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Community Epistemic CapacityIan WerkheiserPublished online: 19 Feb 2015.

To cite this article: Ian Werkheiser (2015): Community Epistemic Capacity, Social Epistemology: AJournal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2014.971911

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Community Epistemic CapacityIan Werkheiser

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk,interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called“Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies stilldo not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, variousattempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participa-tion and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness”is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concernsthe relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficientlyinformed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningfulparticipation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that onlya community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding andcompetence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully.

Keywords: Community Capacities; Epistemic Capacities; Public Participation; Risk

Assessment; Expertise; Popular Epidemiology; Science Shops

Introduction

Many United States (US) policy documents (e.g. National Research Council 1994;

National Research Council, Dietz, and Stern 2008; National Research Council et al.1996) recommend that interaction between scientific experts and the public in risk

decision must move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model”(e.g. Yosie and Herbst 1998). Indeed, the National Research Council recommends

deep and extensive interactions:

The spectrum of interested and affected parties in deliberation can make the processleading to risk characterization more democratic, legitimate, and informative for

Ian Werkheiser is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He works

on issues of environmental justice, food sovereignty and justice, and social epistemology. Correspondence to:

Ian Werkheiser, Philosophy Department, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, Michigan State

University, East Lansing, 48824 USA. Email: werkhei1@msu.edu

� 2015 Taylor & Francis

Social Epistemology, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2014.971911

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decision participants … by improving problem formulation, providing more knowl-edge, determining appropriate uses for controversial analytic techniques, clarifyingviews, and making decisions more acceptable. (National Research Council 1996, 79)

Recommendations like this one call for opportunities for deliberation at “Everystep of the process that informs risk decisions” (ibid., 76). Kasperson calls this par-

ticipation “Early and often” (Kasperson 1986). Protocols for early and often partic-ipation opportunities for the public can thus be understood as establishing the

minimum procedures needed for the public to consent to whatever risk decisionsarise from the (early and often) deliberations. “Consent” by a community is here

understood as the community at least accepting a decision, agreeing not to opposeit, and using the reality of that decision in future decision-making processes. This

consent may be so strong as to mean that the community will actively endorse,support, and work to achieve this decision, but it need not.

Despite the recommendations just referenced and their connection to consent,

many actual agency rules and protocols for public involvement are seen either justas boxes to be checked without further value as procedures for grounding consent,

or as valuable but only to the extent that they legitimate agencies and theirdecisions instead of allowing members of the public to alter the course of risk

decisions (Chess and Purcell 1999). For example, many US agencies follow theminimum “notice and comment” requirements of the Administrative Procedure

Act (APA), which amounts to requiring that they “Declare what it is thinkingabout regulating, give others a chance to say what they think about the agency’sthoughts, and wrap things up by justifying the agency’s ultimate regulatory choice”

(Murphy 2012). In other words, the current public involvement policies, eventhose based on the recommendations above, still do not guarantee much meaning-

ful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have beenmade to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free

informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is acomplex task, this paper explores one dimension of it that concerns the relation-

ship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed.While there might be times when consulting “the public” is best thought of as

consulting the individuals affected rather than the communities qua communities,there are reasons to believe that, in at least some cases, approaches which do notconsult communities earlier in the process, and merely allow them to weigh in on

RCBAs (Risk and Cost Benefit Analysis, although this acronym is sometimes usedto interchangeably refer to Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis as in Cole (2009)) or

QRAs (Quantitative Risk Assessments), are seen as insufficient by those communi-ties (e.g. Native American tribes in Arquette et al. 2002; Ranco et al. 2011). For

the purposes of this paper, I will look at cases where community consent isvaluable and exploring (some of) the necessary conditions for adequate community

consent.I will argue that one essential element of meaningful participation is the affected

communities giving free informed consent, and a necessary part of this process

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involves being informed enough for free informed consent. While what being“informed enough” means is a common topic, I will show how in areas of environ-

mental risk there is not enough focus on what I define in this paper as communityepistemic capacity the ability to gain, maintain, adapt, and continue the knowledge

which is needed to solve problems and manage the environment. I argue that onlya community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and

competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully.In section one, I will briefly look at meaningfulness in terms of participation

and show how being “informed enough” has been understood as a key componentof consent, even in risk decisions involving complex technical issues. In sectiontwo, I will look at Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s analysis of meaningful participation

and free informed consent. I will argue that while she is correct in saying thatmere participation and consent are not sufficient, there is room for greater expan-

sion on the idea of meaningful participation she is calling for and how to achieveit. In section three, I argue that the concept of epistemic capacity provides some of

that needed expansion because it should be seen as a foundational element ofmeaningful participation. In section four I will look at two case studies which help

illustrate some of the more abstract points earlier in the paper. I conclude in sec-tion five by looking at ways of building up this epistemic capacity that can at least

begin to have practical policy applications. By focusing on the work ofShrader-Frechette, among other authors, this paper seeks to identify an underanalyzed aspect of the literature on public participation: elements a community

must possess in order to participate meaningfully and grant fully informedconsent. It will also suggest the framework of community epistemic capacity for

understanding these necessary elements.

