SCIENTIFIC FACT AND VALUE IN U.S. OCEAN DUMPING POLICY

Controversy among scientists over appropriate use of the ocean for waste disposal impedes U.S. policy in this area. The problem arises in part because scientific uncertainty over the fate and effects of wastes released into the ocean requires a large element of judgment, and hence value, when the uncertain science is applied to policy. Scientists often supply that judgment and so impose their values, though seldom explicitly, on policy. Further, science often determines policy because many perceive it as an objective basis for decisionmaking and so less subject to the debate that arises from weighing public preferences in policymaking. Thus, scientists' values rather than the public's come to set policy. The resulting policy may elevate one expert's values over another's. Then as values and so interpretation of science shift, policy changes. Or, as in the case now with arguments over the ocean's ability to assimilate many anthropogenic wastes, conflicting science, really conflicting values, results in an agreement and policy inertia. These problems are partially circumvented when scientists make the nonscientific factors behind their reasoning clear. These factors may then be evaluated by the public along with the supporting scientific evidence. Thus, weighing the welfare of society rather than resolving conflicts among scientists becomes the focus of policy.     

PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENT AND THE PUBLIC ORGANIZATION

This article applies a broad theoretical framework identifying factors which provide an understanding of the relationship between electoral politics, organizational reform and institutional change. In focusing upon product i v i t y reforms undertaken in the 1970's and early 1980's. the authors find that political conflicts over measures of public performance may contribute to a life cycle in which organizational structures are reconstituted and subjects of regulation o r services redefined in ways that are potentially inconsistent with the demand for public accountability. The conjunction of such factors may contribute to a crisis of legitimacy resulting in the redefinition of the boundaries between public and private realms of responsibility, as expressed in the electoral process. Today liberal reformers are confronted by a dilemma of productivity and legitimacy involved in the cycle of reform and retrenchment in which the goal of public accountability is undermined by erosion of the rights of the subject. The attempt to break this bind requires, in part, an explicitness on the part of liberals about the presuppositions regarding the subject underpining the measures and strategies by which organizational reforms are undertaken.