*** MARIA WEIMER, ANNIEK DE RUIJTER (Eds.): Regulating Risks in the European Union. The Co-production of Expert and Executive Power. Hart Publishing (Kemp House, Chawley Park, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9PH, UK. Tel: (44-1256) 302890 – Fax: 842084 – Email: mail@hartpub.co.uk – Internet: http://www.hartpub.co.uk ). 2017, 266 pp, 65 £. ISBN 978-1-84946-879-4.
Experts rarely have a good reputation these days. Sometimes, they simply generate doubt, like when the European Food Safety Agency deals with glyphosate. At other times, they are used negatively for political ends, for example when Conservative Michael Gove commented in the run-up to the Brexit referendum: ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts.’ Either way, it is a fact that, as Maria Weimer and Anniek de Ruijter point out, ‘in the public debate, experts and expertise have come under attack.’ This is particularly the case in the European Union when experts and expertise could well be used by political power.
Following on from a workshop organised three years ago at the premises of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, this remarkable book has eleven… experts – mostly lawyers but also political scientists and specialists in health or technology – who analyse in great depth the relationship between EU executive power and regulatory science in decision-making on risk and technology, their basic aim being to link up discussions on the role of expertise and debate about the legitimacy of executive power exercised in the Union via its various bodies and institutions, particularly the Commission. They rely on the concept of coproduction of power by experts and the executive, which is developed and detailed in these pages by Prof. Sheila Jasanoff (of Harvard University) who explains that ‘centralisation and presumed completeness of knowledge supply a firmer basis for credible displays of public reason and regulatory control.’
In the introductory chapter, the book’s editors, both of whom lecture in law at Amsterdam University, start by pointing out why technocrats and experts have gradually come to dominate political personnel when it comes to regulating risk: ‘Protecting EU citizens from health and environmental risks has been one of the main arguments, together with the need to ensure the functioning of the EU internal market, used to justify the expansion of the EU regulatory state,’ they write, noting that this evolution has been accompanied by empowerment of the EU executive via the rising power of comitology players and quasi-regulatory European agencies. The authors also note why the pertinent expertise at the political level in the EU swings ‘between Epistemic and Political Authority,’ Maria Weimer and Anniek de Ruijter echoing recent studies hinting that ‘the Commission also uses experts groups to politically substantiate its pre-defined positions vis-à-vis other actors.’
A book like this is too rich in lessons to make it possible to properly introduce it in a few lines. We would simply point out that in these pages, it becomes ever clearer that the mission of expertise, at European level, is to legitimise executive power and justify its decisions on risk and technology including their legal and political consequences. For example, Prof. Elen Stokes of Birmingham University explains that by assimilating synthetic biology into its known processes, the Commission has ensured that ‘democratic deliberation on the broader ethical, legal and social impacts of synthetic biology is sidelined.’ Likewise, adds lawyer Tanja Ehnert, the definition of nanomaterials has been ‘depoliticised’ by being handed to the European Commission rather than the European Parliament...
Summing up, the authors brought together in these pages call for regulation of risk at EU level to be given a drastic rethink. ‘Risk governance is a site in which European institutions assert their right to govern all European lives - thereby constructing an imaginary of a united Europe - by generating persuasive technical rationales for centralised policy action,’ as Sheila Jasanoff puts it. Like her, everyone considers that an end must be put to this dominance of the executive by restoring to risk governance legal and constitutional foundations that also (and most importantly) take the public interest into account.
Michel Theys
*** SANDRINE MALJEAN-DUBOIS (Ed.): The Effectiveness of Environmental Law. Intersentia (Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge, CB3 0AX, UK. Tel. : (44-1223) 370170 – Fax: 370169 – Email: mail@intersentia.co.uk – Internet: http://www.intersentia.co.uk ). European Environmental Law Forum series, No. 3. 2017, 347 pp, €75, £72, $90. ISBN 978-1-78068-467-3.
Protecting the environment has become the concern of any local politician worth their salt, be it at any level of power, from the most local to the global level via the region, the State and, of course, the European Union. From the gradual awareness of the fight to be fought to this end has emerged a raft of legal instruments which are supposed to provide protection. As Sandrine Maljean-Dubois points out in the introductory chapter, this ‘impressive development in environmental law has not always been matched by corresponding improvements in environmental quality.’ This professor of international environmental law at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Aix-Marseille University aligns facts that are as worrying as they are irrefutable: ‘The threats to our environment and, by extension, to our health have never been so numerous or serious. Ecosystems and natural resources are declining at an alarming rate. Yet, climate change is a reality. Environmental degradation is an ever-growing challenge. The threats jeopardize our children's future, and subsequent generations' futures, because of their long-term consequences, not to mention their irreversibility.’ Aware that it is not exaggerated to assert, as the editor of this book does, that it is now our ‘very survival’ that is at stake, it was certainly useful or even perfectly indispensable for the question of the effectiveness of environmental law to be taken to task. This was the subject of a conference organised by the European Environmental Law Forum at Aix-en-Provence nearly three years ago and this book includes fourteen of the contributions presented at the conference. They addressed both better legislation and best practice for implementing it, with the specialists who spoke there examining the question from a range of academic and practitioner viewpoints, with geographical sensibilities also revealing great diversity. They formulate suggestions for improving the effectiveness of this law using classic approaches on the penal and administrative fronts (civil sanctions, strengthening the regulatory structure, liability rules, the role of judges etc) and also putting forward more innovative methods such as public participation, collaborative or hybrid governance and the possible role of the private sector.
