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theses

In this research I explore the influence of citizen expertise on environmental regulatory policy surrounding New Jersey’s freshwater wetlands. I intend to improve understandings of pluralism and accountability in social science models of science advising, which have paid little attention to the ways citizens contribute scientific knowledge to policy making. I look at citizen expertise in the context of an important chapter in U.S. environmental history culminating in New Jersey’s Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act (FWPA) on July 1, 1987. This Act made New Jersey the first state to completely assume administration of the portion of the federal Clean Water Act that protects wetlands and gave it the nation’s strongest measures to protect these environmentally valuable lands. Inquiry is situated in the joint perspectives of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Social Movement Studies and incorporates constructivist-interpretivist research techniques. A state-wide environmental advocacy movement called the Freshwater Wetlands Campaign (FWC) responded to what it perceived as inadequate and fragmented state and federal attempts to protect freshwater wetlands by developing the technical and political competence to champion wetlands protection. The FWC worked at a time when standards of knowledge production for freshwater wetlands science had yet to be established and when no methodological approach was privileged. The concept of co-production is used to explain how the FWC helped to define what would constitute scientific competence in three scientifically and technically complex disputes: the definition of a freshwater wetland such that it would be protected; the delineation of a protective freshwater wetland buffer; and the creation of artificial freshwater wetlands as sufficient action to permit destruction of natural freshwater wetlands. Closure around these disputes is conceived as resulting in creation of three new regulatory “artifacts” in New Jersey: freshwater wetlands, freshwater wetland buffers, and mitigated freshwater wetlands. I show that without the FWC’s role in developing science and these artifacts, New Jersey’s FWPA would either not exist or would have followed a different path. From this I suggest that we can improve the co-production framework with a new theory for STS that includes a “bottom up” model of social movements.

ETD_5313

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Heather Mary Fenyk

doi:10.7282/T35Q4T61

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.