The Politics of Counter-Expertise on Aerial Spraying: Social Movements Denouncing Pesticide Risk Governance in the Philippines

Abstract

In various places in the world, aerial spraying of pesticides has met with resistance from local communities potentially endangered by toxic pesticide drift. Social movements, and the counter-expertise that they mobilise, often trigger changes in state regulations of the practice. This article describes such struggles over risk regulation in the Philippines, where aerial spraying is common in large monoculture banana plantations. It has provoked local activism contesting the socioeconomic power of landed and business elites and has challenged the government's approach to managing pesticide risks. This article develops the argument that different types of counter-expertise must be recognised. The case shows that it can be difficult for movements to articulate these different types of counter-expertise. Furthermore, the weak state characteristics of the Philippine state has shaped the ambiguous responses of risk governance to multiple actors' divergent knowledge claims. The result is a legal impasse in which civil society has successfully pushed the issue of aerial spraying onto the national political arena, but the state has as yet been unable to develop a comprehensive pesticide risk regulation independent of powerful business interests.

The Philippine controversy over aerial spraying of pesticides: a timeline of selected developments,1997-2016

“…However, plenty of entries are based on IDIS staff's experience and engagement with government actors and could therefore not be verified with external sources. The table is structured as a timeline of events and includes a separate column for codes to indicate which sequence particular events belong to, matching to some extent the chapters of Nikol and Jansen (2018), and indicating chronological order. A separate overview has been made for all the House Bills filed, to indicate the sequences of the same Bill filed in different Congresses (next section).…”

“…A separate overview has been made for all the House Bills filed, to indicate the sequences of the same Bill filed in different Congresses (next section). The codes have been devised to match the structure and argumentation of Nikol and Jansen (2018). The first three codes (EO, AO, RL) parallel the three main sub-sections outlining the specifically targeted efforts of the civil society lobby addressing different sections and levels of the government.…”

“…The events and activities in the civil society lobby included in this list are relevant for the analysis of the politics of counter-expertise in the struggles for regulations of aerial spraying presented in Nikol and Jansen (2018). This research contributes to the recent literature on the role of social movements in the transformation of pesticide risk regulation (Bohme 2014;Harrison 2011; Barraza et al 2013;Jansen and Dubois 2014;Arancibia 2016;Lapegna 2016;Perkins 2012;Zwetsloot et al 2018).…”

“…This report is a background document for Nikol and Jansen (2018) and provides a comprehensive overview of the developments and events of the Philippine struggle for regulation on aerial spraying of pesticides between 1997-2016. The information provided is relevant to outline and analyse the civil society lobby as it contested the practice of aerial pesticide spraying on large banana plantations on the island of Mindanao.…”

Guest Editorial: Conceptualizing Justice and Counter-Expertise

“…We more broadly define counter-expertise as knowledge deployed by any actor, whether a credentialed expert or member of a social movement organization, to intervene in a power structure to address a goal of a marginalized group. Counter-expert interventions may perturb the lay person/expert boundary (Topçu, 2008;Chhem and Clancey, 2016;Nikol and Jansen, 2018); challenge the epistemological content of credentialed expertise (Fortun and Cherkasky, 1998b;Topçu, 2008;Nikol and Jansen, 2018); and mobilize knowledge through collective action (Nikol and Jansen, 2018). Some counter-experts blur the boundary between lay persons and experts.…”