesestandards, are among some of the most basic of these but socommonplace that the idea that they structure or discipline ourworld seems at odds with their apparently mundane role. However,it is not only, or so much, these but rather the technical construc-tions (e.g. industrial agriculture or the nuclear fuel cycle) whoseproliferation these mechanisms facilitate and maintain, and thatincreasingly populate our world as a result, that are the primarymeans by which power is constituted. This manifests through themany ways these constructions enable and constrain human choice(in precisely the same way that traditional sources of power such aswealth and political capital are assumed to do). Rouse’s analysis isparticularly illuminating regarding the risk implicit in contempo-rary conditions (see Healy, 2004a), although of specific concern tothis analysis is the way it illuminates the changing power dynamicsof the CPRC.

Knowledge and power are intimately related because of the waythe practices involved in the generation and/or application ofknowledge configure and reconfigure networks of relations in waysthat enable and constrain people’s options and choices. While theseinsights remain largely opaque to representative understandingsthey illuminate the success of lay members of the CPRC. In partic-ular they explain the ability of residents to articulate and legitimatetheir concerns over and above the emphasis of Orica and others on‘facts’, and ultimately have them acted upon, in terms of a change inCPRC knowledge/power relationships. The specific details of theseevents are examined below.

3. CPRC ‘Knowledge Politics’

This section examines the ‘knowledge politics’ of the CPRCthrough the lens of lay CPRC member’s concerns. In contrast to theconsistent representational focus of Orica, and others, upon tech-nical ‘facts’ lay CPRC members were more typically attentive to theprocesses surrounding how these ‘facts’ were generated andapplied, resonating with the practice focused epistemology out-lined above. This concern with process was evident in a continuingstress upon issues of credibility, legitimacy, accountability,responsibility and liability attaching to the ‘facts’ that held theattention of Orica and other technically inclined stakeholders.However, while for these representationally inclined stakeholders

such procedural concerns were value-laden and therefore strictlydemarcated from ‘facts’, lay CPRC members saw them as determi-native of the ‘facts’. Hence, while for Orica and others, such asthe CPRC’s ‘independent expert’, the ‘facts’ spoke for themselves,lay CPRC members required quality assurance regarding the cred-ibility and legitimacy of those ‘facts’. Yet, for the representationallyinclined stakeholders, the power of the ‘facts’ was such that this layconcern with process was rendered a lesser ‘contextual’ concernand misinterpreted as simple ignorance of the ‘facts’.

A widely documented symptom of this representationaldisconnect is the characterisation of lay concerns as an unrealisticdemand for ‘zero-risk’ (on the grounds that the community remainunconvinced by the ‘facts’). The General Manager Technology andEnvironment of Orica put it this way5:

‘‘.as a community we expect zero-risk and I’d probably be thesame. I mean when I’m proposing a new chemical plant I canintellectually reduce everything into mathematical risk argu-ment but as a member of the community I’m probably likeeveryone else and don’t do that.’’

However, Irwin and Wynne (1996, p. 218) point out that:

‘‘What scientists interpret as a naı̈ve and impracticable publicexpectation of a zero-risk environment can.be seen instead anexpression of zero trust in institutions which claim to be able tomanage large-scale risks throughout society’’

Reflecting a widely understood and theoretically elaborated (e.g.Giddens, 1990) feature of the contemporary condition it was justsuch a gulf of mistrust, between Orica and the local community,that motivated lay CPRC members. Whereas major institutions,both corporate and regulatory, have traditionally assumed a mantleof public authority as legitimate and credible decision-makingbodies the experience of Botany residents proximate to Oricawas the inverse. A leading resident CPRC member, for example,recalls:

‘‘My worst experience.was a leak.one Christmas Day, and wecouldn’t eat our Christmas dinner because we believed we couldtaste the chlorine. And my son, who was an asthmatic, he hadone of his worst attacks on that day.’’6

It was this depth of mistrust that motivated CPRC residentmembers to, as far as they were able, ensure that CPRC outcomessubstantively reflected their concerns. While there was alwaysa ‘deficit’ aspect to this, in that lay CPRC members were acutelyaware of their technical ignorance and concerned to remedy this,this concern ran alongside, and likely fuelled, the exercise of ‘‘aprocess of ‘lay epistemology’’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 28). Thatis lay CPRC members demonstrated skill and acumen regardingtheir:

‘‘.knowledge of how they know. reflect[ing] upon why theytake on board some ‘scientific facts’ but not others.arecompetent in accounting for why they prefer some sources ofknowledge (e.g. personal experience) over others; and.canjustify why they trust some expert authorities and are suspi-cious of others’’ (Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 28).

