There's been so much discussion about recent federal restrictions on doing and communicating science: closing laboratories and libraries, firing some scientists and muzzling the rest, eliminating the National Round Table on the Environment and Economy, slashing environmental laws. (Check out ActiveHistory for lots of useful sources.)
The reason for concern seems pretty clear: less research and communication means less knowledge, and therefore less ability to protect the environment, especially given big developments like pipelines and the oil sands. Knowledge, it's assumed, equals environmental protection.
But it's worth getting a little more analytical here, drawing on what we know about the relations between science and policy. I've been thinking about this while revising my chapter for the new edition of the edited textbook, Canadian Environmental Policy and Politics. My chapter is about the roles of science in environmental policy, and so in my revisions I've included, among other novelties, what's happened with federal environmental research since 2009.
It's not a pretty story, of course. But it's also necessary to go beyond the simple assertion that "science cutbacks are a bad thing". Perhaps they are, but that needs to be demonstrated, not assumed. And we can do that by drawing on a little theory about science and policy. (Be forewarned: the following is going to get a little wonkish. If you're not into science-policy theory, stop here.)
So here's a brief version of that theory. It can be boiled down to two key points:
1) All environmental science today can be placed into one of four models of science: basic research, regulatory research, advocacy research, and innovation research. Each has its role.
In basic research, goals are set by scientists, framed in terms of disciplines (or interdisciplinary subject areas), sometimes generating unexpected knowledge about environmental issues, but also neglecting topics that may be important, but aren't scientifically interesting. It's done mainly in universities and (until recently) federal laboratories.
Regulatory researchsupports environmental decisions: monitoring industrial impacts and the state of the environment. It provides essential input into these decisions, but is also often secret, may be of dubious quality, and doesn't question government or industry priorities. It's done mainly by government agencies, industry, and university faculties of applied science.
Advocacy researchsupports activism and policy change, by providing alternative interpretations of industrial impacts and the environment. Its essential role is to question and broaden the policy agenda, but it can also have a polarizing effect on public debates. It's generally done by advocacy groups, often advised by university scientists.
Innovation researchis focused on developing marketable technologies intended to improve industry's environmental performance, or open new markets in the "green" economy. It's essential because it helps improve the economy's environmental performance. It is also a great favourite of governments, because it seems to make it possible to avoid having to choose between economic and environmental priorities. It's mainly done by government, industry (usually with government subsidies), and university faculties of applied science, especially engineering.
The key point is that all four models of environmental science are useful and necessary. They also support each other. Advocacy and regulatory research need the quality check that university scientists doing basic research can provide (as they did just this week with oil sands monitoring); innovation research needs the capacity to anticipate that basic and regulatory research can provide (for example, research on energy-efficient technology needs the motivation provided by climate science); and basic research needs regulatory and advocacy science to help make it relevant.
So it's wrong to argue that only scientists should set research priorities, or conversely, that only market forces should determine what research gets done. Both kinds of guidance, and much else, are needed for a healthy science system.
2) To play a useful role in policy, science has to be three things: credible, relevant, and legitimate. Credibility is mainly about scientific quality (assured, in part, through peer review). Relevance is about whether the research connects to things people are actually concerned about. And legitimacy is about how the research is perceived: whether it is seen as unbiased, transparent, and without a hidden agenda.
So what we have then, is the theoretical case for concern about federal science cutbacks. By reducing the federal capacity for basic research (and, indirectly, the university capacity, by closing facilities like the Experimental Lakes Area that are used by academic scientists), the country loses the ability to anticipate emerging environmental issues, and to check on the quality of other forms of environmental research. Reduced regulatory research impedes regulatory decisions relating to industry impacts, drinking water quality, and much else. On the other hand, increased support for innovation research (by subsidizing industry research, and requiring industry support for access to NSERC funding), while not itself a bad thing, means that innovation may not have the guidance it needs from basic and regulatory research to be focused on the most critical environmental needs. And federal controls on science communication have affected not only the relevance of its research, but, especially, its legitimacy, by justifying the conclusion that the government has a hidden agenda.
The key point here is that science and policy form a pretty complicated ecosystem, that i) requires a certain amount of balanced effort in order to work properly, and ii) if it is to work properly, can only work out in the open.
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