Construction Of Scientific Discourse And Resistance Of Risk Discourse: The Roles Of Local Government And The Public In The Decision-making Process Of Maoming PX Project

At present, Scientific and technological(S&T) decision-making has become the outbreak of the government and public relations. The lack of public participation in scientific and technological decision-making will contrary to the principle of democracy. However, if the introduction of public participation, with the scientific and technological content of the decision is easy to be opposed by the public. The phenomenon deserves our attention and reflection. This paper takes the Maoming PX Project as the research object, and is based on the theory of legitimacy of power,public understanding of science and other related theories.so as to interpret the behavior of the government and the public from the Maoming PX Project. The study has the following findings: for the government, he took the PX project as a rational behavior under the guidance of the value of the performance impulse. But the performance impulse of the government didn’t directly show, it was achieved by seeking policy legitimacy. So the government introduced a dual discourse system to increase the legitimacy of its policy. Under the guidance of such behavior, the government has launched a dual discourse system: the public interest and the technology discourse system. But for the public, firstly the public believes that PX is not a purely scientific problem, and the public’s experiential knowledge provides the public with different cognitive perspectives, thus the public turn the government’s science and technology issues to democratic issues. Secondly, the public is constantly frustrated when he played his democratic function. So the public rejected the government decision-making by the strategy of “Make things big”. Therefore this paper considers that to solve the PX event, we must deal with the tension between science and democracy, professional knowledge and experience knowledge, and reasonably determine the role of the government and the public in decision-making.