Determining Evidence: A Symmetrical Approach to the Regulation of Therapeutic Products
Within the social studies of science, risk regulation regimes dominated by a technocratic approach are critiqued for neglecting public, socially situated epistemological standpoints, which, it is argued, are more capable of articulating real world concerns and implications of risk. This critique appears to have been tackled through regulatory modernization in several nations, where strategic efforts are being advanced to open up, enable scrutiny and solicit input into decision-making from a broad range of citizens. While we agree that the evidence for risk regulation could benefit from accommodating more ways of knowing (particularly types of knowledge that have a history of being neglected), we argue that it is not only ‘lay’ public knowledges, but also ‘expert’ scientific ones which become neglected in modern risk regulation regimes. In this paper, we draw upon a specific case — modernization in the Canadian health products regulator — to examine the evolving role and nature of evidence. We draw from our own ethnographic research and the relevant literature (risk and regulatory science, boundary work, and symmetrical anthropology) to suggest a symmetrical approach to evidence-based risk regulation.