Persistent : why New York State and the United States still don’t regulate PFOA in drinking water
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Authors
Rabinow, Laura
Issue Date
2019-08
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
ENG
Keywords
Science and technology studies
Alternative Title
Abstract
This study contributes to a body of social research that illuminates variation in national and regional approaches to chemical regulation. Studies of chemical governance typically focus on federal level standards and policies, but in the US, states sometimes adopt widely varying water contaminant standards. This case study therefore makes a novel contribution by showing how state level policies interact with federal regulatory systems, on one hand, and local-level crises, on the other. Furthermore, this research contributes to theoretical questions about the maintenance of authority in the context of a legitimation crisis, and advances understandings of how public officials, regulatory scientists, and concerned publics contribute to and contend with ignorance about “emerging contaminants” in drinking water supplies. It reflects that relevant landmark environmental regulatory programs are structured to produce incommensurate science about those contaminants, and that in this case the ignorance produced by those programs worked in concert with a public health regulatory culture of minimization and to produce an absence of regulation. On a broader scale, with respect to the large universe of unregulated contaminants, this case demonstrates how those structures and cultures, and their attendant production of ignorance, work to maintain the legitimacy of regulatory-industrial systems and authority over them.
Description
August 2019
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY