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This article focuses on toxic waste management policy in Australia. The disposal method used in many countries where such wastes are produced in substantial quantities is high-temperature incineration. Although, beginning in the late 1970, several attempts were made by private firms and state agencies to set up such a facility in Australia, all ended in uproar and defeat. After years of deliberation, the commonwealth, New South Wales, and Victorian governments, acting in accordance with a broad consensus of the Australian Environment Council, established an independent task force in September 1987 to conduct a public inquiry to produce a workable solution to the intractable waste problem. Upon the announcement of the governments' intentions to proceed with the proposal and the New South Wales government's instruction to its waste disposal authority to prepare the project's environmental impact statement, the Corowa community exploded with crises of no consultation, and protest campaigns were mounted in a few days. The task force had, in Corowa as at the other sites, conducted an extensive local information and discussion program during its previous surveys. The processes and tasks involved in designing policy reform have received relatively little recognition in the literature of environmental management or in the fields of the environmental sciences, political and social studies, and philosophy.

This paper analyzes social processes underlying relationships between technoscientific knowledge and governmental regulatory activities in the context of the recent case of an Australian hazardous waste initiative. It maps a nexus of the phenomenology of trust, the formation of technoscientific knowledge, and the political philosophy of regulation and the clarification of knowledge claims. It proposes that these processes depend upon elemental social and political components described by various writers in terms of 'the constitution of scientific objects; 'the construction of scientific types', 'familiarity; the 'taken-for-granted' 'trust; justice' and other concepts. It introduces the terra 'suspended doubt' to describe a previously undifferentiated situation in individual and social interaction. It concludes that democratization now increasingly extends, in the political handling of environmental initiatives and risk in the conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism, to the democratization and negotiation of knowledge claims. This produces problems for representative democracy and expressed needs for more adaptive political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]