More than any other episode in the CPRC’s ‘knowledge politics’it was the Geomelt EIS process that best illuminates these mattersin their entirety.

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3.1. The EIS process7

From the initial Orica announcement of Geomelt as their chosenHCB disposal technology there were significant resident CPRCmember concerns with procedure:

‘‘Making a fait accompli announcement is not consultation’’(Resident 1)‘‘We want them to go to the public and ask them’’ (Resident 2)

The pressure resulting from the articulation of these concernsled to a series of public meetings to discuss the Geomelt option (seebelow under ‘CPRC Influence/Power’). Particularly illuminating wasthe difference in emphasis between the residents and Orica/URS(the consultants hired to prepare the EIS) on the content of the EIS.The residents were particularly concerned that the EIS shouldexplicitly explore alternatives to the use of Geomelt at Botany:

‘‘It’s a dreadful dilemma that we’re all facing.what we will besaying is that all avenues have to be explored.and spelt out inthe EIS.We want to see their research into these things and wewant to see their reasons why they haven’t opted for thesethings’’ (Resident 1).

URS and Orica, on the other hand, appeared to regard the EIS asa deficit model inspired exercise in selling the Geomelt option, asthis statement by a URS Senior Air Quality Specialist illustrates:

‘‘They’ve got this huge abatement system – one of the best I’veever seen. You’ve got filters, a thermal oxidiser, a scrubbingsystem and a double carbon bed absorption unit, and so it’s greatand there’s two of them. So in actual fact the emissions are prettyminimal but trying to get that through all the detail.and makingsomething presentable to Joe Public who says that’s all magic.’’

Similarly when the General Manager Technology and Environ-ment of Orica was asked (footnote 5):

‘‘What about.any risk associated with the process, are thereany ways that you might try and engage the community or isthere any way you would change the way you would engagewith the community in terms of communicating the risk orhelping them to understand the risk you know.’’

Replied:

‘‘.if I stand back and look at the GML process reality.the riskmitigation.that is proposed.is of a very high level.It’scertainly true that some material escapes that hot melt and goesthrough thermal oxidation process but unlike many other plantsit was a fuel thermal oxidation process and built in redundancyso if one of the thermal oxidisers fail or one of the gas treatmenttrains fail there was another one there. And at the end of that gastreatment train there was also planned to be carbon bedabsorption that is well beyond what would be practicallyrequired.so in other words it was really a belts and bracesapproach to risk mitigation within the process in terms of anypotential omissions.’’

So for Orica/URS this ‘belts and braces approach to risk mitiga-tion’ spoke for itself and the challenge was to sell it to ‘Joe Public’.However, this blindness to community concerns came back tohaunt them at the ‘launch’ of the EIS at Orica’s Botany site. After theformalities one of the leading resident activists, exemplifying Irwinand Michael’s observations regarding ‘lay epistemology’, gotstraight to the point:

7 Unless stated otherwise quotes in this section are directly transcribed fromCastle et al. (2003). Both Resident 1 and Resident 2 are leading resident members ofthe CPRC.

Activist: ‘‘Excuse me but where did URS get all its informationfrom.’’URS: ‘‘From Orica and AMEC’’Activist: ‘‘AMEC being?’’URS: ‘‘The makers of the Geomelt process’’Activist: ‘‘Who have never destroyed HCB before?’’URS: ‘‘That’s right’’Activist: ‘‘So you haven’t actually done any independentresearch?’’URS: ‘‘No.’’

The rationale for this public exchange became clearer ina personal exchange at the end of the meeting:

Activist: ‘‘But I can’t see how you can do it on the Geomeltprocess because it hasn’t destroyed HCB wastes.there’s noproven data for it.’’URS: ‘‘Yeah OK, you’re right, definitely you’re right. But if youdidn’t do that then we wouldn’t have any work anywhere in theworld because of you.Activist: ‘‘We have to kill off people so as others can learn –that’s what you’re saying?’’URS: ‘‘No – don’t put words in my mouth.’’

This clarifies how the activist’s most fundamental concern iswith due process. For the activist no amount of detail regarding the‘belts and braces approach to risk mitigation’ Orica were proposingwould substitute for, what for her might be, legitimate, credible,and primarily trustworthy, sources of information about these‘facts’. The final personal exchange underlines how poorly this isunderstood. This activist, echoing the concerns of Rouse (1987) andBeck (1992) about the dangers of using the world as a laboratory,regards a lack of ‘proven data’ as evidence of significant potentialrisk, particularly as the source of this potential risk has provenuntrustworthy. As a result the activist insists upon far morerigorous attention to the sources and forms of information used toassess and implement this potential source of risk. However, theURS response highlights the customary representational blindnessto such procedural concerns. Content that this is ‘‘one of the best[such systems].ever seen’’ the insistence that ‘‘you have to trialthese things’’ reveals a world-view in which ‘facts’ have to beallowed to speak for themselves ‘‘in order for them to work’’.

