Experiments with democracy

A shamelessly solipsistic story of public dialogue in action

Last week:

Public engagement from the Greeks to the Geeks

This week

Public enagement as democracy

Phase 1: Public understanding of science (PUS)

Phase 1: Public understanding of science ���(PUS)

‘It is clearly a part of each scientist’s professional responsibility to promote the

public understanding of science’Sir Walter Bodmer, Royal Society (1985)

Controversial field trials

•  Between 1986 and 1996, thousands of field trials in France without protest

•  In 1998, 1,100 field experiments, in 1999, 48 field experiments, half of which were destroyed

•  Experiments went from being seen as ‘scientific’ to also ‘political’

•  In the US and Germany, protests against field trials that took place in the 1980s had subsided by this time

Bonneuil et al, 2008

GM crops – opportunities and concerns

•  Opportunities – Yield– Disease resistance– Herbicide tolerance– Drought resistance– Nutrition–  Sustainability

•  Concerns– Health risks–  Environmental risks– Unintended

consequences– Corporate control– Who benefits?

•  e.g. The “Terminator gene”

First GM crops criticised as being risky, anti-environment, anti-development

Phase 2: ‘A new mood for dialogue’

Phase 2: ‘A new mood for dialogue’

‘There is a new humility on the part of science in the face of public attitudes, and a new

assertiveness on the part of the public.’

House of Lords ‘Science and Society’ (2000)

Openness and transparency

The Phillips report•  ‘Trust can only be generated by openness’•  ‘Openness requires recognition of uncertainty,

where it exists’•  ‘The public should be trusted to respond

rationally to openness’•  ‘Scientific investigation of risk should be open

and transparent’•  ‘The advice and reasoning of advisory

committees should be made public’- Lord Phillips, 2000

A big shift

Sheila Jasanoff on UK science policy before BSE:

“It is no accident that difficult policy choices are so often committed to advisory bodies of the ‘great and the good’.” This “presume[s] a relationship founded on shared values and deference to expertise – which is increasingly at odds with the conditions of citizenship in the modern world”

(Jasanoff 1997, 227)

Dialogue in practice

•  Deliberative opinion polls

•  Citizens’ juries and panels

•  Standing consultative panels

•  Consensus conferences•  Internet dialogues•  Focus groups

Why engage?

•  Normative–  Participation is a good thing in and of itself

•  Instrumental–  Participation helps build trust and smooth the path of

policies and technologies•  Substantive–  Participation leads to better policies and better

technologies

Fiorino 1990

GM Science reviewGM nation

GM nation

GM Nation, Summer 2003•  Cost: £500,000•  Six major regional meetings•  400-700 other self-organised meetings•  37,000 feedback forms were submitted, 3 million

website hits•  Also – ‘Narrow but deep’ strand of 10 double

focus-groups•  Report conclusions: –  ‘People are generally uneasy about GM’–  ‘There was little support for early commercialization’–  Many are ‘cautious, suspicious or outright hostile (to the

use of GM crops) than are supportive towards them’

Criticisms of GM nation

•  Did it get to the ‘truth’ about what the public thinks? – Criticisms that NGOs controlled

agenda

•  Did it tell us anything new? – 1994 Consensus Conference on

plant biotechnology

Self-selecting participants

Not statistically robust

Too expensive

Politics of GM risk and uncertainty•  Members of the public have wider appreciation of risks than used in

science–  And they are sceptical about media and NGOs

Governance Questions•  Who decides whether to ask ‘is this safe’ or ‘what would be safest’?•  Should we assume that organizations will comply with regulations?•  How should we characterize ‘harm’ or ‘who/what is harmed’?•  What priorities should we attach to different types of risk (health,

environmental, amenity etc)?•  Should we ignore questions where the answers are unknown?•  What should be the level of proof and, where there are uncertainties,

whose responsibility is it to bear the burden of proof (e.g. companies to demonstrate safety, or NGOs to demonstrate harm?)

(Mayer and Stirling, 2004)

Phase 3: Paddling upstream

Phase 3: Paddling upstream

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‘We have learnt that it is necessary with major technologies to ensure that the debate takes place “upstream”, as new areas emerge in the scientific

and technological development process.’

Lord Sainsbury, Science Minister (July 2004)

Chapter 7 – Science and Society'Government will work to move the debate forward –

beyond simplistic notions of the public being ignorant of science, or being either pro-science or anti-science; and beyond crude notions of a particular technology being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The Government will also work to

enable the debate to take place ‘upstream’ in the scientific and technological development process'

“For more than a decade, the language and methods of PUS oozed across the face of UK science policy. But

instead of lubricating understanding, scientists gradually discovered that PUS was clogging the cracks and pores which might have allowed genuine dialogue to breathe.

Implicit within PUS was a set of questionable assumptions about science, the public and the nature of understanding. It

relied on a ‘deficit model’ of the public as ignorant and

science as unchanging and universally comprehensible.”See-through science, p. 17

•  Wolpert, ‘Expertise required’, Times Higher Education Supplement

•  D Taverne, ‘How science can save the world’s poor’, Guardian

Taverne rejects ‘the fashionable demand by a group of sociologists for more democratic science… The fact is that science, like art, is not a democratic activity. You do not decide by referendum whether the earth goes round the sun.’

Opening up or closing down?

‘Virtually all of the mushrooming commitment to public citizen engagement in ‘science policy’…is

something of a mirage’ Brian Wynne (2004)

Opening up or closing down?

New deficits

1.  Deficit of scientific knowledge2.  Deficit of trust in science3.  Deficit of understanding processes of science4.  Deficit of understanding ethical neutrality5.  Deficit of understanding benefits of science

Wynne, 2006; Also Rayner 2004

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“All the uneven and sometimes wayward adventures in public engagement and dialogue over the last decade or more have generated some occasional revision of the original assumption that ‘public understanding of science’ meant only successful public assimilation and reproduction of scientific understanding of its own objects….But sadly it seems beyond our self-proclaimed rational science-infomed society to learn from these mistakes. We have already wasted about twenty-five years, and counting.”

Brian Wynne (2014) ‘Further disorientation in the hall of mirrors’, Public Understanding of Science Vol,23(1), 60-70

Nanoscientists meet nanopublics

Nanoscientists meet nanopublics

NanodialoguesExperiments in publicengagement with science

Jack Stilgoe

‘We don’t get asked what we want,do we?’ . . . ‘But would we know ifwe were asked?’ . . . ‘Well, no one’sasked us.’

‘I object to the fact that we’re calledconsumers. We’re not humansanymore. We’re consumers.’

‘It’s not nanoparticles we need togovern, it’s the people that are making them and using them.’

‘I feel lucky. I feel like we can makesome nanoscule contribution to society.’

1.  What is the purpose? 2.  Why do you want to do it? 3.  What are you going to gain

from it? 4.  What else is it going to do? 5.  How do you know you are

right? 

Risk Bites: Gene drives

DiscussionDesign a public engagement exercise

1.  What?2.  Why?3.  Who?4.  How?5.  When?6.  Where?