Scientific and Everyday Knowledge: Trust and the Politics of Environmental Initiatives

This paper analyzes social processes underlying relationships between technoscientific knowledge and governmental regulatory activities in the context of the recent case of an Australian hazardous waste initiative. It maps a nexus of the phenomenology of trust, the formation of technoscientific knowledge, and the political philosophy of regulation and the clarification of knowledge claims. It proposes that these processes depend upon elemental social and political components described by various writers in terms of `the constitution of scientific objects', `the construction of scientific types', `familiarity', the `taken-for-granted', `trust', `justice', and other concepts. It introduces the term `suspended doubt' to describe a previously undifferentiated situation in individual and social interaction. It concludes that democratization now increasingly extends, in the political handling of environmental initiatives and risk in the conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism, to the democratization and negotiation of knowledge claims. This produces problems for representative democracy and expressed needs for more adaptive political processes.