ABSTRACT
It is generally agreed that the BSE (‘mad cow’) and other food crises have been instrumental in shaping the way that the EU deals today with science underlying its decision-making. These crises have led to a fundamental change in our view of the legitimacy of government use of science, resulting in a quest for a higher quality of scientific advice used to verify agricultural production and food-processing methods together with increased transparency and broader participation in science-based decision-making. Today, the issue is not merely one of how to ensure that the science used in governance is sound, but it also encompasses the way that scientific opinion is balanced with wider ethical and social values. New approaches introduced by the EU in the wake of the BSE crisis sought to repair the deficiencies in EU risk regulation to make a clearer separation between risk assessment and risk management, clarify which portions of risk policy should be attributed to scientists and public administrations, and define new rules for the production of scientific advice, the introduction of the precautionary principle and increasing openness and participation (Everson and Vos 2009).
