Analyze

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study that the authors reference and model their call to action around is the worlds' largest scientific effort to quantify trends in health. It is lead by the Institute foe Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. It began in 1990 as a World Bank-commissioned study and is known for having introduced the disability-adujusted life year (DALY) as a new metric to quantify the burden of disease, injuries, and risk factors (or determinants), and enable comparisons. 

The 1990s were  a turning point for global health structures of governance and knowledge production, which the GBD study exemplifies. Global health experts began increasingly reframing health and healthcare in technical terms like DALY, removing health from public governance in ways that complemented and bolstered structural adjustment policies that were introduced in the 1980s (Janes 2004). As a result of these policies, the size, scope and reach of healthcare delivery and public health services were steadily reduced and downgraded. Anthropologists have been critical of these processes and other perceived failures in global health: the collapse of primary care initiatives fostered at Alma Ata in 1978, the resurgence of selective forms of primary care and vertical public health programs, and the ascendency of the World Bank as the principal health policymaking institution (Janes 2004, 2009).

Janes, Craig R (2004). "Going global in century XXI: medical anthropology and the new primary health care." Human Organization 63, no. 4: 457-471.

Janes, C. R., & Corbett, K. K. (2009). Anthropology and global health. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 167–183. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164314

“Environmental justice (EJ) scholars and activists see communities’ ability to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect the local environment, including siting decisions for refineries, power plants, waste dumps, and the like, to be integral to the idea of EJ (Cole and Foster 2001; Schlosberg 2007). For some, this explicitly includes the notion of consent: participatory processes are a means through which community members can give their consent (or not) once they fully understand the scope and consequences of a proposal (Shrader-Frechette 2005, 2007).” (252)

“EJ advocates have called attention to siting practices that target communities of color because of their political margin- alization. In order to challenge the siting of hazardous facilities, commu- nities of color have also had to confront exclusionary decision-making processes characterized by unrepresentative local governments, monolingual proceedings, and reliance on technocratic risk assessments, to name a few (Cole and Foster 2001). As a result, one of the Principles of EJ adopted in 1991 by the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit calls explicitly for justice in decision-making practices: ‘‘Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making.’’ (254)

“Seeing disclosure as an important element of informed consent provides ethical grounds to excoriate polluting industries for suppressing information, making misleading scientific claims, and intimidating scientists who wish to draw attention to the health risks they pose (see, e.g., Schrader-Frechette 2007, 39-75).” (255)

“Current discussions of procedural justice in the siting of environmentally hazardous facilities are far from na ̈ıve about the limitations of scientific knowledge. EJ advocates have not only criticized industry and government scientists for patently unethical practices like suppressing data (e.g., Shrader-Frechette 2007), they have pointed out the ways that scientific ways of knowing and technocratic modes of decision making can circumscribe community members’ ability to have a say in decisions that will affect their local environments (Guana 1998; Shrader-Frechette 1991); they have also asserted the need for community members’ local knowledge to be recognized as part of just decision-making procedures (Allen 2003; Fischer 2000).” (263)

This text explores some of the current barriers to achieving procedural justice (participation in decision making by those affected by it) based on Science and Technology Studies (STS). Examples of some of these fundamental barriers include (i) lack of disclosure of information from industry, and (ii) lack of information available at the time of decision making (making consent to be subject to environmental hazards difficult or impossible. The author argues for proactive, STS-based knowledge generation to combat this.

"Far from being anti-science and anti-education, BP has successfully embedded itself at the heart of elite UK science and education policy and practice networks – in particular, networks focused on development and delivery of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Rather than limiting itself to the narrow promotion of pro-petroleum rhetoric, BP has long seen its interests as being best served by the general promotion of pro-business practices and values throughout UK public education. Petro-pedagogy, in the case of BP at least, is best understood as a core component of a more extensive corporate education reform network that, for the past decade, has focused on promoting a neoliberal model of STEM education in schools" p. 475

"This brings us back to the argument of Eaton and Day (2019) that began this article: to tackle the crisis of climate change, we ‘need to dismantle the corporate power of the fossil fuel industries and their petro-pedagogy’ (15). Doing this, however, will require a far different model of STEM education: one that can help students ‘understand how manipulative politics, economic power and myth making PR are subverting public democratic will,’ and encourage ‘young people to apprentice as critical scientific policy analysts,’ and ‘create innovative counter-narratives to the old dysfunctional stories of intensifying carbon dependence’ (Elshof 2011, 15)." p.486