3.2. Risk ‘Acceptability’

The issue of ‘risk acceptability’ encapsulates many argumentscentral to this article regarding the disconnect between lay andexpert perspectives and the gulf of mistrust this involved. Whilewidely criticised for, as Beck aptly puts it, ‘mathematicisingmorality’ (Beck, 2000, p. 215) the notion remains in widespread useamong professional quantitative risk assessors who commonlyremain oblivious to community concerns about its value-ladennature. The minutes for the CPRC meeting of February 1999 recordthat ‘‘community representatives.questioned[ed] what consti-tutes an unacceptable risk’’ in response to which it was arranged forthe consultants (in whose report the term was used) to attend thenext CPRC meeting and explain. The slides of the consultants’presentation, appended to the minutes of the May 1999 CPRCmeeting, record this explanation:

‘‘What are the Maximum Acceptable Concentrations? These aredetermined using a back calculation of the site specific riskassessment for all the volatile and semi-volatile chemicalswhich may be present.’’

On this basis the conclusion of the presentation repeated theclaim, which had initiated the query, that there were ‘not expected

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to be unacceptable risks to human health’. Now while in thisinstance ‘content’ won out over ‘context’, or at least the minutesrecord no further questions of the consultants the very same issuereappears at the end of 2001.

The minutes of the CPRC meeting of December 2001 againquestioned the use of the phrase ‘unacceptable risk’ in the samereport in which its use had been first questioned in 1999. This time,however, the minutes note:

‘‘members of the CPRC voiced their strong disapprobation at theCompany’s terminology. An alternative approach would be toexpress outcomes relative to standards, for example US EPA riskstandards. Orica’s representative said that the phrase ‘unac-ceptable risk’ would not be used in the final report,8 but neitherdoes the company have the EPA’s approval to refer to the US EPArisk standards as a point of reference.’’

So, whereas once institutions such as those of government andbusiness assumed that they were collectively regarded as havingthe legitimate authority to determine what is ‘acceptable’, forresidents proximate to the Orica plant this is distinctly not the case.Their experience of pollution incidents, both historical andongoing, not only disinclines them to take Orica at their word, butalso feeds a distrust of leading institutions more generally andmakes them further inclined to insist on processes and proceduresto ensure that Orica do live up to their word. Ensuring financialliability is one of the most fundamental ways in which this can bedone.

3.3. Accountability, responsibility and liability

CPRC meetings regularly involved resident members articulat-ing considerable concern over Orica’s financial status and capacityto manage the HCB waste. Faced with an untrustworthy source ofongoing potential risk they constantly sought a guarantee that thefunds to finance the response to this risk would be available. Thefirst of many requests for ‘written assurance’ on this matter wasmade at the second CPRC meeting in May 1997 during a discussionabout how the ICI parent company shedding their controllinginterest in ICI Australia might affect responsibility for HCBdestruction. By November 1998 these concerns had shifted to theeffects of the subdivision of Orica’s Botany site, and by August 1999they were articulated in terms of ‘‘a trust. set up for the HCBdestruction money’’, a matter raised frequently from this time on.

The minutes of the August 2000 CPRC documenting anotherdemand for a ‘trust’, soon after a drop in the Orica share value, note‘‘that, although the Company would continue to be unable toprovide the assurance the Committee desired, the Committeewould continue to ask for that reassurance’’. This prophetic state-ment did, however, downplay the CPRC’s ability to affect events.While residents did continue to seek a financial assurance withlittle success, particularly during 2001 when Orica underwenta restructuring process involving the shedding of over 800 jobs, by2004 change was in the air. The Independent Review Panel (IRP)was scrupulous in its dealings with the CPRC and after a questionfrom the CPRC in May 2004 undertook to ‘‘investigate the status quoregarding such [security] bonds in Australia and overseas, and [to]report back to the CPRC.’’ The IRP final report ‘‘Recommended that anenvironmental damage bond in the minimum amount of $1 million belodged by Orica and held in trust for the duration of the project’’(2004, x).

