Radioactive waste management in Malaysia remains a wicked problem, the result of extracting technoscientific knowledge for techno-economic and industrial science purposes. Early policies were not cognizant of the full extent of these risks. Moreover, wicked problems are complex problems that emerged out of interactions as a result of particular ecological conditions. Postnormal science (PNS) becomes the framework for the negotiation of these complexities. Science-based problem-solving is broadened to include non-science epistemologies, which enables the legitimation of participatory epistemic interventions from lay experts. The problems encountered in radioactive waste management resulted from the high-stake uncertainties involved in measuring and evaluating risks and their causes. Wicked problems arise when there are disagreements over the governance of risk; incomplete information received as a result of obtuseness in the decision-making process, or in the blackboxing of the risks occurrences and mechanisms of predictions; and contextual interpretations of data provided by different expert stakeholders that could culminate into misinformation. Wicked problems in the two cases to be discussed will be considered through these lenses: ambivalence over technoscientific authorities and the structures of (dis)trust, the over-reducibility of complex technoscientific problems, and the difficulties in enacting extended peer review when participatory practices were traditionally excluded from policy-making.
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Risk management and technoscientific governance are encumbered by fallacious reasonings and strawman policies that obstruct the building of trust between authorities (decision-makers and process managers) and non-decision-making community stakeholders. The problematic situation is contextualized within the background of technoscientific struggles taking place in emerging (particularly postcolonial) states fraught with epistemic and political dispossession (Sousa Santos Citation2014). With rare exceptions, modern western science did not spread into all corners of the globe passively. Rather, modern western science was introduced into these societies by imperialists who found advantages in introducing technoscientific governance to their colonies (Mohd Hazim Citation2007Footnote1; Pyenson Citation1993). Therefore, the first scientific institutions established in the colonies were propped up by non-indigenous values. Newly sovereign countries were left to unpack blackboxed knowledge brought through encounters with such knowledge’s extractive and utilitarian properties.
Depending on the policies and priorities introduced by the ruling elites, scientific education could localize the culture and spirit of scientific inquiry by leveraging on prior colonial scientific legacies to reconstitute knowledge that is more trustworthy so as to attain resonance with local knowledge. Alternatively, administrators could merely preserve “blackboxed” practices that did not accommodate tinkering, reverse-engineering, and discovery-style research and learning. In the case of countries such as Malaysia, inconsistencies, and opaqueness in technoscientific governance, are set next to incomprehensible standards for dealing with risks because of the extractive practices of technoscience (Sulkifar Citation2014). These inconsistencies contributed to the distrust of scientific authority by members of non-scientific communities and sowed discord among scientific communities with wide-ranging technical expertise. Among the technoscientific experts are found variable priorities over whether to blackbox or unblackbox scientific objects, especially when the process of reviewing the objects is extended to non-scientific communities (Farrell Citation2011).
