Building institutional and procedural bridges between science and policy is a vital role for law. Fundamental to the success of this work is the development of more sophisticated, nuanced understandings of scientific knowledge production than those which are current in legal and policy spheres. In this paper, I consider scientific controversies that have emerged in the field of human and environmental health impacts of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), notably around methodological approaches to identifying such chemicals and analysing the risks they pose. Building on literatures in the philosophy and sociology of science, I identify bases on which bridge-building between science and policy could proceed and discuss the role that legal normativity can play in those processes.

Cultural theory (CT) has been widely used to explain variations in risk perception but has rarely been tested in Canada. This contribution represents the most thorough attempt to adapt CT to the Canadian context. Study results suggest that respondents’ commitment to egalitarianism was strongly correlated with risks from technology, while respondents’ commitment to hierarchism was strongly correlated with risks from criminal or unsafe behaviours. Respondents’ commitment to individualism was also correlated with risks from criminal and unsafe behaviours but differed from hierarchism in that individualism was not correlated with risk perceptions from prostitution and marijuana use. Respondents’ commitments to fatalism were strongly correlated with risk perception of vaccines. These conclusions are reinforced by results from a survey question that tests the extent to which such cultural predispositions map onto the myths of nature hypothesized by CT and by a survey experiment that tests how cultural commitments predict perceived risks from a controversial pipeline.

We model environmental interaction among countries as a policy game where governments in each country use quotas or taxes as strategy variables. The environmental policy has a triple role to play: targeting domestic emissions, providing strategic advantages for domestic firms and targeting imported pollution. Using a multi-sector economic model, we show that, besides the well-known inefficiencies arising at the international level, the environmental policy may lead to purely domestic inefficiencies.