The Role of Science in Assessing International Environmental Standards: Lessons from the Case of Animal Welfare Guideli

1. The Role of Science in Assessing International Environmental Standards: Lessons from the Case of Animal Welfare Guidelines Ike Sharpless July 1st, 2010 15th International Scientific Congress Havana, Cuba

2. Science and Policy, Values and Valuation: the Limits of Science-Based Policy • A disclaimer… • Lecture Outline • The Science-Policy Interface • Case Study: International Farm Animal Welfare Guidelines • Lessons for Environmental Policy

3. I. The Science-Policy Interface • Basic science v. applied science • Applied sciences like environmental science and animal welfare science are rife with uncertainty, for various reasons • ‘Sound science’ v. ‘junk science’ (McGarity 2004, Steel 2004) • Appeals to stick to policy based only on ‘sound science’ can often be a shield to protect specific stakeholder interests (Wagner 1995) • Critiques of ‘junk science’ are often political rather than scientific criticisms (Herrick 2001) Image source: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/scienceflowchart

4. The Rise of Risk Assessment • From 1983-2008: the NRC ‘Red Book’ and “Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment” studies • The role of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Hsu 2005) • Bias in Environmental Risk Assessments during value formation (Ball 2005) Image source: NAS/NRC risk assessment/management paradigm. SOURCE: Adapted from NRC, 1983a.

5. Uncertainty, Indeterminacy, Incommensurability • Wicked problems and social messes • Science, especially applied science, is rife with uncertainty (Sigel 2010) • This is compounded by competing value sets that each claim to ‘own’ the science Source for images: http://www.strategykinetics.com/2007/09/this-is-the-sec.html

6. The Fact-Value Dichotomy • Quantitative vs. qualitative inputs • What role does science play when competing value frameworks exist? (Anthony 2004) • Distinguishing ‘science-based’ and ‘value-based’ claims (Manning 2006) • What do we value, and how? • Contingent Valuation • Discourse-based valuation (O’Hara 1996, Wilson 2002, Kumar 2008) and narrative valuation (Satterfield 2000) “Risk has emerged as a universalizing metric or common currency of governance that facilitates conversations across an incredibly wide range of issues and actors. By reducing threats to a common currency (usually mortality rates, dollars, or pounds) risk-benefit analysis permits actors with fundamentally incommensurable value commitments to make otherwise infeasible trade-offs about priorities, goals, resources, and responsibilities. Thus, a discourse of values is pushed aside by a discourse of valuation.” (Rayner 2007)

7. II. Case Study: International Farm Animal Welfare Guidelines • In mid-2009, I conducted phone interviews with US and European stakeholders from: government agencies, intergovernmental organizations, animal advocacy organizations, livestock trade groups and academia. • The interview questions, formulated in a literature review, focused on the role of farm animal welfare in World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) law and policy.

8. Learning from the Polarizing Case of “Factory Farming” • Distinguishing stakeholder groups: producers, consumers, and government—each have different interests and potential biases • The importance of framing • “trench warfare”: the big-picture truth often gets drowned out by caricatures, on both sides • The lesson for environmental policy

9. What are “science-based standards”? • Animal welfare science as applied science rather than basic science—this makes appeals to scientific objectivity extremely difficult • The Brambell Report’s “five freedoms” (turn around, groom, stand, lie down, stretch) • Three different stakeholders, Three different parameters (Fraser 2004) • Biological functioning • Natural Living • Affective States

10. Whose Science? Which Standards? • Livestock trade groups and USDA APHIS tended to prioritize ‘biological functioning’, • Animal advocacy groups (and many citizens) tended to prioritize ‘natural living’ (Vanhonacker 2008) • The EC emphasized the role of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the risk assessment model (risk assessment, risk management, risk communication) Image source: http://www.thepigsite.com/articles/14/pig-welfare /2862/the-science-behind-the-issues-in-animal-welfare