Nonetheless the gulf of mistrust between Orica and residentscontinues to fuel such demands. The minutes of the CPRC Q&Asession with the IRP to discuss their final report notes:

8 My copy still contains this phrase!

‘‘A member of the CPRC asked the Panel where the figure of$1million came from because he understood that it should behigher than this;’’ and that‘‘A CPRC member asked Orica if the $80million dollars Orica hasallocated to this issue is enough now that it will now take timeto find a new location, and given that Orica also has a majorgroundwater problem. Should this figure be raised?. the CPRCmember mentioned that they raised this question because theywere aware that the company had many financial liabilities, andif they began to have difficulties he wants to be sure that it won’tbe the taxpayer that will have to cover the cost. He wants thisissue to be pursued from a liability angle.’’

While this pursuit of liability underlines the adage that trust iseasy to squander but difficult to generate, it also illuminates thechanging power dynamics within the CPRC. While in 2000 Oricawere minuted confidently denying that they could not ‘‘provide theassurance the Committee desired’’ by 2004, this assurance wasmandatory and additional liability was being pursued. Thesechanging power dynamics are examined further below after ananalysis of the use of ‘independent expertise’ by the CPRC.

3.4. Expertise and counterexpertise

As CPRC proceedings progressed and matters of technicalcomplexity became an increasing focus of discussion and debatethe requirement for an ‘independent expert’ to advise lay CPRCmembers became an ever more pressing issue. While generallyagreed to be a second best option the lack of external fundingresulted in the CPRC accepting Orica’s offer to fund this position andafter some deliberation a university industrial chemist, first sug-gested by the CPRC chair, took up the position. While this personcompetently resolved aspects of the lay CPRC members’ knowledge‘deficit’, ultimately residents became disenchanted with the waythe expert’s findings were being interpreted by Orica, and the rolewas discontinued.

This problem resulted from the pursuit of an impossible ideal of‘independence’. Knowledge does not take the form of representa-tional statements, but rather the situated practices that give rise tothese statements; therefore experts, like others, tend to have alle-giances to some forms of situated practices rather than others.However, from a traditional expert perspective independence isa strictly a matter of separating ‘facts’ from contextual concerns(such as those of residents with process and procedure). Althoughthis particular expert strove to achieve ‘objectivity’ in a conven-tional sense, the situatedness of his own knowledge and the val-idity and veracity of residents’ concerns with process andprocedure weighed heavily on the question of independence. Thisanalysis involves brief comparisons of the contribution of the‘independent expert’ appointed by residents and that of a Green-peace representative on the CPRC.

3.4.1. ExpertiseThe industrial chemist appointed to the role of ‘independent

expert’ was concerned to convert complex technical detail intoa form assessable to lay people. This was skilfully accomplished ina manner consistent with the representationalist injunction againstmixing ‘fact’ and ‘value’. However, although such an approachreflected conventional notions of ‘independence’ and ‘objectivity’,it was at odds with the situated concerns of residents, and withtheir emphasis on process and procedure. For example, in consid-ering the possibility that hydrogen would be used in treatmentprocesses, the expert put the view that:

‘‘The chemical industry has used hydrogen for a very long time.Handling hydrogen under these conditions is pretty mucha piece of pie by comparison with other things that go on in the

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chemical industry. The probability of anything nasty happeningis extremely low.’’ (Castle, 2003)

So, whereas the longstanding experience of residents proximateto Orica, enduring ongoing problems with day-to-day operations,caused them to favour a requirement for strict monitoring of sucha process the expert viewed them as ‘‘pretty much a piece of pie’’.This fundamental divergence in approach to the risks andmanagement of Orica’s proposals fuelled disillusionment of resi-dents with the ‘independence’ of their own expert. As the publicdebate unfolded Orica made use of the expert’s reports to supportthe company’s favoured technology, Geomelt. Ultimately thiseroded resident support for the employment of the expert, despitethe skill with which he helped to resolve their knowledge ‘deficit’.The then Greenpeace representative on the CPRC took a verydifferent tack, however.

3.4.2. CounterexpertiseEchoing Beck’s (1992) description of ‘counter-experts’9 the

Greenpeace representative (henceforth GP) was primarily con-cerned to technically deconstruct Orica’s Botany proposal at everyopportunity. At the October 2000 CPRC meeting at which theGeomelt proposal was announced GP queried Orica about thediscrepancy between the emission levels attained in the Geomelttrial and those set in the management plan. Later in the meetingwhen the residents’ ‘independent expert’ reported to the completeCPRC, GP raised a query about potential toxic residues in thevitreous material remaining on completion of the process (seefootnote 3). The expert explained how these are dealt with viatreatment of the off-gases given off from the ‘melt’ and these laterbecame a focus of the ‘Greenpeace Questions’ (see below).