Meaningful Participation, Informed Enough Consent, and Public Policy

Much work has been done on participatory justice in risk decisions (e.g. Arquette

et al. 2002; Cole 2009; Ranco et al. 2011; Shrader-Frechette 2002; Wallerstein andDuran 2006). As a rough beginning, we can say that participation cannot be mean-

ingful (and therefore cannot be just) if the participants have no means to affectthe outcome of a process with respect to their interests, values, and knowledge.

Further, we can say that the process of participation, in its scope, the role of vari-ous stakeholders, and so on, must itself be understood and agreed to by the partic-

ipants (fortunately this understanding and agreement can be achieved during theprocess, thereby avoiding an infinite regress of consent-seeking). One ingredient ofbeing able to affect the outcome, and to accept and understand the process, is that

citizens must be informed enough. For, if participants do not know to what theyare consenting (or dissenting), the consent is meaningless from the perspective of

participation.“Informed” consent has a rich tradition in medical ethics (e.g. Beauchamp and

Childress 1994; Faden and Beauchamp 1986), and those principles have been

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applied to community decision processes (e.g. Derr et al. 1981; Elliot 2011;Shrader-Frechette 1991; Teuber 1990). However, principles from medical ethics are

often about the interactions between doctors, the individual patients, and theirfamilies. Thus it is possible to insist that all affected parties communicate with

each other, are informed, and asked for their consent. For community consent, itis usually the case that not everyone affected can be directly consulted and asked

for consent. For communities, then, the focus moves from receiving consent fromeach person affected to providing opportunities for deliberative democracy.

Whether these opportunities are taken or not, this can be seen as tacit consent(e.g. National Research Council, Ostrom et al. 2002). Here again the consent mustbe informed enough to be meaningful. If the public was not aware of these oppor-

tunities or what they meant, the tacit consent is meaningless. Still, what informedenough means in a community context, and therefore what the minimum stan-

dards for governments or other larger institutions for structuring these opportuni-ties for deliberative democratic processes ought to be, is not as clear as in the

medical ethics case.Some authors, such as Sunstein (2002), have argued that members of the pub-

lic are too prone to errors in judgment and flawed reasoning to compare whatrisks deserve more policy intervention and funding than others. Therefore,

“informed enough” is largely satisfied by knowing who the experts are and havingthem assign risk probabilities, costs, and benefits to them. Informed enough con-sent is achieved by the community having an opportunity to review and comment

on this RCBA developed by experts. Sunstein’s account is a version of the leadingconcept of informed enough consent in policy, though some authors add other

constraints to the consent, such as viable and risk-free alternatives (e.g. Teuber1990; Thomson 1985).

Other thinkers, notably Shrader-Frechette (1991), are unsatisfied by thisdominant concept of informed consent, arguing that being informed enough

requires more than the information in an RCBA being presented to the commu-nity—citizens should also be involved in discussions about how benefits and costsare calculated in the RCBA in the first place. RCBAs have value judgments

embedded within them which should be decided by the affected parties, ratherthan experts. For Shrader-Frechette, then, “informed enough” requires that the

community have an active hand in directing all stages of the deliberative process.Both Sunstein and Shrader-Frechette have crafted solutions to the problem of

moving “informed consent” from medical ethics over to public policy. The differ-ences between the two accounts concern the extent to which citizens should be

involved in the processes by which they are informed about the risks and tradeoffsinvolved in risk decisions. Shrader-Frechette’s account is more in keeping with the

policy recommendations for deeper involvement discussed in the introduction. Inthe next part of the paper I will focus on it. I will also show that for Shrader-Frechette, or anyone offering an approach that calls for robust participation,

epistemic capacity is an important element to meaningful participation.

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Shrader-Frechette and Free Informed Consent

In Risk and Rationality (1991), Shrader-Frechette argues that, contrary to thecommon and Sunstein-esque argument that members of the public make biased

judgments about risks, both experts and the public use value judgments in riskassessment, particularly when evaluating the acceptability of risk. As a result, “Noone has privileged access to the truth about risk acceptability merely because she is

an engineer rather than a housewife” (1991, 31), and “Contrary to the assertionsof other assessors, controversy over hazardous technologies very likely arises

because of the value placed on consequences, not because of overestimated riskprobabilities” (1991, 94).

Given then that there is no prima facie reason to not allow the public to partic-ipate, Shrader-Frechette explicates three reasons why the public should be included

in risk assessment and policy, the third of which has a key epistemic component:when the public meaningfully participates in negotiating risk, that risk assessmentwill be more objective when it is has survived “Scrutiny and criticism by different,

well-calibrated communities of theory holders, each with different transformationsof ethical assessments of the same hazard” (1991, 192). In this view of rationality,

the public has as important a role to play as experts, particularly in risk evaluation.In order to play this role, they must be able to consent to a risk assessment or

alter it only after they are able to understand it well enough to apply their ownframeworks of ethical assessments to bear. Here, then, we see the beginning of a

richer definition of what informed enough might mean outside of the individualis-tic model in medical ethics.

