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7 Fewer Boundaries and Less Certainty: The Role of Experts in European Air Policy Göran Sundqvist Scholars in the field of science and technology studies (STS) often repeat the message that the relationship between science and society is unstable. Spurred by regulatory failures in dealing with problems such as “mad cow disease” (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) and public criticism of genetically modified organisms, the European Commission has prioritized expert credibility as an important issue in need of political attention . In preparing for the White Paper on Governance published in 2001, the commission set up a working group on “democratizing expertise” whose main objective was to propose ideas on how to restore the credibility of expertise (EC 2001). In 2005, the commission established an expert group consisting of STS scholars to address the widely recognized problem of public unease with science (Wynne and Felt 2007). These events and activities obviously indicate that the relationship between science and society must be strengthened; they also suggest that STS insights can contribute to this strengthening. According to STS scholars, the problem is that the public receives conflicting advice from experts about what to think and how to act. The solution to this problem, however, is not unanimous advice, but a better understanding of how to handle disagreeing experts. The problem consists of naive expectations as to what expert advice can in fact deliver— expectations arising from the widely held but misleading view that scientific advice is certain. This false aura of certainty surrounding the role of the scientific expert is the main problem and the source of unrealistic expectations (Collins and Pinch 1993, 1998, 2005; Shapin 1995; Latour 1998; Hilgartner 2000; Wynne 2001; Jasanoff 2003; Irwin 2006; cf. Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). When conflicting advice is understood from the perspective of certainty, problems arise. The solutions to the problem, according to STS, are for scientific experts to stop presenting their work as about certainty and for the public to lower its 196 Göran Sundqvist expectations and to understand that science, like all other human enterprises , is uncertain and fallible. The only way to strengthen expert credibility is to foster a realistic understanding of what science is and what it can provide to policymakers. Doubts can be raised, though, as to whether this view is applicable to all policy areas in that there seem to be some instances of stable and trusting cooperation between scientific experts, policymakers, and the general public. One of the most obvious examples of such cooperation is European air policy. For almost four decades, scientific experts from all over Europe have cooperated in developing a scientific understanding of the problems related to long-range transboundary air pollution. Policymakers , with strong public support, have based their negotiations on this foundation, which has led to seven binding protocols on emissionreduction commitments. Expert conflicts as well as exaggerated expectations on the part of the public have been part of this story, but the result has not been instability or decreased expert credibility. How can this result be explained? In what ways has the interaction between science and policymaking been organized and perceived by involved actors and by the general public in this case? Can this example provide a clue to how more generally to restore the credibility of expertise and to foster robust relationships between science and society? This chapter is devoted to answering these questions. The overall aim is to investigate how key STS findings can help us understand expert advice in European air policy connected to the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) process and thereby critically assess these findings as well as the work of air policy experts. An additional aim is to review international relations (IR) research, which often treats science as a neutral, external input to the policy process, and to compare this research with STS findings regarding how to understand the interaction between science and policy in regulating transboundary air pollution. The next section describes CLRTAP and its success, emphasizing in particular the science–policy interaction that is often seen as an important explanation of this success. The aim is to define the characteristics of the purported success as described by involved actors and IR researchers . In the third section, the STS description of a general crisis in the relationship between science, policy, and the public is spelled out in more detail. As already mentioned, the STS portrayal of a general crisis differs from how European air policy work is usually assessed. In the...

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