Maintaining+Authority

Remediate/ing Environmental & Public Health Governance: The Challenge of ‘All-overness’ and The Maintenance of Authority

The legacies of the industrial histories of the United States (though certainly not only the United States) challenge the strategies through which authority in environmental and public health governance is maintained/reproduced. Such challenges are evident in the ruptures (of trust in governance) created by contamination that exhibits a complex ‘all-overness’ and ‘unexpected’ properties. Dominant modes of environmental and public public health governance of water in the U.S. are reflective of a double movement of solidification and compartmentalization. While at particular junctures more precautionary sensibilities have been introduced, on-the-whole such regimes have (from the beginning) been technology-based or risk-taking and assumed some degree of contamination as ‘safe’, isolatable, and remediable. As such, they are ill-suited to the challenges of ‘all-overness’ and of ‘unexpected’ persistence, bioaccumulation, and mobility, occurring in dynamic relation to ecosystems. These ill-suited arrangements are once more challenged by the continued and ‘sophisticated’ use of science - even the products of regulatory science itself - by community members, social movements actors and academics, to produce new knowledge claims and counter-narratives.

That authorities are able to maintain their positionality/power despite such challenge to the structural and performative strategies meant to do just that requires particular consideration (Jasanoff). While these strategies have been well addressed in the context of Science and Technology Studies literature pertaining to science policy and regulatory science, it has tended to over-attend to one strategy or another. My case study of PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) contamination of drinking water in Hoosick Falls (though not only in Hoosick Falls) reflects how authorities challenged by ‘all-overness’ are able to maintain power through the use of multiple, integrated, structural and performative strategies.