Having made this argument in favor of including the public, Shrader-Frechettelays out three conditions that must be met for free informed consent as an aspectof meaningful participation (1991, 206–7). The first and third of these conditions

focus on participatory power for the different groups, public and institutional, thatare coming together to create the risk assessment. Her second requirement is the

one that speaks to sufficiently informed consent. She says that in order for freeinformed consent to be realized, alternative evaluative assumptions and methodol-

ogies ought to be considered in the process, and that this may well require thegovernment fund alternative studies which incorporate the values of the public

(1991, 207).In Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (2002),

Shrader-Frechette greatly expands her treatment of full informed consent, arguing

that “Stakeholder and expert deliberation [should be] given equal weight” (2002, 28).She also adds another four conditions for achieving it to those provided in 1991.

Again, we will focus on those conditions that are concerned with being informedenough. These are (1) full disclosure of risk by professionals, (2) understanding on the

part of those giving consent (which may require “Professionals to help persons over-come factors such as irrationality, immaturity, and distorted information, all of

which can limit their comprehension of a situation to which they have a right to giveor withhold consent”) (2002, 77), and (4) competence to give or withhold consent to

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this particular act on rational grounds (2002, 77). (Her requirement (3) is aboutvoluntariness of consent and has less of an epistemic focus.)

These conditions are not as easily met as those in her earlier book, which could(at least in theory) be simply paid for by the government in a given situation.

Instead, characteristics of the community, such as a “low level of education”(2002, 78) can “jeopardise its ability to meet [the] requirements for free informed

consent” (2002, 78). This is, in part, because “Low levels of education can preventthe understanding condition from being satisfied” (2002, 78).

In these two works, then, we see that Shrader-Frechette’s free informed consentrequires that the community have certain characteristics (such as education level),and abilities (such as the ability to conduct studies which embed their values) in

order for that community to be in a position to give fully informed consent. Inpractice, then, any program seeking to elicit free informed consent from a commu-

nity might well need to first find ways to increase these characteristics and abilitiesin order to meet the necessary conditions for the community to truly be informed

enough. I will argue in the rest of this paper that these characteristics and abilitiescan best be seen as part of a larger set of community epistemic capacities. I will

address, in part, how these might be built up in practice.

Community Epistemic Capacity

Though Shrader-Frechette is right to focus on characteristics of the audience as

well as the information itself when deciding if informed enough consent is possi-ble, she makes several assumptions about epistemology which lead to an emphasis

on individuals and a de-emphasis on communities. It is worth examining theseassumptions and their consequences for what informed enough consent looks like.

Shrader-Frechette argues that a community’s “low level of education” (2002,

78) might render informed enough consent impossible by preventing the principleof understanding from being fulfilled, and discusses a case study where the low

level of education in a community at least gives prima facie reason to suspect thatthey could not provide free informed consent. This is the only epistemic require-

ment of the community (as opposed to requirements, like honesty, placed on thosesoliciting the consent) in the book. By using education levels as a metric for what

it means for a community to be able to be informed enough, she is assuming thatthe important scale for informed enough consent is the epistemic capacity of the

individual, and averages of individuals, as opposed to the epistemic capacity of thecommunity. It is also worth pointing out that this metric rests on the assumptionthat formal education is the most useful way of measuring the ability to under-

stand and assess risk, as opposed to things like Traditional Ecological Knowledge(TEK). As Shrader-Frechette has herself pointed out in critiques of Sunstein, when

they are out of their area of expertise and do not have superior data, “[Presumablywell-educated] Scientific experts are no better than laypeople in estimating risk

probabilities” (2010, 121). This makes it unlikely that education of members of a

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community is the best metric for assessing the possibility of that community beinginformed enough.

In her (1991), when Shrader-Frechette lays out requirements for free informedconsent to allow meaningful participation, she does not say anything about how

the community would have to be constituted in order to take advantage of thegovernment being willing to pay for alternative studies incorporating the commu-

nity’s values. She seems to assume that as long as these studies are conducted bycompetent professionals and paid for in a way that does not burden the commu-

nity, any kind of community can benefit equally, which again de-emphasizes thecapacities (or lack thereof) of particular communities. This method additionallyseems to assume a high level of trust of experts by the community, something

which (as we will see in a later section) is not always the case. A lack of trustmakes it unlikely that a community can derive the same benefits from the studies

Shrader-Frechette calls for than would a community which trusted those findings.Also, similarly to her emphasis on education in her (2002), Shrader-Frechette

emphasizes scientific studies conducted by experts, as if these were the only or themarkedly superior way for a community’s knowledge to be relevant and to be

reflected upon and shared.All this is not to say that Shrader-Frechette is ignoring communities altogether

in her work—far from it. That the relevant unit for informed enough consent iscommunities rather than individuals seems to be implied in at least some aspectsof her work. The first condition of meaningful participation in her (1991) is equiv-

alent economic and political power. While Shrader-Frechette argues that the gov-ernment should enact policies and fund communities to reduce their disadvantage

relative to government institutions or large corporations in terms of economic andpolitical power, it is difficult to imagine achieving anything like this equality for

each individual in an affected community. This is particularly so given how indi-viduals coming together to petition, fight, and otherwise engage in participation

with these larger entities is one of the few effective strategies in our currentpolitical system (e.g. Brown 1993). Shrader-Frechette supports active communityparticipation, as opposed to participation by isolated individuals, in a political

context, but they have a role to play in an epistemic context as well which shedoes not fully discuss. I will argue that for a community to give informed enough

consent and therefore to begin to meaningfully participate requires epistemiccapacity as a community.

