The Role of Social Scientists in Dealing with the "Social Aspects" of High-Level Radioactive Waste Management in Belgium. Will Sociologists Tame Resistance?

In most of the European countries that are confronted with the problem of nuclear waste, an important shift in the way decisions are made seems to have recently taken place, labeled by some scholars the “participative or deliberative turn” (Lehtonen, 2010 ; Chilvers, 2008 ; Barthe, 2006). Whilst technocratic rationales (based mainly on performance assessment and quantitative risk analysis) prevailed until the early nineties, they have proved to be unsuccessful and reached stalemate, leading to a paralysis of decisions-making procedures. Experts identified the “societal aspects” of nuclear waste management (mainly the emergence of organized local contestation) as the main cause of this paralysis and set up new tools of decision (e.g. SIA, local partnerships, consensus conferences) to deal with this new issue.

The present paper examines this "participatory turn" in the Belgian case. I identify the emergence of a new consensus among policy makers on how to deal with the "societal aspects" of high level waste management: it is claimed that the problem can only be properly handled if the expertise of social scientists is mobilized. Collaboration between nuclear and social scientists is therefore called upon by the actors of the nuclear sector as a way to unblock the decision-making process on nuclear waste.

Adopting a neo-institutionalist stance, I analyze the genealogy of this new kind of expertise in the field of nuclear waste management, tracking the idea of bringing social scientists in the process back to controversies in the late 1940s in the US. This genealogic account enables me to argue that this use of the social sciences can be seen as a way to maintain the prominence of technocratic rationality in participative decision-making processes.