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Myriad articles have been written about the precautionary principle; some commentators have tried to clarify its content, others have praised the principle, and still others have decried it and eventually advocated for its repeal or nonadoption. The debate continues. The purpose of this contribution is twofold: it aims to reconstruct a desirable version of the precautionary principle by identifying its constitutive elements, and to deconstruct the most notable critiques of the principle by explaining the misconceptions upon which these criticisms rest.
The discussion that follows warrants a brief introduction of the principle. In its basic version, the principle holds that scientific uncertainty should not be used to postpone (regulatory) action. While this may appear trivial, in practice it is not. In fact, one problem of environmental decision-making in times of continuously evolving technologies is that uncertainty over the potential hazards of new technologies can easily be used as arguments against regulation. This is all the more true in situations where governments endorse deregulation as the preferred or default regulatory philosophy; in such circumstances, proponents of regulation bear the burden of providing clear grounds of justification.
The escalation of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as Mad Cow Disease) in British cattle, which resulted in a national crisis, exemplifies the problems inherent in such a regulatory culture. The crisis originated in 1986 when the first cases of BSE were recorded in Britain. In spite of the rapid escalation of the BSE epidemic in 1987, U.K. policy-makers did not take any regulatory actions because the risks of cross-species transmissibility were deemed unproven. In stark opposition to the spirit of the precautionary principle, scientific uncertainty was used as a reason to postpone regulatory action.
Only after 1995, when for the first time humans contracted a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and the risk that BSE could cross species became manifest, did U.K. officials and policy institutions respond to the emergency. The response was rather late, though, not only in terms of human costs and costs to agro-industry, but also in light of the disruption of public confidence in official institutions that resulted thereafter. This example underscores the point that the problem of postponing regulatory action because of uncertainties is a real one. The implementation of the precautionary...