Making systematic sense of public discontents with expert knowledge: two analytical approaches and a case study

Several recent strands of work within science studies, risk analysis, the p ublic understanding of science, and environmental policy analysis have focu sed on the significance of lay knowledge and expertise. In case after case, it has been suggested that "expert" accounts of physical reality have conf licted with local people's knowledge and that rather than local knowledge b eing routinely inferior and defective, it has commonly proven more sensitiv e to local "realities." These cases have become favored sites for studying public discontents with expert knowledge. Though the primary style of analy sis in this emerging tradition has consisted of the case study, two concept ual schema for clarifying this topic have recently been proposed by Funtowi cz and Ravetz and by Wynne. This paper uses a case study in the local under standing of an air-quality model to undertake a conceptual and empirical as sessment of these contrasting analytical frameworks.