SCIENTIFIC AND EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE - TRUST AND THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES

This paper analyzes social processes underlying relationships between technoscientific knowledge and governmental regulatory activities in t he context of the recent case of an Australian hazardous waste initiat ive. It maps a nexus of the phenomenology of trust, the formation of t echnoscientific knowledge, and the political philosophy of regulation and the clarification of knowledge claims. It proposes that these proc esses depend upon elemental social and political components described by various writers in terms of 'the constitution of scientific objects ', 'the construction of scientific types', 'familiarity', the 'taken-f or-granted', 'trust', 'justice', and other concepts. it introduces the term 'suspended doubt' to describe a previously undifferentiated situ ation in individual and social interaction. It concludes that democrat ization now increasingly extends, in the political handling of environ mental initiatives and risk in the conditions of late twentieth-centur y capitalism, to the democratization and negotiation of knowledge clai ms. This produces problems for representative democracy and expressed needs for more adaptive political processes.