Civilization and madness: the great BSE scare of 1996

Abstract

During the UK's BSE crisis of 1996, citizens and their public institutions experienced an unprecedented breakdown of communication that I call `civic dislocation'—a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they actually did. Trust in government vanished, and people looked elsewhere for information and advice. In the UK, public confidence in governmental advisers rests on the reliability of persons rather than (primarily) the rationality of their views; in the USA, on the other hand, trust rests in formal processes and styles of reasoning that ensure the transparency and objectivity of governmental decisions. UK policy institutions require a set of conditions—among them a shared, unambiguous problem definition, relative certainty about `objective facts' and identifiable expert knowledge—which in the BSE case simply did not exist. Given the pervasive uncertainties, the distance between citizens and experts was greatly reduced, and the lay public was almost as well positioned as the experts to make sensible decisions about how to avoid the risk of BSE. This reading of civic dislocation in the UK should make us wary of recent proposals to create pockets of insulated expertise within the US risk management system to neutralize unfounded public fears through rationality, expertise, insulation and authority. A programme that values rationality and efficiency most highly leaves little room or reason for lay inputs; and, by putting too little faith in people and too much in the objectivity of formal analysis, may also carry the seeds of civic dislocation.