Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how the introduction of socio-economic analysis in the course of their assessment by public experts transforms the practices of chemical (risk) valuation.

Paper long abstract:

As far as the regulation of toxic chemicals is concerned, economic reasoning has informed regulators in the setting of priorities more and more systematically since the 1980s, as the example of cost-benefit analysis illustrates (Porter, 1996; Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). However, the introduction of so-called "socio-economic analyses" (SEA) in the European REACH regulation, in charge of controlling the most toxic chemicals, has modified the ways in which molecules are valuated.

In this paper, I propose to study how SEA transforms how public experts valuate molecules in order to control their placing on the market. When it comes to expert committees that inform regulators, valuation practices tend to focus on the decisions' relevance and efficiency, the evaluation of molecules themselves being presumably only technical. The activities of a French expert committee responsible for assessing dangerous chemicals in the context of REACH illustrate, however, how SEA has brought in new practices that reconnect the valuation processes organized by companies to more classical risk evaluation practices. Such an instrument brings together the intertwined identity of chemicals as both objects of science and commodities (Gaudillière, 2010; Gaudillière and Hess, 2012) as never before.

Based on ethnographic data, I suggest that European experts use SEA as a means to problematize their evaluation and valuation practices (Mennicken & Sjögren, 2015). The work of qualification they perform not only transforms how molecules are valuated, but simultaneously redefines them as objects of knowledge. These activities displace the ways in which molecules and their markets are defined and constructed.