At the February 2001 meeting GP countered a number of Orica/URS arguments regarding treatment off-site (this had always beena major point of tension between residents and Orica) and at thefollowing CPRC meeting in April GP submitted the ‘Greenpeacequestions’ containing ‘issues need[ing] to be addressed’ ‘[i]n theinterests of public health and safety’.10 In this way GP took a situ-ated stance which reflected many of the residents key concerns.GP’s primary allegiance was, however, not to residents but toa Greenpeace agenda (that categorised Geomelt as an incineratortechnology to which Greenpeace are, on principle, opposed).Nonetheless GP’s actions, echoing the concerns of residents,demonstrated a skilful engagement with the situated character ofthe knowledge claims in this case and the interrelatedness of thesewith issues of procedure and risk.

Although an ‘independent expert’ can valuably enhance laytechnical literacy this may reproduce, or even compound, asym-metries in relations of trust and power, rather than further engageand empower lay people, unless this role is informed by awarenessof these broader relations and how they relate to knowledge. GP,however, illustrates how knowledge can be mobilised in a waycognizant of these broader interdependencies but in the service ofa narrow, rather than an inclusive, agenda. The residents’ ‘inde-pendent expert’ unwittingly served a narrow agenda. GP did so aswell, though more knowingly and explicitly. The situated characterof knowledge claims meant that attempts to achieve ‘objectivity’

9 The notion of the power of the ‘dialectic of expertise and counter-expertise’(1992, 30) is central to Risk Society and intended to capture how ‘[n]ew pub-lic-oriented scientific experts emerge [exposing] the dubious foundations ofscientific argumentation with counter-scientific thoroughness’ (161), and is furtherelaborated in later works (see eg 1995a: 114–115).

10 These centred on ‘Emergency off-gas treatment’, ‘Contamination of refractorylining’ (this refers to the lining of the crucible in which the melt is contained), and‘Drum handling protocols’. GP was further active in a number of other ways such asby calling Orica’s Geomelt EIS ‘hotline’ during this meeting and noting that itremained unanswered.

that rendered opaque the relations of trust and power in which the‘independent expert’ was embedded, while at the same timefacilitating GP’s ability to manipulate these same relations. Thechallenge is thus to construct and conduct participatory processesin ways that openly, inclusively and accountably address theseconcerns, a challenge taken up in Section 4.

3.5. CPRC influence/power

While others (e.g. Carson, in this volume) have characterised theCPRC as a failure, such a view discounts the significant influencethat CPRC resident members brought to bear on the ongoingprocess to manage Orica’s HCB wastes. In Section 3.1 it was notedhow the reaction of CPRC resident members to Orica’s Geomeltannouncement resulted in a series of public meetings over the EISpreparation period. Community pressure was further evidentduring this process in a variety of ways, many setting precedents forcommunity access and involvement.

CPRC community members asked for and got admission toattend the ‘Planning Focus Meeting’ conducted prior to the EIS –a first for a community group. They were also – after specificallyrequesting them – given assess to the ‘Directors Requirements’which the CPRC minutes for February 2001 notes ‘‘was unique, andthat it was not standard procedure for DUAP [Department of UrbanAffairs and Planning] to issue such documentation to Communityrepresentatives.’’ Similarly the CPRC requested and got an exten-sion of the public display period to 60 (from a minimum of 30) days.In many ways the EIS, reflecting the community members successin the above regards, marked a turning point for the CPRC, whoseprofile and designated role grew as the process moved from the EISthrough the CoI and IRP.

Community members requested and obtained an extension tothe CoI submission period, as for the EIS, of 60 days. TheCommissioners findings marked something of a further turn for theCPRC with Orica required to not only to consult with the CPRC butalso to fund them to the tune of $20,000 p.a. during the commis-sioning stage and $10,000 p.a. for the life of the plant to pay for‘independent expert’ advice. If anything the IRP marked a furtherturning point with one of its three members nominated by CPRCresident members, after the original nominee was roundly rejectedby them. The IRP met with the CPRC five times during theirdeliberations, adopting further recommendations regarding pubicinvolvement, in addition to the communities long-standingdemand for an environmental bond described in Section 3.3.

It is notable that as residents’ concerns gained profile, legitimacyand were increasingly addressed that their emphasis upon ensuringthe quality of processes and procedures was reproduced in theincreasing sophistication of the recommendations of the CoI andIRP. This imperative to address matters of process is taken up below.

