As a science graduate myself, I’ve always favoured scientific research for scientific research’s sake. Many of the natural sciences’ most pragmatic societal applications have been the outcome not of applied, but rather of pure, scientific research. An obvious example would be Faraday’s curiosity-driven experiments on electricity, which into the bargain led to the electric light replacing the candle in our everyday lives.

So far, so scientific.

Yet now with a new, very different hat on – as an intern here at the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development – I’ve been forced to reassess my position. I have begun to look at science in terms of how it contributes to sustainable development – in the famous words of the Brundtland Commission, how well it allows us to meet ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’  – as well as how democratic it is.

And the catalyst for this personal psychological overhaul? CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), and more specifically its most talked about investment in fundamental physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC, for those unfamiliar with it, is a particle accelerator 100m below the Franco-Swiss border. It smashes together sub-atomic participles, known as ‘hadrons’, head-on and at high energy, in order to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang. According to CERN’s website, it will ‘revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe’.

To me, the potential benefits that such an instrument could bring need no justification. But what of the costs?  With my ‘democracy and sustainable development’ hat on, these strike me as cause for concern.

The degree to which the LHC might compromise sustainable development cannot be reliably quantified; making grappling with this issue all the more problematic. What can be said, however, is that an experimental ‘glitch’ in research of this nature and energetic scale could result in the elimination of the world as we know it. Naturally, this would make the LHC the ultimate in unsustainable development: there would be no future generations whose needs could be met!

The fears aroused by the LHC’s potential for world elimination are varied. Yet recurrent areas of uncertainty and risk do seem to crop up time and time again: namely the production of strangelets and of black holes at colliders.

To give a flavour of the vagaries of particle collision, CERN claims that the collisions it engineers are too hot to produce strangelets. Even so, not only have several CERN scientists published papers speculating on strangelet production, but there are also two large strangelet detectors at CERN itself. The message appears mixed.

As for black holes, a 1999 RHIC paper to the effect that colliders could not generate energy sufficient to fuel black hole creation, was followed by numerous physics papers touting new theory which predicted the creation of black holes at colliders. What’s more, the claim in a 2003 CERN paper that black holes, if created, would dissipate immediately via Hawking radiation, coincided with several papers challenging the fundamental theory underpinning Hawking radiation – a radiation which, incidentally, has never been seen experimentally.

Even if (as many conclusions seem to concede) the energies generated at colliders will not surpass those of the cosmic rays that constantly bombard our atmosphere to no ill effect, the fact remains that the LHC works on materials of which very little is known. Where is the precaution?

The well-known ‘precautionary approach’ proposes that a lack of complete scientific certainty in the face of risks of serious or irreversible damage to human or environmental health should not be an excuse for postponing cost-effective preventive measures. In the case of CERN, then, should the precautionary approach’s ‘preventive measures’ not be the cessation of all collider experiments?

Scientists are well-accustomed to dealing objectively with matters of risk; assigning numerical values to their estimates. The problem with LHC-associated risk, however, is that it dices with the future of the planet’s entire population of life-forms.

In science, asserting that you are 99.99% confident of something translates as very confident indeed. Yet apply that level of confidence to experimental research with the (arguable) potential to obliterate humanity, and the odds don’t seem so favourable. After all, 99.99% confidence of safety means 0.01% chance of disaster: a little much, to my mind, without a better safety review!

With a dubious sustainable development rating, then, does CERN fare any better in terms of democracy? First off, it is worth remembering that the existence of CERN and its LHC were never voted upon. This, of course, is just part and parcel of representative democracy: the international community wasn’t consulted on whether the US should have tested the atomic bomb in 1945 either. Under this model of democracy, the matter of whether or not people would vote for a particular issue, given the chance, is therefore merely academic.

So how could the realm of fundamental physics be made more democratic? One way could be through the establishment of a jury or focus group of representative citizens charged with the consideration of scientific risk. However, surely the very nature of fundamental physics precludes such an idea: how democratic could it be when it is so extraordinarily difficult to comprehend the nature of the risk assessment?

