Perspectives on the Precautionary Principle

In June of 1999 the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis sponsored a 2-day policy workshop in Washington, DC on the topic: “The Precautionary Principle: Refine It or Replace It?”. The purpose of the workshop was to stimulate scholars and practitioners to consider how the desire for precautionary action against uncertain technological hazards should be addressed by policy makers and risk managers. The workshop was not designed to produce a consensus but instead was aimed at fostering different points of view for consideration. Participants in the workshop included 17 invited speakers as well as 150 professionals from government, industry, academia, and the non-profit sector, including participants from Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The workshop was organized around four case studies: biotechnology, synthetic chemicals, electric and magnetic fields from power lines and consumer products, and man-made greenhouse gases that may contribute to global climate change. A short summary of the workshop is published in our Center’s publication, Risk in Perspective (September 1999), which is available from the Center upon request. A total of 12 scientific papers were prepared prior to the workshop and revised by the authors based on commentary at the workshop; 11 were subsequently approved for journal publication. Six of the papers are being published by the Journal of Risk Research, a journal launched by the Society for Risk Analysis of Europe. The other five papers are being published in this issue of HERA. The authors of the papers have done a commendable job of drafting each paper as a freestanding contribution and thus I will make no effort to summarize them. I do, however, wish to make some observations, based on the workshop experience, about how scholarly and public debate about the precautionary principle can be improved. First, there is no such thing as “the” precautionary principle. In fact, Sandin (1999) recently analyzed 19 different formulations of precaution and found that they differ conceptually on several critical dimensions. When discussing precaution, it is constructive for people to define, as precisely as possible, what definition of the principle they are employing. Perhaps the most negotiated version of the principle,