the nation's largest school district , announced a new policy on use of pesticides in its school buildings. The district committed to a policy of integrated pest management, giving priority to nonchemical approaches to pest control, and set a long-term goal of eliminating all chemical controls. In establishing this policy, the school district invoked the precautionary principle, saying: The Pre...

In their recent Talking Point articles, Martin Peterson and Andrew Stirling debated whether the precautionary principle could act as a basis for rational decisionmaking in the face of unknown or unclear dangers (Peterson, 2007; Stirling, 2007). In addition to the problem of measuring the effectiveness of implementation, there is— more fundamentally—little understanding at present of how impleme...

In recent paper in this journal (), we proposed two novel puzzles associated with the precautionary principle. Both are puzzles that materialise, we argue, once we investigate the principle through an epistemological lens, and each constitutes a philosophical hurdle for any proponent of a plausible version of the precautionary principle. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen () claims, also in this...

The Precautionary Principle has been proposed as a basis for making decisions about environmental issues but remains controversial. Using a model of inductively justified propositions about awareness, this paper shows how the Precautionary Principle may be interpreted as a heuristic guide for boundedly rational decision-makers faced with the possibility of unfavorable surprises. © 2013 Elsevier...

The European Union has chosen the precautionary principle as a key guiding principle to achieve more effective policy-making on risks, by moving away from preventive regulation towards more precautionary regulation. Precautionary language has been a part of European Community law for over a decade; however, whether its establishment has had any real effect on European policymaking and regulatio...

Introduction It was only recently, about fifteen years ago, that the “precautionary principle” rose to international prominence in environmental policy making. Loosely formulated, the principle states that if there is an indication that a certain activity may be harmful to humans or the environment, that activity should be abandoned. The principle provides politicians with the possibility to in...