4. Discussion – toward an epistemology of publicparticipation

Before examining what the CPRC experience holds for similar,future exercises it is necessary to further explain the CPRC’s ‘radi-cally engaged’ character, which distinguished it from other, similar,exercises and facilitated its achievements. In retrospect this char-acteristic appears to be attributable to the fortuitous convergenceof a number of factors. Among these are: the range of aid, assistanceand advice available to resident CPRC members; the quality ofthe CPRC chair; external, including political, factors; and, not least,the sustained and energetic commitment of lay CPRC members.

While, as described in Section 3.4, resident CPRC membersbecame disillusioned with their own arrangement for employingan ‘independent expert’, the particular expert did help resolveelements of their knowledge ‘deficit’, also probably fostering

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a process of ‘lay epistemology’. There were, however, a number offurther knowledge and information resources available to resi-dents. Notable was the community information system developedby a leading Australian campaigner on toxic chemicals (Lloyd-Smith this collection) who frequently gave informal advice toresidents on technical matters. Others, including the author whowas trained as an engineer, sometimes fulfilled a similar role, evenif only by asking questions at CPRC meetings to illuminate andprobe matters of potential interest to residents. The CPRC chair wasalso specifically attentive to resident’s concerns and intent onachieving inclusive processes. The CPRC Chair, who became chairafter the second CPRC meeting in May 1997, trained as a geologist, isa former Campaign Manager of Greenpeace and is experiencedwith public participation processes and theory. He was, therefore,well attuned to the need for, and difficulties of facilitatingcommunity engagement in the CPRC and, for example, commonlyparticipated in a residents’ meeting held immediately prior to CPRCmeetings to discuss issues of common concern and strategy.

The increasing attention paid to residents’ concerns also owesmuch to broader external changes over this period. While Australiahas not witnessed the sort of significant institutional changes toscience/society relations notable elsewhere over this period, partic-ularly in post-BSE/vCJD UK, it has been influenced by such develop-ments to, at least, the degree that the rhetoric of public involvementin technical decision-making has far greater purchase in contempo-rary Australia. However, the external developments of most signifi-cance to the CPRC were likely those of local politics. While some ofthe delay in the protracted EIS/CoI/IRP process may be attributable tocontingency, including ministerial changes over this period, the NSWelection in early 2003 was probably a particularly significant factor.Putting the HCB issue on hold removed the potential for political fall-out over any decision on HCB destruction. The 2003 election also sawthe election of a new local State MP who took a specific interest in theCPRC and was particularly supportive of resident CPRC member’sinterests. Ultimately, however, while these many factors may havehelped facilitate the ‘radically engaged’ character of the CPRC it wasthe sustained commitment, energy and enthusiasm of long-standingresident CPRC members that brought it to fruition.

What lessons are there then for the facilitation of similar levelsof engagement in future, analogous, participation exercises, otherthan that of simply attempting to imitate elements of the set ofcircumstances described above? It’s important to first underlinea pragmatic constraint on what can be recommended here. Theanalysis of this article ultimately suggests an imperative fora ‘cultural project’ in which representational notions of knowledgeare replaced by a non-representational epistemology. Such anexercise would likely have far reaching implications for expertiseand, even perhaps, the practice of science itself, implications thatare well beyond the purview of this article, which will, therefore,focus upon more limited recommendations regarding the designand conduct of participation exercises, while also consideringbroader socio-theoretic implications. These echo, at least rhetori-cally, long established insights regarding the achievement ofeffective public participation but suggest significant differences tohow these translate into practice. Ultimately it is the failure ofcurrent approaches to adequately facilitate the open and inclusivedialogue and deliberation they espouse that renders them inef-fective and is addressed below.

4.1. The epistemological dimension of public participation

While current mainstream approaches to public participationexplicitly promote inclusive dialogue and deliberation, theycommonly ignore fundamental prerequisites for this – that is theresolution of asymmetries in power, resources and trust amongstakeholders. Rather, because of the implicit, structural privilege

granted ‘facts’ and resultant tendency to relegate lay concerns tothe marginal status of ‘context’ and/or ‘values’, lay people arecommonly systemically disenfranchised and disempowered. Animportant example of this is that the technically inclined stake-holders in this case tended to portray the ‘independent expert’s’judgements on risk as ‘objective’ and robust and considered thoseof residents simply as lay risk perceptions (and therefore merely‘subjective’ and lacking credibility). However, not only is thisintensely inequitable but also fundamentally counter-constructivesince it denies the evident veracity of many resident concerns.Echoing Irwin and Michael’s insights regarding ‘lay epistemology’the CPRC process demonstrates that while lay people are oftenuntutored in the representationally codified canons of knowledgefamiliar in academia, government and business, they can be veryperceptive, shrewd and capable (including relative to ‘experts’) inthe management of it.

