Reconceiving science and policy in the preventive paradigm

for current assumptions about scientific knowledge and environmental policy raised by the preventive approach and the associated Precautionary Principle. He offers a critical examination of approaches to characterizing different kinds of uncertainty in policy knowledge, especially in relation to decision making upstream from environmental effects. Via the key dimension of unrecognized indeterminacy in scientific knowledge, the author argues that shifting the normative principles applied to policy use of science is not merely an external shift in relation to the same body of ‘natural’ knowledge, but also involves the possible reshaping of the ‘natural’ knowledge itself.