On the flipside, though, how democratic can scientific research be when its risk assessments are, by necessity, carried out by those with a vested interest in the research?

In conclusion, it seems that the challenge of making fundamental physics research at CERN both ‘pro sustainable development’ and democratic resides predominantly in the fact that physics at this level is a highly unknown beast. Unknown, yes; but perhaps not unknowable. Rather than suspend CERN-style experimentation on the grounds of a lack of knowledge, physicists would argue that we should strive to surpass current levels of knowledge by continuing to invest in the LHC and its ilk.

Those on the opposite bench might retort that we could learn just as much, and at considerably less risk, if analogous experiments were conducted in supercomputer simulations, as for much cosmological research.

Those on a more distant opposing bench might go so far as to say that fundamental physics research should be completely shelved, in favour of pragmatic science directly geared towards remedying our planet’s problems.

To my own mind, the solution is unclear. One problem, it seems, is not so much the risks entailed by collider experiments, but rather the lack of debate about those risks. And another relates to the precautionary principle. As interpreted above, this principle should lead to the termination of collider experimentation at CERN. Yet, from a different perspective, could there be an equally great risk in leaving this sort of fundamental scientific research on the shelf?

So frequently in science there is a tantalising trade-off between research which is truly interesting and potentially revolutionising on the one hand, and that which is safer yet less likely to represent scientific value on the other.

As to where the appropriate trade-off should lie, the jury is still out… or at least, would be if it existed. 

The draft International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility has gradually been taking shape over the past five years. ISO is a private nongovernmental body, headquartered in Geneva. And it is also the world’s largest developer of international standards.

The final plenary of the working group in Copenhagen yesterday marked a major milestone: agreement on a revised final draft of the guidance standard. That means that the development of the standard now moves on to the final stages of the process. The next step is to hand a revised draft to ISO’s members (standards bodies from more than 160 countries) for a two-month voting period. There can be no more than 25% of the total ISO member voting body voting ‘no’ if the standard is to be adopted and published as an international guidance standard late in 2010.

It was good news all round in Copenhagen as more than 400 delegates from over 80 countries (dubbed ‘experts’ rather than ‘representatives’ in ISO parlance) agreed on a final draft of the international guidance standard.

This post isn’t about all the good things that were agreed: the agreement of the Chinese delegation to text that everyone could live with; the resolution of concerns from participants from Gulf and Arab states about the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ (resolved in favour of the term ‘personal relationships’); or how the 1500 outstanding comments and 15 ‘Copenhagen Key Topics’ were satisfactorily resolved.

Instead, this post is about how the private standards-setting process of ISO 26000 has triggered heated debates, and lasting concerns, on the content of the so-called ‘precautionary approach’ and how it should be applied by organisations other than governments. And those debates and concerns raise some basic questions about how ISO’s private processes bump up against public policy and the international legal commitments of states. That, in turn, raises a whole host of issues about the state of global governance and the confused state of distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’ global governance.

There are two basic problems.

First, a number of government representatives came to the ISO 26000 negotiating process with worries about how the potential trade impacts of the standard could interact with their obligations under the World Trade Organization. For example, the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade requires WTO Members to use relevant international standards as a basis for national technical regulations. A technical regulation that is based on a relevant international standard and created to address a legitimate objective benefits from a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that it does not create an unnecessary obstacle to trade.

Second, some government participants have the additional concern that their position in these talks could potentially have an impact on their international legal obligations more widely, or that working group participants are effectively re-interpreting delicately balanced intergovernmental agreements. Non-governmental participants do not have to confront these issues.

In the final plenary session in Copenhagen yesterday, three participants from the so-called ‘government stakeholder group’; those participating on behalf of the governments of the United States, India and Canada; expressed their concerns with two references to the ‘precautionary approach’ in parts of the proposed new standard that set principles for organisations to apply in pursuit of social responsibility in the fields of environment and consumer issues respectively.

