Procedural Care: Licensing Practices in Animal Research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Animal research has always been debated on moral and ethical grounds. Non-governmental organisations repeatedly critique the lack of openness and transparency around the use of animals in science. In response to this critique, openness and transparency have, in the most recent decade, been integrated in new ways in systems and practices of licensing animal research in the EU, materialised and conceptualised by a harm-benefit framework. In the licensing system in Norway–this article's empirical site–articulating and balancing between ‘harms' and ‘benefits' are core activities to foster a ‘culture of care' that responds to a diverse set of care relations: those between science and society, science and policy, and humans and animals. Harm-benefit analysis is, however, plagued by tensions that can be traced into licensing procedures. Performing harm-benefit analysis in this context can be called ‘procedural care’. While procedural care is meant to manage conflicting cares in animal research, it also tends to conceal tensions that emerge in practice. Yet, procedural care is a genre promises to bring together types of care and more openly engage with the relationship among them. Conceptually and methodologically, procedural care calls for the study of care in the administrative and legal domain.