What Rights are Eclipsed When Risk is Defined by Corporatism?

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Abstract
Governance by corporate power and allied state policy has long been associated with the demise of the public arena and substantive democracy (Habermas, 1962; Dewey in Westbrook, 1991; Chomsky, 1992). Significant among contributing factors to such governance is the presentation of new technologies. The central contention of this paper is that where public debate on the introduction of new technologies is prescribed to the technical limits of the expert, such dialogue can be confined to areas which in no way question the role these technologies play in the de facto selection of an exclusive kind of society. Attention to the technically-defined social, economic and environmental impacts of technologies at the expense of attention to their role in shaping society, underwrites the agenda for narrowing avenues of meaningful public participation ((i.e. democracy)). Confinement of public participation in this way may result as much from the uncritical adoption by opposition groups of the prevailing terms by which technologies are framed as it does from the imposition of these terms by 'experts'. Either way, confinement of debate limits popular democratic and NGO efforts to influence the use of new technologies. Consequently, opposition groups are unlikely to succeed unless and until the reasons for narrowing public political discourse down to a technology's technically- defined risks, costs and benefits are better understood and challenged. The question of just what is at risk when risk, costs and benefits are defined for us is of fundamental concern to the prospects of democracy. The UK government's (declared) position on genetically engineered or 'modified' (GM) food provides a case in point. The government's attitude has been from the beginning that scientific testing, such as crop trials, is necessary in order to assess the risks before 'informed' debate can take place. Risk assessment generally turns on two factors: the amount of harm an accident can cause and the probability of the accident taking place.i Once judgement about the amount of harm and probability of its occurrence is made, it must be decided whether and how much of the risk ought to be regulated (Revesz, 1997, 45). This decision is widely made by comparing risks with net benefits from

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