Procedural choices in regulatory science

Abstract

Policymakers have long assumed that scientific inputs to regulatory decisions (facts) should be insulated as far as possible from political and policy considerations (values). Some have even recommended a complete institutional separation between scientific and political decisionmaking on the model of the science court. Drawing on research in the social studies of science, this paper suggests that such separatist models fail to address important differences between regulatory science and research science. Regulatory science, which provides the basis for policy, routinely operates with different goals and priorities and under different institutional and temporal constraints from science done in academic settings and without implications for policy. Four brief case studies are presented to underscore the need for negotiations between science and policy in making regulatory decisions. The paper concludes that adversarial or trial-type approaches are generally less effective than processes that promote negotiation among competing interpretations of regulatory science. This finding, in turn, has implications that should be factored into the institutional and procedural design of scientific advice in the regulatory process.