Violación del artículo 12 de la Convención

In a series of publications on the Cumbrian sheepfarmers, Brian Wynne (1991, 1992, 1996) has developed perhaps the most famous case study of the prob- lematic character of science–public relations. Rather than assuming that the key problem is the public ignorance of science (as in the conventional deficit theory), in Wynne’s account it is the representatives of science who emerge as both ignorant and unreflexive in the face of public understandings. Equally, and rather than drawing upon questionnaire studies, this research builds upon a series of interviews, observations and ‘thick descriptions’ of local life during one social and environmental crisis.

Wynne provides an account of the social ramifications for scientific institutions and local communities alike when heavy rain deposited fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear power station explosion on the Cumbrian fells. Soon after the rainfall, during May and early June in 1986, confident minis- terial and scientific statements were issued reassuring farmers that the problem would clear up within a few weeks. However, by 20 June restrictions on movement and slaughter of sheep were implemented, although it was also announced that these would be temporary. Most worryingly, on 24 July the ban was extended indefinitely. A key observation for Wynne is that one con- sequence of these abrupt and unexplained changes in policy was for the cred- ibility of the scientists of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to become severely compromised among affected farmers.

The sheepfarmers’ scepticism regarding MAFF expertise was triggered and exacerbated in several other ways. For instance, the solutions offered by MAFF scientists tended to neglect the constraints on farmers’ practices (e.g. regarding the movement of sheep) and seemed to be alarmingly uninformed about very basic farming methods (e.g. what could be fed to the sheep). Over and above this, scientists issued pronouncements that were routinely couched in terms of certainties that contradicted the farmers’ own experiences of the contingen- cies and incertitudes of hill farming. More generally, Wynne has observed

that, while MAFF scientists drew confidently on laboratory studies of radio- active materials, the terrain on which they were operating was very different in character. In this way, scientific expertise was over-extended across very differ- ent contexts – but the self-confidence (or perhaps intellectual arrogance) of the scientists insulated them from these local factors and obstructed their learning from the ‘local experts’.

This problem of over-extension applied, for example, to MAFF’s attempts to measure radioactive levels on the fells by standardizing and randomizing the areas to be monitored. This ‘scientific’ approach took no account of the peculiarities of the fell terrain, peculiarities with which the farmers were intimately familiar. This familiarity meant that the farmers knew the location of the sheep’s favourite drinking places. For them, it seemed logical to concen- trate monitoring on these likely exposure sources. The point is that standard- ized, highly scientific measures, which were presented by MAFF as the ‘right’ way to gauge radiation levels bore, in the eyes of the farmers, little relevance to the realities and uncertainties of the fells and the sheep.

The outcome of these disparate perceptions was that the farmers, in problematizing the certainty entailed in the scientists’ assessments, began to see them as part of either a conspiracy or cover-up. Denied access to the under- lying uncertainties involved in the scientific evaluations of the longevity of radioactivity on the Cumbrian hills, farmers tended to view the changes of policy made by MAFF and its scientists as responses to other political factors (such as the imagined need to cover up the levels of radioactivity released from the nearby nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield).

Wynne argues that the scientists’ expertise encroached upon and often derogated the farmers’ own local knowledge. Proclaimed as being in the farm- ers’ best interests, the work and techniques of the scientists failed to take into account, let alone complement fittingly, the comparable skills of the farmers. While the farmers generally recognized that such monitoring was the proper domain of scientists, they were disillusioned by the ways in which this, and other, scientific techniques and the knowledge they generated were applied without entertaining, let alone recognizing, the relevance of their local non- scientific craft knowledge. This wholesale, unreflexive transplantation of sci- entific knowledge into the Cumbrian fells devalued the farmers’ hard-earned, less formally organized knowledge (see also Croll and Parkin 1992). The Cum- brian sheepfarmers came to view what Wynne terms the ‘body language’ of MAFF as posing a threat to their local craft knowledge, their collective way of life and, in sum, their social identity.

We can now abstract some of the key features of Wynne’s highly influential analysis. What is noticeable here is the assumption, following the sociology of scientific knowledge, that all knowledge is derived from its particular cultural and social context. Wynne’s analysis charts the clash of cultures between the expert and the lay, both conceptualized as local ‘actors’

(institutions or communities). The farmers’ ‘lay local’ knowledge is viewed as qualitatively different from that of the scientific experts in so far as it does not share in certain key assumptions and practices that undergird the scientific enterprise. Crucially, the farmers’ knowledge is based on collective, culturally mediated experience of the fell terrain and upon a keen sensibility for the uncertainties and contingencies found within a harsh and unpredictable environment. The association of local knowledges to community and experi- ence means that such local knowledges are intertwined with, and are partly constitutive of, local cultural identities. These local cultural identities are placed at risk by virtue of the expert knowledges imported into the lay local context.

Expert knowledges are thus threatening because, by virtue of the unequivocal ways in which they are presented, they undermine the status of local knowledges that are intimately tied to lay local identities. The result is that scientists and scientific institutions endanger their credibility and trust- worthiness. As Wynne (1996) puts it when summarizing the critical PUS approach (and counterposing it to the standard analysis of the ‘risk society’): ‘the fundamental sense of risk in the “risk society”, is risk to identity engendered by dependency upon expert systems which typically operate with such unreflexive blindness to their own culturally problematic and inadequate models of the human’ (p. 68). That is to say, expert scientific knowledge which ‘neglects and thus denigrates specialist lay knowledge’ (p. 68) poses a threat to lay local identities and, indeed, to our sense of personhood.

In Wynne’s version of ethnographic public understanding, lay local and expert knowledges are examined, at least in part, in terms of whether they sustain or jeopardize local social identities. Indeed, one might say that, contrary to the generally positive view of the value of science promulgated by survey questionnaire approaches, Wynne tends to point to the cultural dis-utility of scientific knowledge. Rather than acting as agents of the enlightenment, the mediators of scientific knowledge undermine, or attempt to colonize, the lay local and its related social identities – with negative consequences for the local publics.