While conventional expertise insists that ‘facts’ speak forthemselves, lay people with a stake in these ‘facts’ are commonlywell placed to identify weaknesses in the processes and proceduresunderpinning their veracity. An inclusive approach to participatoryprocess design should, therefore, accommodate the mounting ofsuch critiques by lay stakeholders and some means to facilitatetheir integration with more conventional expert-determinedinsights. In practice such processes would have to parallel moreconventional attempts to improve lay technical literacy levels. Forthe CPRC this might, for example, have been achieved by compli-menting the increased information ‘capacity’ facilitated by thecommunity information system initiative (Lloyd-Smith, in thisvolume) by not only further means to facilitate community uptakeand deployment of this information but also further means tofacilitate the collection of public observations and insightsregarding this information in forms assimilable to expertise.

Ultimately the achievement of open and inclusive dialogue anddeliberation requires what I have elsewhere termed ‘epistemolog-ical pluralism’ (Healy, 2003a, 2004a), which rests on the practicebased account of knowledge described above and involves ‘‘facili-tating processes in which all relevant perspectives and insights,whether conceived representationally or not, are accounted for’’(Healy, 2003a, p. 691). Of particular concern, therefore, is thatleading contemporary guidelines for public participation presup-pose, and are structured by, representationalist considerations thatreproduce the problems discussed in this article. This concern isepitomised by influential material issued by the InternationalAssociation for Public Participation (IAP2).

As Carson (in this volume) discusses, IAP2 provides guidelinesfor public participation that are widely regarded as exemplary ofbest practice. Currently IAP2’s ‘seven core values’ (www.iap2.org)are:

1. The public should have a say in decisions about actions thataffect their lives.

2. Public participation includes the promise that the public’scontribution will influence the decision.

3. The public participation process communicates the interestsand meets the process needs of all participants.

4. The public participation process seeks out and facilitates theinvolvement of those potentially affected.

5. The public participation process involves participants indefining how they participate.

6. The public participation process provides participants with theinformation they need to participate in a meaningful way.

7. The public participation process communicates to participantshow their input affected the decision.

So, according to IAP2, the public ‘should have a say’, ‘contribute’and ‘influence’, ‘communicate’ their ‘interests’, be ‘involved’,

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receive ‘information’ and be ‘communicated’ to. However, nowhere,reflecting the representationalist preconceptions framing them, isthere any sense that these ‘core values’ might embrace publiccontributions beyond ‘interests’ and ‘needs’ or that the public, inaddition to requiring ‘information’, might have some ‘information’(or more properly ‘knowledge’) to contribute. The analysis of thisarticle has clarified how participation of this form then becomesprimarily a matter of contextualising expert-determined decisionsrather than facilitating substantive lay involvement in them. Sorather than empowering the public such an approach is more, asothers have argued (e.g. see: Levidow and Marris, 2001), aboutlegitimating conventional expert-determined decisions and thestatus quo they reflect. In the first instance then ‘core values’ arerequired that place public insights on a par with those of expertise,rather than denying them as these do.

This would only be a first step, however. The next would be tointegrate such ‘core values’ into the design and conduct of publicparticipation exercises so as to resource and empower lay people,accommodating rather than denying their contributions. One wayin which this might be flagged is through modifications to the IAP2public participation spectrum (www.iap2.org). The current spec-trum proposes a continuum through from informing people, toconsulting them, on to involving, collaborating with, and thenempowering them by mapping objectives into mechanisms forthese purposes. Mapping the epistemological concerns articulatedin this article onto this spectrum would involve flagging theincreasing significance of epistemological considerations in themovement from informing to empowering people, in terms of notonly addressing lay knowledge ‘deficits’ but also the ‘deficits’ ofother stakeholders that might be addressed via the exercise of ‘layepistemology’. This would require the integration of these consid-erations directly into objectives and, particularly for those parts ofthe spectrum involving a direct requirement for public contribu-tions, namely ‘involvement’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘empowerment’,the elaboration of mechanisms designed to harness lay contribu-tions of all forms and, where necessary, integrate them with thoseof conventional expertise.

In the near term then, and as a first step to ‘epistemologicalempowerment’ it should be ensured that the frameworks andguidelines informing the design and conduct of public participationexercises ensure that due weight and consideration are given topublic knowledge and to facilitating the exercise of effective, criticallay scrutiny of expert claims. This move to put public insights andunderstandings on a par with those of expertise has significantramifications for matters of politics and governance more generally.