Essential Elements of Community Epistemic Capacity

There has been work on community capacities to represent their own interests andparticipate meaningfully in research and policy questions (e.g. Chaskin 2001;

Freudenberg 2004; Goodman et al. 1998), and how techniques like community-based participatory research can increase these capacities (Minkler et al. 2008).

However, this work has not looked at epistemic capacities as an essential element

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of community capacities for participation. In literature on this topic, “communitycapacity” is commonly understood as referring to something like “A set of

dynamic community traits, resources, and associational patterns that can bebrought to bear for community building and community health improvements”

(Norton, Mcleroy et al. 2002). I agree with this definition, but as this paper isfocusing on epistemic capacity, it is worth defining the more specific term. By

community epistemic capacity I mean a community’s ability to gain, maintain,adapt, and continue the knowledge that it needs to solve problems and manage its

environment. Epistemic capacities cover everything from communities learningabout entirely unprecedented forms of pollution, to maintaining and continuingtheir knowledge about something in the environment the community has had a

relationship with for thousands of years. While a complete description of epistemiccapacity would vary from community to community, there are some essential

elements in any successful epistemic community.One of the essential elements of community epistemic capacity is the ability to

gain knowledge. This means that there must be accepted methodologies withinthe community for gaining the knowledge that is important to them and that

embed their values. These methodologies must have high buy-in among membersof the community (e.g. be trusted), be well understood, and be effective. This is

true whether the methodologies in their practice are widely dispersed within thecommunity (perhaps for egalitarian reasons or for efficiency of distributedresources such as time), or rely on specialized segments of the community who

are well respected in their given realm of specialization and who are an accessibleresource for other members of the community. There also must be “knowledge

networks” of trusted relationships (Bidwell, Dietz, and Scavia 2013) for distribut-ing and disseminating the information within the community, in particular to

those segments of the community which need that particular knowledge to informsome action.

Another essential element is the ability to maintain knowledge in the currentgenerations of the community. This requires that the community keep enoughcohesion for the knowledge dispersed within the community to meaningfully be

said to be part of the entire community, and for the different things known withinthe community to usefully interact. It also requires that the members of the com-

munity have enough trust in the community and its ways of knowing that theywork to continue and add to it. If trust within the community breaks down, it is

easy for knowledge within the community to not be sufficiently communicated orfor it to be abandoned. Finally, for at least many communities, in particular mar-

ginalized communities, maintenance requires the ability to legitimate their knowl-edge in the larger society. Knowledge is sometimes used by a community to

become informed about risks and benefits, or to coordinate and guide theiractions, but another use for knowledge is to legitimate their actions in certain con-texts. This includes being able to reframe knowledge in a way that is understand-

able to the wider society and advocate for it. It is problematic to expectmarginalized communities to legitimate their knowledge in the eyes of the

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dominant society, but it is the case that without this legitimation, it will bedifficult for the community to use its knowledge as a reason in support of its goals

and projects. Further, knowledge that has no legitimacy within the larger society isvulnerable, because it will be given no support (e.g. in the schools the children in

the community may attend) (e.g. Reed and Norgaard 2010).A third essential element of community epistemic capacity is the ability for the

community to adapt. By adaptation, I mean the ability for the community tore-deploy its capacities for challenges it has never faced before. This requires that the

methodologies by which the community gains knowledge are open to reflection andchange as the situation warrants, and open to strategic adoption of methodologiesand knowledge from outside. It also requires that knowledge the community already

maintains be periodically re-checked against new experiences to see if it is stillrelevant. For example it is not uncommon for an indegenous community to employ

both Traditional Ecological Knowledge as well as scientists within the tribe to addressissues (such as new pollution sources) that TEK alone is not effective for understand-

ing or addressing (e.g. McGregor 2009). Without this capacity for adaptation, thecommunity’s epistemic capacities are highly fragile to outside shock, and the

community’s knowledge may quickly become outmoded in the face of rapid change.The final essential element of community epistemic capacity I will address is

the ability for the community to continue its knowledge. Where maintenance isfocused on the current generation of the community, continuance focuses oninter-generational transmission of knowledge and methodologies. Doing so

requires an understanding of what is known by the community, the resources nec-essary to teach future generations with fairly high fidelity, and the ability to create

enough buy-in to the community from future generations that they participate inlearning their culture’s knowledge and practicing its methodologies. It also requires

that the community decide what knowledge and methodologies within its episte-mic heritage to continue forward into future generations, and what to either allow

to be forgotten, or to adapt in a critical way (for example as an object lesson ofhow the community has improved). This capacity to choose what to pass on isakin to the concept of “environmental heritage” found in the work of Robert

Figueroa, which he argues “Pertains to the meanings and symbols of the past thatframe values, practices, and places peoples wish to preserve as members of a

community” (2011, 233, emphasis added).Without these elements, a community cannot be said to have significant

epistemic capacity. I will argue in the next section that discussions of meaningfulparticipation require coverage of community epistemic capacity or else one cannot

guarantee a community’s ability to consent.

