Not Entirely Reliable: Private Scientific Organizations and Risk Regulation – The Case of Electromagnetic Fields

Private scientific organizations exert a great deal of influence in the regulation of some technological risks. The high level of expertise of their members is arguably a good reason for them to participate in making and monitoring risk regulations, in order to adjust these to scientific progress. Nevertheless, there are also sound reasons why governments shouldn’t uncritically follow the views expressed by such organizations. Taking the role played by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection in the regulation of electromagnetic fields as an illustrative example, this paper shows that private scientific organizations such as these are structurally less well suited than democratic authorities when it comes to managing those risks.

There are several good reasons for governments not to uncritically follow the recommendations made by private scientific organisations such as the ICNIRP in order to regulate some risks, in particular those risks that affect third parties.

Such organisations do not have the right incentives to make the decisions – or, eventually, the recommendations – that maximize social welfare, not even the welfare of most citizens. They lack the adequate incentives to give due consideration to all interests at stake and to strike a fair balance between them. Let us remember that the limits of exposure set down in the ICNIRP Guidelines have not taken into account, inter alia, neither possible interference with medical devices at levels below the recommended limits nor the social costs and benefits of establishing such thresholds.

Private scientific organizations such as the ICNIRP often have an excessively homogeneous composition. The system of cooptation used to elect their members favours such homogeneity. That lack of plurality tends to reduce both the quantity and the quality of the available information that serves the basis of their judgments, to stifle critical dialogue, to exacerbate the common biases and positions of their members and to produce extreme outcomes, polarized in the direction of those biases and points of view.

Experts are not immune to the cognitive biases that other people commonly suffer from and that make them overly resistant to revise and change their opinions. Some of those biases affect experts even to a greater degree than laypeople.

Scientists tend to solve policy problems – e.g. setting limits of maximum permissible exposure to electromagnetic radiation – by applying purely scientific criteria. This is incorrect. The optimal degree of stability, discontinuity and responsiveness to new information does not necessarily have to be the same for scientific theories and legal rules. On the contrary, it is probable that the latter should be more elastic in that regard than the former ones. Even though new empirical evidence contrary to a mainstream scientific theory might not eventually constitute a sufficient reason to abandon such a theory at the purely scientific level, it may justify a change in the legal rules grounded in that theory.

Copyright:	© Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH
Source:	Issue 01/2013 (Februar 2013)
Pages:	14
Autor:	Prof. Dr. Gabriel Doménech Pascual

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