Reflexive modernization and beyond : knowledge and value in the politics of environment and technology

The relationship between knowledge and values, experts and lay people, represents a major issue of the debate involving environment and technology. There is a growing awareness that the connection between value commitments and technical solutions, scientific expertise and lay competence, is much more entangled than once was believed. The article deals with this issue by analysing Robert Dahl's ‘minipopulus’ and Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz's ‘extended peer communities’ arguments. They are subsequently inserted into the sociological debate which is, at present, considerably influenced by the reflexive modernization framework. As a result, Ulrich Beck's and Anthony Giddens' theories appear as one of four ideal-typical approaches to the social construction of the issues that can be outlined, according to the priority assigned to knowledge versus power and nature versus society. The idea of an ‘extended peer review’ of problems and solutions is remarkably close to the deliberative democracy concept. However, the high level of uncertainty characterizing major environmental and technological questions suggests that a ‘strong’ version of deliberative democracy, such as the Discourse Ethics proposed by Habermas, is untenable in its search for a universal, rational consensus on the normative grounds of action. Thus it is necessary to develop a ‘weak’ interpretation of the extended peer review, exploring the possibility of fair and stable agreements on bounded, practical solutions to bounded, practical problems.