ALSA 2025 meeting

Science-based regulations are typically based on a vague statutory mandate that requires the agency to set standards or take actions at the point when risks are identified. Within such process, regulatory knowledge is created, circulated, and made into patterns by concrete and sophisticated technical rules produced by structured and ‘objective’ approaches. Such ‘standardization’ produces clear-cut, commensurable rules and creates expectation for the general public, acting as a crucial means of knowledge communication. Meanwhile, it incorporates authorized expertise in certain fields to improve the quality of administrative decision making, striving for truth and correctness in achieving better regulation. However, the trend of standardization in modern regulations comes with the tyranny of science-dominated and number-based rationality, creating potential injustice between the knowledgeable few and the vast majority.

While science-based regulatory frameworks universally feature instruments with similar functions of standardizing regulatory knowledge, their constructions of regulatory objectivity can be varied, influenced by different traditions of the Rule of Law. Drawing on Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s conceptions about mechanical objectivity and trained judgment, this article explores how environmental governance defines and pursues objective knowledge within the U.S. and China, principally in the domain of administrative rulemaking. By examining their pollution control regimes and underlying rationales, this article highlights the contrasting approaches to ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science-based regulations. This comparison reveals how regulatory structures are informed by different notions of Rule of Law, which are guided by the seemingly universal, but intrinsically varying constructions of objectivity.

Key Words: Standardization; Expert Administration; Regulatory Objectivity; The Rule of Law