The Necessity of Capacity

It has been argued that community capacity generally is essential to successful envi-

ronmental management (Habron 2003) and environmental justice (Freudenberg,

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Pastor, and Israel 2011). As Freudenberg, Pastor and Israel say, “Increased commu-nity capacity can help a community reduce the level and impact of environmental

stressors” (128), and so the inverse is presumably also true. However, epistemiccapacity and its effects have been insufficiently examined, and so it is perhaps worth

arguing for its necessity as well to meaningful consent to environmental risk man-agement. To make this argument I will focus primarily on instances of what has

been called “post-normal science,” and for communities with high distrust towardscientists and other experts. This is not the only situation in which community epi-

stemic capacity is important, but it is hopefully a very clear case. When “normal”interactions between science and the public are not good enough to settle aquestion of risk because “Facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and

decisions urgent” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, 744), we are in a situation describedby some as “post-normal” science (e.g. Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, 1994). At such

times, including stakeholders and those who might have useful information is seenas essential (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, 752–4). However, when input by

stakeholders is vital, but these stakeholders have a high distrust of experts, it ismore difficult to include them than we might suppose.

Whatever the cause of the distrust, be it a long history of prominent abuses(e.g. Deloria 1995; Dwayne et al. 2005; Freimuth et al. 2001; Thomas and Quinn

1991) or rapid loss of trust due to a single incident (e.g. Wynne 1989), these arewhat Whyte and Crease call in their (2010), “Poisoned-well cases.” Whyte andCrease say that in at least some of these situations, which they define as “Distrust

in experts is an explicit and irreducible element in multilateral negotiations overscientific and technical issues,” there is “No hope for a technical argument to suc-

ceed” (418). Simple education of the individuals in the community is not a suffi-cient redress, because it is not merely a lack of understanding or even competence

(unless one wants to beg the question and simply assert that understanding andcomprehension require endorsing mainstream scientific practice). Rather, people

in these so-called “Poisoned-well cases” feel that the science and other expert workbeing done does not embed their community’s values, standards of evidence, andso on. At one level, the fact that this distrust is oriented around their community

implies that addressing their community is an important part of gaining aproductive partnership. At another level, when we think of what is required for

participation in ways that would lead the public to buy in to the process, we see adeeper need for focusing on and strengthening communities, and in particular

strengthening their epistemic capacities.If we imagine a scenario in which the public has low trust in external experts,

and feels that their local knowledge is not being represented, merely being con-sulted and giving consent is unlikely to suffice, even if they meet all of Shrader-

Frechette’s requirements in Environmental Justice. This is because all they would beable to do is articulate values and beliefs, without grounding either in robustmethodologies. Without a methodology and other epistemic capacities, they are

not likely to be able to participate meaningfully and influence the research beingdone, and will either have to abandon some of those values and beliefs in order to

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accept the only research program and findings available (thereby granting aninsufficiently informed consent), or act in a way that seems irrational because they

cannot give epistemic grounds for rejecting the expert research program (therebynot granting consent at all, but being unable to articulate why this is the right

decision for them).In situations such as these, it is necessary for the public to have the epistemic

capacity to participate meaningfully by being able to articulate their values andbeliefs embedded in theories and methodologies in a way that lets them interpret

the information they are being provided so that they can truly be said to beinformed enough. Without this it is highly unlikely that they will meet Shrader-Frechette’s second requirement in Risk and Rationality. Unless the public can have

articulated alternative evaluative assumptions and methodologies, it is impossibleto mandate that these be considered.

This can only be done at the community level. Complex methodologies relyingon robust evaluative assumptions that result in strong prediction and control of a

wide variety of situations (such as, for example, the ones found in science) are notthe sort of thing developed and held by individuals. Even scientists, despite being

individually very well educated and likely to qualify all of Shrader-Frechette’srequirements for giving free informed consent, must rely on their epistemic com-

munity of fellow scientists. An isolated climate scientist would presumably not feelthat she could give informed enough consent to future sea level changes based onjust her observations without access to meta studies of other researchers. For non-

scientists, the burden of each member of the community having to separately learnentire methodologies and conduct research is an even more impossible burden.

But by distributing the epistemic load among people in the community who arewell suited by inclination, time, and resources to do a given epistemic task and

share with the community, research becomes possible, both for communities ofscientists and non-scientists. Merely listening to communities is not enough.

Rather, these communities must have enough epistemic capacity to be what Shrad-er-Frechette called “Well-calibrated communities of theory holders” (1991, 192).

Without epistemic capacities, the expertise on which Sunstein, Shrader-

Frechette, and other authors rely as an element of distributive justice (the idea thatsome communities do not have enough access to this expertise), is actually useless

for communities with low trust in experts. Community epistemic capacities, partic-ularly for these communities, allow access to expertise to be of use in building free

informed consent.

Case Studies

In giving some examples of the abstract situations described above, we will look

first at Popular Epidemiology. It provides examples of successful communitieswhich did not initially have sufficient community epistemic capacity, but which

were able to build their epistemic capacity to the point where their knowledge had

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enough legitimacy that they were able to meaningfully participate. We will thenlook at science shops, which are good examples of a possible alternative to fully

developing a community’s own epistemic capacity. In looking at science shops, Iwill show that, though they are an improvement for the communities over their

prior situation, this alternative is insufficient for informed enough consent.

