Public Participation, Legitimate Political Decisions, and Controversial Technologies Introduction

How should a diversity of public opinions and perceptions of controversial policies or technologies regarding, for example, food, health, and medicine should be accommodated or respected in the overall legal, administrative, and political frameworks? What is required to enhance or preserve the democratic legitimacy of such a range of decisions? What sort of public participation should we want or require in designing the legal, administrative, and political frameworks? In particular, what weight should public participation have compared to other requirements of justice and legitimacy? This special issue concerns the above questions, and is one of the outcomes of a multidisciplinary research project undertaken at the University of Copenhagen titled “Plants for Changing World.” The project involved researchers in plant and environmental sciences, pharmacology, law, food and resources economics, and philosophy. This project aimed at underlining the scientific and social challenges raised by a variety of agricultural developments, in particular in plant design. These developments included genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and rewilding of crops (e.g., Marchman et al. 2015, Palmgren et al. 2015). As is familiar, GMOs create a lot of public resistance, often despite contrary scientific evidence that they may be beneficial and involve no significant risk to health or the environment. At least in the European context, what we might call the public-participation paradigm has been influential in the regulation of GMOs. This is the idea that public participation—as well as some degree of public acceptance—is a precondition for legitimate decision making in the domain of novel plant technologies. Numerous surveys have found a considerable public resistance in all European countries regarding GMOs and their development (European Commission 2010, p. 18), and in part this may explain the costly regulatory system and the lack of will among producers to engage in the development of GMOs. Yet the suspicion is often voiced that this resistance is illegitimate because it is not sufficiently scientifically informed, or because it is not based on sufficiently cohesive and justified moral values. An additional concern is that one major potential of novel plant technology touches climate change and food supply, issues that mainly affect humans in developing countries and future generations. But it is unclear how benefits to people other than those who are involved in the political decision-making process should be reflected in the public-participation paradigm. So, there is considerable reason to rethink and refine the public-participation paradigm as it applies to novel plant technology. This special issue relates to current discussions in political theory about legitimacy, deliberative democracy, epistemic conceptions of democracy, deliberative failures, public understanding of science, and collective decisions in contexts of uncertainty. Moreover, its main focus is the public-participation paradigm (i.e., the idea that public decision making needs citizens’ involvement in order to be legitimate). According to the public-participation paradigm, affected individuals should give their qualified consent to a given policy in some sort of deliberative process. The public-participation paradigm raises all sorts of questions that are central for political theory—for example: This special issue is obviously too short to deal with all these questions. Nonetheless, these questions indicate the richness and the depth of the issues related to the participation of citizens in public decision making, issues that need to be tackled by political theory. The task undertaken by the authors of this special issue of Les Ateliers de l’Éthique/The Ethics Forum is double pronged. On the one hand, it is to discuss the implications of the public-participation paradigm for decision making that bears on scientific activities and advances that are perceived as risky by citizens. On the other hand, it is to question the very role played by …