The Science of Bureaucracy

Risk Decision-Making and the US Environmental Protection Agency

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20031397
AutoresDavid Demortain (0000-0001-9544-7507, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Páginas452
Fecha de publicación2020-01-21
Open AccessSí
TipoBOOK
RevistaScience of Bureaucracy (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7551/mitpress/12248.001.0001
OpenAlexW4229685001
Open LibraryOL29855509M
ISBN9780262356671
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas25

How the US Environmental Protection Agency designed the governance of risk and forged its legitimacy over the course of four decades. The US Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 to protect the public health and environment, administering and enforcing a range of statutes and programs. Over four decades, the EPA has been a risk bureaucracy, formalizing many of the methods of the scientific governance of risk, from quantitative risk assessment to risk ranking. Demortain traces the creation of these methods for the governance of risk, the controversies to which they responded, and the controversies that they aroused in turn. He discusses the professional networks in which they were conceived; how they were used; and how they served to legitimize the EPA. Demortain argues that the EPA is structurally embedded in controversy, resulting in constant reevaluation of its credibility and fueling the evolution of the knowledge and technologies it uses to produce decisions and to create a legitimate image of how and why it acts on the environment. He describes the emergence and institutionalization of the risk assessment–risk management framework codified in the National Research Council's Red Book, and its subsequent unraveling as the agency's mission evolved toward environmental justice, ecological restoration, and sustainability, and as controversies over determining risk gained vigor in the 1990s. Through its rise and fall at the EPA, risk decision-making enshrines the science of a bureaucracy that learns how to make credible decisions and to reform itself, amid constant conflicts about the environment, risk, and its own legitimacy. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries

Agency (philosophy) · Bureaucracy · Business · Corporate governance · Credibility · Economics · Institutionalisation · Legitimacy · Management · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Risk assessment · Risk Governance · Risk management · Social science · Sociology · Sustainability · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Law · Public Administration · Risk Perception and Management · Environmental policy · environmental protection agency · united states