Popular Epidemiology

Popular Epidemiology (PE) is a term describing communities doing their own

work to find the source of diseases in their area. PE is a well-developed literaturein social science, but one which has been underdeveloped in its philosophical

justifications, making it worthwhile to use as an example. Further, at issue areparticipation, policy, and risk assessment, all themes being discussed and directly

involved in questions of justice.In “When the Public Knows Better,” Philip Brown lays out the typical stages of

how a community comes together to perform PE and what common responses andoutcomes are, using the example of the community of Woburn, Massachusetts,which had suffered from contaminated water:

(1) People in a contaminated community notice separately both health effectsand pollutants.

(2) These residents hypothesize something out of the ordinary, typically aconnection between the health effects and the pollutants.

(3) Community residents share information, creating a common perspective.(4) Community residents, now a more cohesive group, read, ask around, and

talk to government officials and scientific experts about the health effectsand the putative contaminants.

(5) Residents organize groups to pursue their investigation.

(6) Government agencies conduct official studies in response to communitygroups’ pressure. These studies usually find no association between the

contaminants and health effects.(7) Community groups bring in their own experts to conduct a health study

and to investigate pollutant sources and pathways.(8) Community groups engage in litigation and confrontation.

(9) Community groups press for corroboration of their findings by officialexperts and agencies (18).

Looking at this list, we can begin to see implications for a community’s episte-mic capacity and how that is connected to their ability to give informed enoughconsent and participate meaningfully. The first thing to notice is that the people

living in the local area are aware of a problem before anyone else, and oftenhypothesize the causal link before those in positions of authority are even con-

vinced there is a concern. That residents are the first to be aware of a problemgoing on in their own community is perhaps not surprising. Members of the

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affected community are well placed to notice that something is wrong, and theyare also often in a special position to hypothesize the correct causal agents. This is

because their daily practices let them know in a very fine-grained way who in theircommunity is exposed to what and who is particularly vulnerable, and they are far

more likely to notice small indicators like rashes or respiratory problems which donot rise to the level of a reported symptom. Most importantly, they have the

motive to pursue an investigation when health officials do not think it necessaryor affordable. Indeed, Brown comments that it is often the women in the commu-

nity who first notice a potential problem and begin to deal with it because of theirdaily practice of caring for the health of the family. So we see already some episte-mic capacity for those individual members, but it is not necessarily community-

focused if the information is not shared in knowledge networks. Only when thecommunity can be said to gain knowledge is it a useful capacity for community

action. This is what members of the community try to build in steps 3, 5, and 7.Before moving on, it is worth emphasizing that it is certainly also possible that

communities will have incorrect hypotheses, though the assumption that they arewrong until proven otherwise which seems to motivate some politicians and scien-

tists is certainly overstating this concern. That they can be incorrect is not neces-sarily too great a problem; providing that they check their hypotheses against new

incoming evidence and are willing to and have the capacity to adapt their beliefs,this is no greater a concern than in academic science. There also may well be partsof a community’s hypotheses which are not particularly falsifiable, but this too is

not as great a concern as some might believe it to be. As writers on indigenous sci-ences like Sandra Harding have pointed out, as long as an epistemic community’s

theories are reliable, in that they are significantly better than chance at predictionand successful interaction with the environment, they ought to be respected inde-

pendent of any unfalsifiable baggage attached along with them (if we didn’t acceptthis idea we would have to reject much of Western science as well, with its own

particular difficult or impossible to falsify assumptions). This adaptation to betterenable the community to pursue its goals and interact with its environment can beseen in step 7.

The next thing to notice is that the concerns of the community, according toBrown, are often disconfirmed by initial scientific studies. This happens for several

reasons. First, the nuanced, personalized data that led the community to drawthese conclusions is usually discounted. Second, the scientific studies are often

sampled and modeled with assumptions that do not match the community (forexample, most exposure and health models are based on an assumed adult, male,

white worker). Third, scientific studies are often either performed by the corpora-tions under question, or by overworked government agencies who are heavily

influenced by them. Finally, as Brown points out, different values are motivatingdifferent standards of evidence: “Although epidemiologists admit to the uncertain-ties of their work, their usual solution is to err on the side of rejecting environ-

mental causation whereas community residents make the opposite choice” (20).

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This approach can be from a paternalistic desire to keep people from panicking,or simply a preference internal to science for false negatives over false positives.

As a result of the community’s local knowledge, and the perceived lack of rep-resentation of that knowledge in expert scientific methodologies, there is low trust

by the public of the EPA and other experts, perhaps rightly so. Yet if participationamounted to merely re-asserting their belief that in fact there was a connection

between the pollution and illness, or that they valued clean water, it is unlikelythat this would have much effect. Further, it is unlikely that they would be able to

maintain this knowledge and continue it. When experts tell the community thatthere is no connection, the community needs strong internal capacities of mainte-nance and continuance for that knowledge to not be abandoned, particularly when

many members of the community wish the information were not true, perhapsbecause the increased risks for themselves and their families are difficult to deal

with, and perhaps because they benefit financially from that risk, for example byworking at the polluting factory. Attempts to develop capacities for maintenance

and continuance can be seen in step 5. Moreover, if step 9 is unsuccessful, thecommunities will need to build up their capacity for maintenance and continuance

as they develop their own strategies for mitigating the environmental problems asbest they can.