The positions of these three experts at the talks can in many respects be seen as an inevitable consequence of the current unjoined up link between ISO and public policy. They mean bringing the political positions of governments to a voluntary and private standard where, in contrast to intergovernmental or national policy processes, they are less likely to be negotiable. This in turn causes frustration on the part of many participants who are committed to the ISO principle of ‘consensus’ decision-making across experts, regardless of how representative they might be, or how accountable to others.

The draft social responsibility standard does not apply to governments in their capacity as policy-makers. But it addresses other kinds of ‘organisations’ of all sizes, wherever they might be found.

Yesterday, in a concluding plenary session of more than 400 participants from more than 80 countries, a representative of the US government made it clear that the US government has ‘sustained opposition’ to a key part of the 100-page text which asks organisations of all sizes to take a ‘precautionary approach’. Canada and India also expressed their concerns about the text. The three have differing views on the content of the precautionary approach and how it should be applied, at the level of principle, to organisations.

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this post to explain in any detail the precise sources of the different positions, a brief explanatory diversion is probably useful.

The precautionary approach has been developed in a series of international agreements since the 1990s. As an approach, it proposes that lack of full scientific certainty in the face of risks of serious or irreversible damage or harm to the environment or human health should not be an excuse for postponing cost-effect preventive measures. The precautionary approach has also been adapted for application by other kinds of organisations, including businesses

The idea of a ‘precautionary approach’ is a central part of international talks on the global issue of climate change; controversial in part because of the global distribution of costs and benefits of tackling climate change in line with precaution. Now, the precautionary approach has properly been included in the global guidance standard on social responsibility because it reflects the reality of good social responsibility practice in many organisations.

The concerns of the three governments whose policy positions might reasonably be assumed to lie behind the representations of the three experts are not critical to progress with the standard at this stage since voting is ultimately based on votes from standards bodies.

Governments take part in the standard-setting process along with other groups including consumers, trade unions, and non-governmental organisations in so-called ‘stakeholder groups’. However, their objections to the text are an indication of a potential mismatch between a) political positions that arise out of government policy on issues such as climate change, science-based policy, or the management of risks from genetically modified organisms in the Capitals of the three countries and b) the reality of good social responsibility practice in markets and economic sectors around the world.

As ISO’s involvement in key issues of public policy action such as human rights, environment and labour (all addressed in the draft standard) gets deeper and broader, the tensions will only get worse unless governments themselves find a way to deal with the wider implications of ISO under the WTO and in international law.

Holding back progress in the world’s largest and most inclusive social responsibility negotiation, as these and other government positions risked (but did not eventually end) doing, is not the right way forward to ensure progress with social responsibility around the world. ISO 26000 shows that not all stakeholders can properly be treated as ‘equal’ in a process that takes effect through markets, not government ratification, and that is built around the principle of consensus.

One part of the way forward should be for both ISO and governments to clarify how governments might be ‘different’ to other stakeholder representatives in future ISO talks with public policy reach.

The ISO 26000 process has internally been relatively ‘democratic’ as a hermetically sealed process; but it is one with an impact on other ‘democratic processes’ that are not yet reflexively recognised within the ISO process.

The second part of the way forward needs to be for governments to go to the WTO to find ways to reduce the impact of ISO on their ‘policy space’ at national and international levels.

The third, and potentially trickiest area for action is to find a way to ensure that, where appropriate or necessary, government participants are freed up to be able to participate genuinely as ‘experts’.

For those whose governments see them truly as representatives of governments, (irrespective of the  fiction that they participate as ‘individual experts’), there are real concerns that their positions and views in such talks potentially has an impact, through evolving international law, on the content of their governments’ international obligations as states. ISO 26000 cannot be treated as a process that is subject to the Chatham House Rule, as ISO itself would like, because for some participants the positions taken have implications for public policy and hence accountability of governments; a key element of democracy itself. 

We must hope that in the meantime ISO 26000 is adopted by ISO members over the summer, and that it begins to generate its promised positive impacts on the social responsibility practices of organisations and their contribution to sustainable development around the world.