4.2. Knowledge, power and late-modernity

On many levels the analysis of this article resonates with otherwell-known thinking on the dynamics of late-modernity. Beck, forexample, notes how contemporary conditions:

‘‘turns the target groups and appliers of scientific results inpolitics, business and the public into active coproducers in thesocial process of knowledge definition’’ (1992: 157).

The emphasis on ‘active coproducers’ resonating with the ‘radi-cally engaged’ character of lay CPRC members involvement inshaping decisions on HCB management, a role anticipated by Beckin the quote heading this article. Of particular significance to theanalysis presented here is Beck’s notion of the ‘relations of defini-tion’ which:

‘‘include the specific rules, institutions and capacities thatstructure the identification and assessment of risk in a specificcultural context. They are the legal, epistemological and culturalpower-matrix in which risk politics is conducted’’ (2000: 224).

The emphasis of this analysis upon reframing the ‘epistemolog-ical and cultural power-matrix’ of public participation being oneway of engaging, and thereby reframing, these ‘relations of defini-tion’. I wish, however, to go beyond Beck in interpreting the signif-icance of this ‘power-matrix’ and, in particular, a reframing of it.

Working in the shadow of Habermas, Beck little appreciates howthis ‘power-matrix’ is constituted through and by the knowledge/power relationships elucidated by Foucault and whose broaderepistemological dimensions have only more recently been exploredby Rouse. For Beck this ‘power-matrix’ is simply a means to explorethe reflexivity of modernity and particularly how it might be madethoroughly ‘self-critical’ (2000: 218). The Foucauldian view pro-pounded here, however, suggests that a significant reframing of this‘power-matrix’ is of more fundamental significance. Whereas Beckremains committed to the ‘grand narrative’ of the enlightenment‘but in a new sense’ he fails to realise how the notions of ‘criticism,self-criticism, irony and humanity’ (Beck, 2000, p. 226), which hebelieves are central to the enlightenment project have remainedthe restricted domain of a select few.

This select few, the ‘philosophes’, the gentlemen scientists of theearly Royal Society and today their professional descendents, whoin the guise of ‘independent experts’ are expected to facilitatepublic involvement in participation, have always been part of anexercise in which the few lead the many (see Latour, 1999 chapters7 and 8 for an argument that places the initiation of this processwith the ancient Greeks). So whereas Beck believes that theencouragement of critical expertise and the democratisation oftechnical advance will facilitate a ‘self-critical’ modernity theaccount given here rather suggests that addressing the hegemonyof the status quo requires that, in addition, public concerns andinsights are placed on a par with those of expertise. A reframing ofthe ‘relations of definition’ in this way would change long-livedstructures of power underpinning technocracy and its bedfellows.It is for this reason I have elsewhere argued that a pluralist‘knowledge politics’ – that is the exercise of ‘epistemologicalpluralism’ – is a necessary but insufficient condition for a pluralistpolitics more broadly (Healy, 2002, 2003a). From this perspectivea truly pluralist politics, and the many matters attaching to it suchas the achievement of sustainability, will likely remain stymieduntil these concerns are better and more fully addressed.

5. Conclusions

While public participation is increasingly regarded as a legiti-mate, and even necessary, way of tackling the challenges and risksof complex contemporary problems, the practice of participation isseverely hampered by the hegemony of traditional conceptions ofknowledge and rationality. In practice the implicit, structuralprivilege granted ‘facts’ relegates lay concerns to the marginalstatus of ‘context’ and/or ‘values’, systemically disenfranchising anddisempowering lay people. Of particular concern is the way thatthese problems are reproduced by influential contemporaryguidelines for public participation suggesting an urgent imperativefor them to be revisited and reframed. While lay people may lacka detailed understanding of technicalities experience suggests thatthey can be adept and skilful in playing a quality assurance role forcomplex technical proposals in which they are stakeholders. Asa result a key challenge for public participation is to ensure theequitable integration of lay and expert perspectives. This requiresprocesses able to creatively combine divergent perspectives,a fundamental prerequisite for which is the resolution of asym-metries in power, resources and trust between stakeholders.Resolving lay knowledge ‘deficits’ in a way that, at the same time,respects public knowledge and facilitates its integration with themore formal insights of expertise is fundamental to the resolutionof these broader asymmetries. The extension of ‘epistemological

S. Healy / Journal of Environmental Management 90 (2009) 1644–16541654

pluralism’ of this form has ramifications for entrenched, broaderstructures of power that impede our ability to engage contempo-rary challenges successfully. Surpassing these impedimentsrequires a pluralist politics, one prerequisite for which is a pluralist‘knowledge politics’ of the form outlined here.

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