Abstract
In policies targeting environmental and health hazards, an effort is frequently made to anticipate and avert more or less probable adverse events. In this context, computerized models are frequently portrayed as superior knowledge tools, for their capacity to extrapolate from existing data and predict hazards. This paper looks at the historical development and use of such models in regulation, with the specific example of structure-activity relationships (SARs) in the regulation of new industrial chemicals at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It asks how evidential culture(s) in a regulatory organization change, in particular how new methods and forms of knowledge find their place alongside others to forge regulatory decisions. The development and application of, first, a qualitative approach to structure-activity relationships, and then of quantitative models, show that the EPA had the necessary autonomy to imagine and adjust a method emerging in the research environment to respond to regulatory needs. This can be understood from a coproductionist perspective, if adjusted to take into account the bureaucratic knowledge that mediates the imagining and application of prediction in regulatory practice.
Highlights
In policies targeting environmental and health hazards, an effort is frequently made to anticipate uncertain adverse events, calculating the probability of their occurrence in the future (Sarewitz and Pielke Jr, 1999; Nelson et al, 2008)2
How have computational methods emerged as a form of science-forpolicy in an organization marked by high level of constraints on the demonstration of risk? How have these computational methods grown into an element of the evidential cultures practiced in a regulatory agency?
The history provided in this paper shows that the agency did import quantitative modelling from the outside, namely from the pharmaceutical industry, but actively constructed an original, qualitative technique of anticipation of risk based on the consideration of molecular structures by experts
Summary
In policies targeting environmental and health hazards, an effort is frequently made to anticipate uncertain adverse events, calculating the probability of their occurrence in the future (Sarewitz and Pielke Jr, 1999; Nelson et al, 2008)2. The introduction of structure-activity thinking at the EPA means that evidential cultures in use in the organization evolve either in the direction of a restrictive culture (using quantitative models to find correlations between two reductively considered thing, a molecule and a given toxicity endpoint), or an evaluative one (using analogies to produce signals of safety, and justify a pragmatic decision to further test a chemical).
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