The final, and for our purposes most interesting, thing to notice about Brown’sstages of PE is that communities respond to their special epistemological access onthe one hand and the uselessness or hostility of dominant scientific institutions on the

other by as a group performing studies themselves. In Woburn, Massachusetts, thecommunity did this by informally sampling their fellow community members and

the local environment to draw up epidemiological maps, collecting samples to showthe EPA, and other personal data gathering methods. The people of Woburn also

worked in conjunction with professional scientists to perform more formal studies,and these studies were far more effective at finding toxins in the environment and

increasing the probability of a causal link because they were driven by communityknowledge. As those formal studies were being done, many people in the communitywere learning about how epidemiology worked so that as a community, they were

able to better participate in the process. It is important to note that this did not hap-pen at the beginning of the process. If it had, the experts they brought on would have

been much less effective (as we will see in the next case study), because the commu-nity would not have had the necessary capacities to interact with the experts

effectively. Taken together, this is an example of the people of Woburn building theircommunity epistemic capacity to the point where it was possible to be informed

enough to consent to having the polluters in their community, and to participate ina meaningful way in those policy decisions.

In PE, recall that the community forms a sense of itself and organizes in orderto make this knowledge and advocate for it. While they are often not granted epi-stemic authority by those with political power, this is something that they can con-

test, by arguing for their own special relationship to the land they are discussing,gaining scientific corroboration, using political pressure, media outreach, and any

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of the other techniques of social activism. But until they have this knowledge as anepistemic community, rather than isolated suspicion, there is no chance of having

enough epistemic authority to meaningfully participate.As for values recall that the epistemic values in the community, such as what

level of uncertainty to accept, whether to tolerate false positives or negatives,informed by other values (such as valuing a clean environment or strongly disvalu-

ing cancer for their children) are an inherent part of their knowledge formation.So by increasing their epistemic capacities, the community is able to better articu-

late their values and beliefs in ways that will affect research, so that the researchcan sufficiently inform their decision to consent or not. Thus building epistemiccapacity is an important part of achieving meaningful participation, and essential

for the community and its members to give informed enough consent.

Science Shops

It might be objected at this point that one does not have to build up the episte-mic capacity of the community, because I am wrong when I say that communitiesneed epistemic capacities to interact productively with experts. Perhaps it is

possible to have proxies who understand the values of the community but do theepistemic “heavy lifting” for them. This would be in keeping with Shrader-

Frechette’s (1991) call to fund alternative studies that embed the perspectives andvalues of the community. In the example of PE above, the community of Woburn

was able to build its own capacity and thereby democratically participate in riskassessments and policy decisions, but perhaps this need not necessarily be the

case.A promising alternative to building epistemic capacity in a community is found

in the model of “science shops” which are prevalent throughout Europe—non-profit

groups which facilitate the interaction of communities and academic scientists.Community organizations come with practical concerns and are able to get the

formal studies they need to act. The science shop helps by putting their concerns intothe sort of formal question that might be usefully answered with empirical research,

and connects them with scientists who have agreed to volunteer their time to the pro-ject. According to Irwin (1995), one science shop in Northern Ireland, in three years

of operation, received requests from over 60 different community groups on ques-tions concerning “Health/environment (39), community development (25), welfare

(15), work/training (11), [and] homelessness (9)” (162). Irwin also reports that thescience shop in Northern Ireland is very popular with those who have used it.Interestingly, the groups often wanted not new information that only scientists could

give them, but “The legitimatory orientation … to ‘prove what you already know’”(162–3). A charitable reading of this is that local knowledge is often the first to

recognize a problem, thereby benefiting researchers, but measuring its extent andgranting the knowledge formal legitimacy (stage 7 in Brown’s list) is a powerful gift

researchers can give back.

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Science shops can give a community some useful tools for becoming informedenough to give meaningful consent, but this participation is still partial as long as

the knowledge production is not integrated into the community. This forces thecommunity to be dependent on academic science or government institutions. Sci-

ence shops, relying as they do on academics taking over the question from thecommunity, suffer from the problems we have been discussing in this paper. One

problem is that, as Irwin points out, the public often cannot have their questionstaken seriously or performed the way they want them to be: “Science dismisses

externally-generated issues, questions and understandings as irrelevance and igno-rance. Public groups find science inaccessible” (161). Additionally, those scientistswho do make the effort to do the research the public groups want find their

results falling on deaf academic ears (165). This is hardly full participation.Further, recall the earlier statement by Irwin that the public often comes to sci-

ence shops looking for confirmation of what they already believe. While I pre-sented a charitable reading of this above, another reading is that because the

science being used is external to the community, it can be used by the communityneither to generate new hypotheses, nor to reflexively develop their own theories.

Instead, they can at best provide a new hypothesis and perhaps some data toalready-existing methodologies and bodies of theory, with embedded values which

may not match that of the community. If science shops worked instead to buildepistemic capacity in the communities they were serving, the results would be bet-ter both for the communities’ ability to become informed enough, and for the

objectivity (per Shrader-Frechette’s definition of the term) of research generated.

