Watson2018
| Watson2018 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Watson2018 |
| Author(s) | Patrick Watson |
| Title | “Common Sense Geography” and The Elected Official: Technical Evidence and Conceptions of ‘Trust’ in Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway Decision |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Public Policy, Evidence, Knowledge Sociology, Ethnomethodology |
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| Year | 2018 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie |
| Volume | 43 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 49-77 |
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Abstract
Abstract. In felds such as Sociology and Political Science, there have been, over the course of three decades, attempts to engage elected offcials in “Evidence- Based Decision-Making”. Evidence is generally conceived as “expert” advice provided to politicians. A question that has gained more centrality in recent years is “why do elected offcials not trust expert opinion or technical evidence?” and the answer to this question has been sought in historical or general terms (e.g. Irwin 2006; Weiss et al. 2008; Kraft et al. 2015). Here I will propose an alterna- tive question: “when politicians exhibit a lack of trust in expert advice, how is such skepticism publicly accounted for?” I will examine this question by util- izing a case study ethnographic approach to the City of Toronto’s controversial decision to endorse the Hybrid alternative for the Gardiner expressway. By do- ing so, I intend to show that knowledge controversies are not inherently a form of defciency on the part of the elected offcial – that they are ignorant to the implications of evidence – but rather the standard by which elected offcials and appointed experts review and understand evidence can lead to very different (al- though both reasonably ‘correct’) conclusions.
Notes
