ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society, and School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Jul 12;366(1573):1955-65. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0408.
This paper analyses how the changing governance of animal health has impacted upon veterinary expertise and its role in providing public health benefits. It argues that the social sciences can play an important role in understanding the nature of these changes, but also that their ideas and methods are, in part, responsible for them. The paper begins by examining how veterinary expertise came to be crucial to the regulation of the food chain in the twentieth century. The relationship between the veterinary profession and the state proved mutually beneficial, allowing the state to address the problems of animal health, and the veterinary profession to become identified as central to public health and food supply. However, this relationship has been gradually eroded by the application of neoliberal management techniques to the governance of animal health. This paper traces the impact of these techniques that have caused widespread unease within and beyond the veterinary profession about the consequences for its role in maintaining the public good of animal health. In conclusion, this paper suggests that the development of the social sciences in relation to animal health could contribute more helpfully to further changes in veterinary expertise.
本文分析了动物健康治理的变化如何影响兽医专业知识及其在提供公共卫生效益方面的作用。它认为，社会科学可以在理解这些变化的性质方面发挥重要作用，但它们的思想和方法在一定程度上也是这些变化的原因。本文首先考察了兽医专业知识在 20 世纪如何成为食物链监管的关键。兽医行业与国家之间的关系被证明是互利的，这使得国家能够解决动物健康问题，而兽医行业也被认为是公共卫生和食品供应的核心。然而，这种关系逐渐被应用于动物健康治理的新自由主义管理技术所侵蚀。本文追溯了这些技术的影响，这些技术引起了兽医行业内外对其在维护动物健康这一公共利益方面的作用的后果的广泛不安。最后，本文认为，社会科学在动物健康方面的发展可以更有助于兽医专业知识的进一步变化。