Building Epistemic Capacity

If we acknowledge the necessity of epistemic capacity for a community to mean-

ingfully participate in assessments and decisions, and if we agree that meaningfulparticipation is important for justice, we might well ask how these capacities can

be enhanced. This is particularly true when a new “community” has been recentlycreated out of emerging risks or shifting demographics. Whether starting from

scratch or working with extant communities, it is within the remit of many policyorganizations, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development

(HUD) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US, to enhancecommunity epistemic capacity, if indeed it is a required element of informed

enough consent (EPA Public Participation Guide 2014; HUD Demonstration Act1993). Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to lay out detailed policies, andindeed such policies would vary radically in different contexts (both historical con-

tingencies and the current state of the community’s capacity) and for differentactors (internal or external to the community), it is possible to make a few obser-

vations and suggestions from the theory and the case studies.One observation, coming out of the example of PE, is that it is difficult to

build epistemic capacity as a general good without a specific focus. Without a

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motivating problem, the goal of building a community’s epistemic capacity mustcompete with the many other goals and responsibilities placed on the community,

and it is unlikely that many members of the community will have the necessarybuy-in to this particular goal for it to be successful. Instead, when a community or

public agency is already responding to a crisis, that is the time to build up thecommunity’s epistemic capacity. As the crisis is addressed, it would be easy to cre-

ate networks and institutions which disappeared when the crisis is over. Instead,activists, policy makers, and organizations working with or within the community

should see each issue motivating the community as an opportunity to build up theepistemic capacities not only around the particular issue, but in a way that willleave the community with more capacity to apply to other problems down the

road.Another observation, coming out of the example of science shops, is that epi-

stemic capacity is not something modular that can just be bolted on or given as aresource for the community. Recall the three elements of gaining knowledge in the

definition of community epistemic capacity. Even if this new epistemic resource isvery popular (has high buy-in), and is very effective (because it was created by

experts outside the community), if it is not also understood by members of thecommunity, it will not be as useful as it could be, because the community will not

use it to structure their epistemic goals in the first place. It is also, of course, lesslikely to have their interests embedded in it.

Examples of building epistemic capacity that follows the two above

observations can be found in the cases of the Anishinabek/Ontario FisheriesResource Center (McGregor 2009) and the Walpole Island Heritage Center (Van

Wynsberghe 2002). These centers not only conduct environmental assessmentswhich integrate TEK with scientific knowledge, but they also work hard to increase

the epistemic capacity of the communities. In the case of the Fisheries ResourceCenter, the biologists solicit and support the community to participate at all

stages, and over time this has built understandings of the assessments which letthe participation be more effective. In the case of the Walpole Island HeritageCenter, when external experts are brought in to conduct research that the commu-

nity cannot currently carry out, the community shadows the experts to learn howto do what they are doing, so that the community can critique the methods, and

adopt them in the future if they see fit.These two examples also embody some of Freudenberg, Pastor, and Israel’s

(2011) strategies for increasing community capacity. While their list includes someelements which are not relevant to building epistemic capacities, some are: Train-

ing and Technology Transfer, Technical Assistance, and EmpowermentApproaches. These cannot exist in isolation, but together can be part of a valuable

strategy for increasing a community’s epistemic capacity. McGregor (2009) andVan Wynsberghe (2002) both discuss limitations to these models and ways inwhich the participation and epistemic capacity building could be more robust.

These are not perfect solutions, but rather examples of real-world attempts toaddress this difficult problem.

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Conclusion

Meaningful participation can make risk characterizations and decisions “moredemocratic, legitimate, and informative” (National Research Council 1996, 79).

When communities with sufficient degrees of epistemic capacities exist, meaningfulparticipation and informed consent from the community are possible. When com-munity epistemic capacities do not exist, it is not possible for a community to par-

ticipate and give consent, and participation and consent must then laboriouslyinclude every member of the community, or rest on methodologically questionable

assumptions built into statistical sampling (Shrader-Frechette 2010). Therefore, itis within the remit of many organizations to increase epistemic capacities in the

communities from which they are trying to obtain consent.This paper leaves unanswered several important questions. For example, there

is the practical question for policy makers of “threshold”—we have seen that epi-stemic capacities admit to degrees, and so the meaningfulness of the participationby a community will be roughly proportional to the level of their epistemic capac-

ity, but what is the minimum threshold? Further, while the suggestions in thispaper of the need for epistemic capacity building and a few directions in which it

might be pursued are meant to have practical policy implications, structuralcritiques of dominant institutions might suggest that these kinds of changes are

impossible, or at least will not be achieved by supporters of the status quo.Epistemic capacity concerns arise from a complex vision of society which might

not be transferable to liberal policy applications. Despite these concerns, however,we can see that to the extent community epistemic capacity is necessary for

informed enough consent and, therefore, meaningful participation. Epistemiccapacity must be pursued on justice grounds. The better the capacities the betterable a community will be to participate.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to acknowledge the Slaughter Research Fellowship through thePhilosophy Department at Michigan State University for funding the completion

of this paper, Dr. Dan Steel for helping with an early draft of the paper, andDr. Kyle Whyte for helping throughout the writing process.

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