Governing the Air: The Dynamics of Science, Policy, and Citizen Interaction

Chapter 4. Transboundary Science for Transnational Air Pollution Policies in Europe

4 Transboundary Science for Transnational Air Pollution Policies in Europe Bernd Siebenhüner The problem of air pollution has been at the center of most industrialized countries’ environmental policymaking from early on. Damages to human health, buildings, crops, and forests through emissions of toxic gases and particles have raised political concerns since the nineteenth century and have been addressed in numerous national regulations. The problem of air pollution, however, does not remain within national borders but is transboundary in nature. This fact poses a particular challenge to political processes and the political approaches to combat air pollution with regard to international coordination and agreements. Within Europe, several levels of institutions and approaches to address transboundary air pollution have occurred over the past 30 years. The transboundary dimension of air pollution is a particular challenge for this continent because emission sources are numerous and widespread over countries that are relatively small and in close vicinity—at least when compared to North America. Only in Southeast Asia and East Asia does a similar problem structure of transboundary air pollution exist at the moment. In addition to the transboundary dimension, air pollution also requires much scientific knowledge on the definition of the problems, the identification of dangerous substances, the monitoring of possible damages, the understanding of causal mechanisms, and the analysis of policy responses and their impact on ecosystems. Given the complexity of ecological systems with their interconnectedness, numerous causal mechanisms , synergies, and accumulation effects between different substances and abrupt system changes, scientific knowledge is limited and has to cope with paramount uncertainties that can be only partially eliminated by rigorous research and monitoring. This chapter sets out to investigate how European policy approaches of the past 30 years have addressed these problems—specifically, the 94 Bernd Siebenhüner Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) and the European Union’s (EU) air pollution policy. Both have somewhat different institutional contexts and address air pollution from different angles. The chapter compares both approaches with regard to the interface between scientific knowledge and political decision making and what effects these designs have had in the political realm. The second section develops the analytical framework for the subsequent analysis, and the third section studies the evolution of the CLRTAP and its major concepts and achievements. The fourth section addresses the EU’s air pollution policies, and the final section discusses and compares both approaches on the basis of the central criteria. Designing Transnational Science–Policy Interfaces Designing the interface between science and political decision making poses a significant challenge to both realms and must be thorough to function effectively. Different designs of this interface will influence the overall effects that scientific knowledge has in political processes (Mitchell, Clark, Cash, et al. 2006). The chapter seeks to study effects of science actors and scientific knowledge in a broader sense that is not related to a particular ideal point of reference, as the notion of effectiveness suggests. Effects are understood rather as changes in the behavior of decision makers, mainly governments and international bodies, such as the EU. This notion of effects is generally known as “outcome” in policy studies and is to be distinguished from the actual impacts on target indicators, such as improvement of environmental parameters. It follows a line of reasoning in recent works on international institutions that have generally focused on changes of actor behavior instead of on environmental improvement (Keohane, Haas, and Levy 1993). Science actors such as epistemic communities (in the sense of Haas 1992), international scientific organizations , and individual research institutions can have effects on political decision-making processes by changing other actors’ knowledge and belief systems and by influencing policy agendas and advancing specific solutions. In this context, social studies of science and technology have stressed the need for a perspective on the underlying norms of both realms and the way each intrudes into the other realm. As opposed to the idea of pure science, which is regarded as a completely independent provider of knowledge governed by its own rules and quality-assurance mechanisms, Transboundary Science for Transnational Air Pollution Policies in Europe 95 this field of study regards science as being influenced by political needs and interests, in particular in those fields of knowledge where uncertainty is high (Jasanoff 1987, 1990). In this situation, clarification and transparency about which roles are to be taken by particular individuals and organizations are necessary for a functional organization...