(PBo)
*** TANJA EHNERT: The EU and Nanotechnologies. A Critical Analysis. Hart Publishing (Kemp House, Chawley Park, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9PH, UK. Tel: (44-1256) 302890 – Fax: 842084 – Email: mail@hartpub.co.uk – Internet: http://www.hartpub.co.uk ). 2017, 255 pp, £75. ISBN 978-1-5099-0850-9.
This book follows on from a doctoral thesis, the idea for which was born when Tanja Ehnert was a trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and which she presented in Marc 2015 at the Maastricht Centre for European Law au Centre after coming to fruition at the European University Institute in Florence and back in her country, Germany. A lawyer today at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment in Berlin, in the book the author studies the role of law in confronting major societal transformations embodied by the emergence of nanotechnologies, which are revolutionary in that a human hair is 80,000 times the width of a nanometre. Their rising power ‘hence embraces the fundamental tension between scientific and technical progress and its unsolicited side effects,’ at the interface of science, politics and law. How are the societal challenges arising from the ‘progress’ represented by nanotechnologies managed within the European Union, the level of analysis deemed pertinent by the author because nanotechnologies come to play in domains such as chemicals, food, cosmetics and medicines, for which there is European harmonisation? Hence the desire she displays to critically and scientifically analyse regulatory developments that are registered at European level in this domain, her aim being to gauge the EU's behaviour in the face of risks. In an initial chapter, she discerns what exactly nanotechnologies are and how they carry risk. After also providing an overview of the current EU regulations in this domain, she looks at the three societal transformations at play, namely globalisations, functional differentiation and the risk society, which she says are exemplified by nanotechnologies and have influenced discourse about regulation in the European context. On this theoretical basis, Tanja Ehnert defines in the third chapter the ‘tangible impacts’ of the debate on European governance and the legal procedures that the institutions have established to boost their regulatory capacity. The practical cases chosen to then verify how nanotechnologies have been regulated are in the domains of food and chemicals, the latter naturally being addressed in the light of the REACH regulation. The author discerns the differences of approach registered in the two domains, which enables her to comment among other things in her conclusions that ‘rhetoric and practice diverge substantially,’ and she feels her work reveals ‘not only significant shortcomings in the application of the procedures by the EU institutions but also in their design.’
(PBo)
*** PABLO SERVIGNE: Nourrir l’Europe en temps de crise. Vers des systèmes alimentaires résilients. Actes Sud (Place Nina-Berberova BP 90038, F-13633 Arles cedex. Tel: (33-4) 90498691 – Fax: 90969525 – Internet: http://www.actes-sud.fr ). Babel series. 2017, 207 pp, €7.90. ISBN 978-2-330-08657-2.
Originally published in 2014 and now issued as part of a ‘pocket’ collection, this book arises from a report concocted upon request by former MEP and French minister Yves Cochet. In the original preface, this ecologist notes that the rapid transition to a different type of food from that allowed by the productivity-focused agricultural policy blinds one to the current social and environmental realities of an ecosphere that is being upset at an ever-faster rate and this is the political challenge of our times. In this book, agronomist and biologist Pablo Servigne – who describes himself as a transdisciplinary and earth-friendly researcher – certainly shows how our industrial food system is body toxic and vulnerable because it depends on oil and, therefore, will be condemned in the long-term. He is at pains to show how the CAP contributes to global warming, destroys ecosystems, ‘condemns farmers’ and endangers the health of populations, generating immense waste into the bargain. After drawing up a devastating balance sheet of the state of industrial food, he calls for Europeans to radically change their behavior and to focus, for example, on local farm production. He presents some alternatives which, from permaculture to urban agriculture via agroecology and returning to animal-traction, proving that another world is both possible and realistic – and the author is far from a woolly dreamer wanting to return to the good old days.
(MT)
*** YANNIS VASSILIOU: L'expansion de l'Union européenne dans l'espace. Editions Historical Quest (66 rue Chrisiidos, GR-13122 Ilion. Tel: (30-210) 2611832 –Fax: 2611832 – Email: info@historical-quest.com – Internet: http://www.historical-quest.com ). 2017, 88 pp, €9. ISBN 978-618508829-3.
Travelling into space and plunging into space research have been European Union objectives for a long time. Rational space exploration is in fact linked to a vast range of domains on our planet, such as television, telecoms, financial systems, climate change, health, defence, security, management of energy and natural resources, meteorology, surveillance of the atmosphere and the marine environmental, environmental protection and industrial competitiveness, along with agriculture, aviation, navigation, railways, biotechnology, recycling, forestry, rescue operations in the case of catastrophes, rescue operations, civil protection, means of transport, town and country planning and tourism. As Yannis Vassiliou, a graduate of Birmingham University and expert in EU regional policy, explains, in this book he critically analyses how the European Union has managed to use space in the interests of its citizens and the author provides readers with keys to enable them to draw their own conclusions about the degree of success of this policy and the future prospects that are forming in this domain. After examining the four key domains of the EU's space policy, how it is led and the institutions and bodies active in this field, the author makes comments and draws conclusions. The book also includes a vast bibliography.
(AKa)