11. Not ‘sound science’ v. ‘junk science’, but different subdisciplines • competing scientific understandings backing competing normative frameworks (Sarewitz2004) (Examples: ethology, veterinary pathology, veterinary epidemiology, and stress physiology.) • Ethologists would be likely to conclude “that free range hens have a better life than battery hens in traditional barren cages because they can exercise a number of behaviors that battery hens cannot (e.g. dust bathe, scratch and lay their eggs in a nest). Other applied scientists have based their views on veterinary pathology. They have come to the conclusion that battery hens have the better life because their mortality rates are much lower than those of free range hens. (Sandøe 2006) -Konrad Lorenz, 1973 Nobel laureate and a founder of ethology

12. The Growth of ‘Process Standards’ • According to one group, process standards “extend far beyond efforts to assure biosafety and biosecurity…and relate to societal expectations regarding how food should be produced…may be more a matter of perception than of science…[they include] animal welfare, fair-trading, local sourcing, organic farming, and the avoidance of GMOs.” (ECLAC 2009) • Lessons for environmental policy—the role of private, public, and third-party ecolabels Image source: www.ecolabeling.com

13. Intergovernmental Organizations and the Role of Science in Policy Decisions • Necessary but not sufficient conditions, or the only common denominator? • Article 2.2 of the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) Agreement, members must assure that any measure “is based on scientific principles and is not maintained without sufficient scientific evidence” • The standards of the CODEX Alimentarius and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) are the WTO-sanctioned bodies to provide scientific evidence on food safety and animal health • In the case of animal welfare, however, there is no clear scientific consensus—although some stakeholders would disagree “The mutual construction of epistemic and legal authority across international organizations has been critical for constituting and stabilizing a global regime for the regulation of food safety…this process has also given rise to an authoritative framework for risk analysis touted as “scientifically rigorous” but embodying particular value choices regarding health, environment and the dispensation of regulatory power” (Winickoff 2010)

14. Science and Guidelines at the OIE • Recent science-based initiatives at the OIE include establishing guidelines initially on the slaughter and transport of animals—guidelines on housing are in progress. • As one of the academic respondents noted, “you can have a technical or science-based standard, or you can have a process where 174 member country representatives vote on something. But if it’s democratically chosen by consensus of 174 countries, then it can’t be just science based.” • Other issues that matter to some (but not all) stakeholders: the positive experiences of animals, the ethical implications of genetic uniformity, applying the precautionary principle to farm animal welfare

15. III. Lessons for Environmental Policy • As with the case of animal welfare, environmental science and policymaking is complex and contains many distinct and competing viewpoints • The case of ‘wicked problems’; science can inform policy in such cases, but it can’t guide it (Rayner 2007) • The precautionary principle and the limits of science-based regulation (Levidow 2005, Rothstein 2006)

16. ‘Sound science’, or hiding behind science? • Various actors in the case of farm animal welfare (consciously or unconsciously) valued personal and policy preferences as being more ‘science-based’ than other policy preferences • One food and environment example among many: Florida agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson on “science-based standards” vs. “arbitrary nutrient standards” (Bronson 2009) • The lesson? Policy formation in domains with disagreement over values (of which environmental policy is a prime example) can never be ‘strictly science-based’

17. Domains with Similarly ‘Wicked’ Problems • Conservation law (Tear 2005) and ecosystem-based management (De Santo 2010) • Nuclear energy policy • Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other emergent domains • Other food policy areas • Usually trade-related (NFTC 2003) • GMOs, cloning, organics • ‘best available science’ (Lupien 2000) Image source: http://www.projectcartoon.com/

18. Key Lessons from the Case of Animal Welfare • For better or for worse, applied science is always politicized (Doering 2010) • Science and ethics can both be ambiguous—sometimes appealing to the political process is the best strategy (Alario 2001) • When international organizations address wicked problems like international farm animal welfare standardization, they turn to science as ‘the only common denominator’ – because the science in question is applied, and the issue is wicked, however, science can’t really be the final arbiter.

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