Commercialisation of Non‐timber Forest Products: A Reality Check

This article challenges the pervasive view that commercialisation of non‐timber forest products can (easily) achieve ecosystem and species conservation as well as improving livelihoods. Following a brief review of who and what is involved, it focuses on the main ecological and livelihood risks of unconsidered promotion of NTFP commercialisation, drawing on a wide range of case studies from around the world. It concludes with some recommendations, emphasising the lack of ‘magic‐bullet’ products, and the importance ‐ among other things ‐ of not ignoring national policy, taking an integrated view of the value chain, considering the implications of different production options, and improving both quality and quantity.     

R&D production in the United States: Rethinking the Snowbelt–Sunbelt shift

The Frostbelt–Sunbelt shift in the US, which is thought to have accelerated during the 1970s, corresponds with recent findings that invention and innovation in the Southern and Western parts of the country have come to rival the traditional manufacturing belt. Whether research and development (R&D), a key input to new technology, shows a similar pattern is the focus of this study. It is found, that there was a shift in R&D activity to the Sunbelt during some decades, but not all, and that the manufacturing belt has maintained a slight R&D lead in the country. Still, parts of the Sunbelt rivalled the Northeast for R&D already in 1963. Thus, any national shift in the location of R&D must have occurred prior to the 1960s and before it might be thought to have happened. In the US, R&D production associates well with places that have an educated, professional, and technically specialized labor force. Those states that continue to build on these and similar techno-societal conditions will arguably be in a better position to grow.     

Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake

In this paper, I attempt to explain how existing work in the science and technology studies (STS) sub-field of public engagement with, or participation in, public issues involving science and technology, has performed a serious category mistake in allowing itself to be called ‘public participation in science’ research. This requires us to reflect more systematically upon how our assumed objects, here the public issues we think we are dealing with, come to be ‘objectified’ in the forms which they do. Using the three sister papers, I make some conceptual distinctions which carry important political implications and corresponding analytical implications for STS. I suggest that the typical reduction of participation questions to ones of ‘what qualification do publics have for engagement in expert practices?’ is a mistaken distraction from more important questions which not only much analytical work, but also dominant practice, continues to ignore. This reductionist tendency even in social science and STS may tend to intensify, the more the issues reach across global networks and arenas. Finally, I suggest that STS work on public participation needs to enrich itself with some relevant political theory and philosophy, which would throw due historical perspective on the deeper forces shaping scientific understandings and normative representational performances of its ‘democratic’ publics.     

Fragments of development: Nation, gender, and the space of modernity

Imagine any process of economic development. How do the social,political, and economic interact in your imaginary development?Who is active and who is passive? What stands in the way? Howis success or failure measured? Who is then credited or blamed?The ways that we think about development are at least partiallyreflective of essentialist constructions that have been producedby societal and theoretical discourses. Bergeron has examinedboth mainstream and critical bodies of literature and emergedwith a powerful set of observations regarding these constructions. The discursive analyses in Fragments of Development demonstrate     

An Examination of Accidental-Release Scenarios from Chemical-Processing Sites: The Relation of Race to Distance

Objective. This study is intended to enhance the discussion of environmental equity by offering a methodology that is based on chemical‐specific risk zones that reflect inventories of chemical facilities, risk dispersion modeling, local weather conditions, and the unique chemical processes of each site. The central question concerns whether the racial makeup of a community near a chemical‐processing site is characteristic of the city, county, or community as a whole. In essence, does the racial makeup of a community vary by distance from a chemical‐processing facility? Methods. A comparison of the racial makeup of the community was examined for 13 chemical‐processing sites submitting off‐site consequence data under the Environmental Protection Agency Risk Management Plan, by clusters of the sites, and for all sites in the community. Instead of relative ratios, we look at odds ratios. The odds ratio compares the odds of being African American to the odds of being non‐African American at two given distance classes. In this way we may make inferences about how much higher (or lower) are the odds of an African American (relative to a non‐African American) living in a closer distance class (as opposed to a further distance class). Results. The results show that as one moves further from a facility, the characteristics of the community reflect less and less the makeup near the site. The percentage of African Americans living near a chemical‐processing site tends to be much higher when compared to population characteristics further from the site. Conclusions. The study shows that distance does make a significant difference in the racial characteristics of the population from a chemical‐processing site. Using data reflecting accidental‐release scenarios, weather conditions, and the chemical process from the local community provides a more realistic basis for determining vulnerability zones.     

Distribution of Arsenic and Copper in Sediment Pore Water: An Ecological Risk Assessment Case Study for Offshore Drilling Waste Discharges

Due to the hydrophobic nature of synthetic based fluids (SBFs), drilling cuttings are not very dispersive in the water column and settle down close to the disposal site. Arsenic and copper are two important toxic heavy metals, among others, found in the drilling waste. In this article, the concentrations of heavy metals are determined using a steady state "aquivalence-based" fate model in a probabilistic mode. Monte Carlo simulations are employed to determine pore water concentrations. A hypothetical case study is used to determine the water quality impacts for two discharge options: 4% and 10% attached SBFs, which correspond to the best available technology option and the current discharge practice in the U.S. offshore. The exposure concentration ( C_E ) is a predicted environmental concentration, which is adjusted for exposure probability and bioavailable fraction of heavy metals. The response of the ecosystem  ( R_E )  is defined by developing an empirical distribution function of predicted no-effect concentration. The pollutants' pore water concentrations within the radius of 750 m are estimated and cumulative distributions of risk quotient  ( RQ = C_E / R_E )  are developed to determine the probability of RQ greater than 1.     

Heuristics Structure and Pervade Formal Risk Assessment

Lay perceptions of risk appear rooted more in heuristics than in reason. A major concern of the risk regulation literature is that such “error‐strewn” perceptions may be replicated in policy, as governments respond to the (mis)fears of the citizenry. This has led many to advocate a relatively technocratic approach to regulating risk, characterized by high reliance on formal risk and cost‐benefit analysis. However, through two studies of chemicals regulation, we show that the formal assessment of risk is pervaded by its own set of heuristics. These include rules to categorize potential threats, define what constitutes valid data, guide causal inference, and to select and apply formal models. Some of these heuristics lay claim to theoretical or empirical justifications, others are more back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations, while still more purport not to reflect some truth but simply to constrain discretion or perform a desk‐clearing function. These heuristics can be understood as a way of authenticating or formalizing risk assessment as a scientific practice, representing a series of rules for bounding problems, collecting data, and interpreting evidence (a methodology). Heuristics are indispensable elements of induction. And so they are not problematic per se, but they can become so when treated as laws rather than as contingent and provisional rules. Pitfalls include the potential for systematic error, masking uncertainties, strategic manipulation, and entrenchment. Our central claim is that by studying the rules of risk assessment qua rules, we develop a novel representation of the methods, conventions, and biases of the prior art.