Engaging with the political imaginaries of science: Near misses and future targets

The current economic and financial crisis, notwithstanding public statements to the contrary, is unlikely to spare research and education. A rapidly shrinking vision of the future transforms the present into a volatile, short-term and profoundly uncertain period. This will also have an impact on the content and form of public engagement with science.

To begin with, the public is engaged in new social protest movements that express the frustration experienced by rising inequalities. The condemnation of privileges enjoyed by a global financial elite comes uncomfortably close to a widespread feeling of government as irrelevant. In previous times, such a situation would have been described as pre-revolutionary. In today’s world the results are more benign, but not less worrisome: a loss of solidarity, a return to nationalistic closure and making space for extremism.

The public, it seems, has priorities other than science, while funding levels for science are under assault. Short-term expectations for science to deliver on its promise of economic and societal relevance imply that its future impact is assessed in advance, while the potential contributions of research to accelerate innovation are being internalized.

But the crisis offers also an unexpected opportunity: to rethink what is unique about science; why it may be worthwhile to maintain its (always relative) autonomy; and to reflect anew on the values that underpin scientific activities. The time may have come to revisit our own normative understanding of the place of science in society and our normative expectations regarding public engagement with science.

Undoubtedly, the past decades have seen many achievements. They range from widening the overly restrictive and mistaken notion of the original ‘public understanding of science’ to carrying forward science, technology and society’s (STS’s) normative mission of including the public in the processes of democratic decision making. The public, now conceptualized in a pluralistic form, was to be given voice in the workings of liberal democracies that at the same time began to show their internal fissures and deficiencies. The normative impulse culminated in the noble idea of ‘civic epistemologies’ with Sheila Jasanoff asking how do citizens know in common and how they can apply this knowledge to politics (Jasanoff, 2005).

In short, while our collective tacit understanding was that public engagement with science had to do with linking science to politics, our explicit knowledge of politics, i.e. the ongoing transformation of political institutions, their modes of governance, operations and procedures, and the obstacles thereby posed for public engagement with science, remained marginal to our concerns.

While the scholarly focus was directed at the public, admittedly constructed in its recognized plural diversity, policy-makers and politicians were not seen as part of the public sphere. Their public understanding of and engagement with science remained a political black box. Yet, there can be no doubt that their ideas of how science worked and towards which ends it could be made to work, had far greater influence on the directions of research and its funding than any degree of acceptance or resistance from the public. By not sufficiently taking into account the actual practices of stakeholders other than the various publics we simply ignored the political dimension of public engagement with science.

Arguably, the understanding of how science and innovation actually work among those who decide on funding, articulate policies, legislate or decide on organizational structures and procedures matters. It makes a difference, for instance, whether science is seen as a collective, international and public good or whether scientists’ place is seen to be in the frontline of a competition between national economies.

Also this is an integral part of public political understanding of and engagement with science. The political dimension has far-reaching repercussions. It emerges from what Yaron Ezrahi calls collective political imaginaries. These are necessary fictions that are causative. ‘A democracy, like any other political regime, must be imagined and performed by multiple agencies in order to exist’ (Ezrahi, 2012: 1).

Recently, the causative effects of some of these political imaginaries become manifest in crude form by focusing on the short-term outcome and impact of every unit of scientific activity. While this is not exactly new, the point is that collective political imaginaries are neither right nor wrong. They are causative. They are performative. They acquire power by shaping individual and collective minds in the public sphere. They permeate institutions, public discourse, laws, regulations and procedures, and thus shape public engagement with science.

Such collective political imaginaries would be incomplete and deprived of political legitimation, would they not invoke citizens as the ultimate and fictitious beneficiaries of all scientific and technological activities undertaken in the public and private sphere.

Citizens are either conceived as abstract entities or as highly individualized fictions. As such, they are the target and beneficiaries of a large part of the drive for greater efficiency in knowledge production and of achieving maximum impact through research while accelerating innovation and the aspired job creation. Tailored to individual needs, profile, age, socioeconomic background, even ethnicity, citizens are enrolled in these imaginaries as consumers and voters in what has become a pervasive agglomeration of private–public partnerships.

The dominant political public engagement with science emerging from such a collective political imaginary is thoroughly utilitarian and instrumental. Citizens are to be offered choices and awareness of choice. This is the reason why technologies are key, as they lend themselves to a seemingly easy calculus according to which the benefits will ultimately outweigh the risks. An eventual gap between them is filled with the promises that come with innovation and the anticipation of an even brighter future.

Of course, there is and has been also a circulation of counter-imaginaries. They project science as a public good which is non-rivalrous in use. They insist on the public value of science, vindicated by the amazing, if unpredictable societal transformation that the advancement of scientific knowledge and technologies has brought about. It is an imaginary dear to scientists, as it calls for appropriate autonomous space as well as adequate funding. It asks for suspending the belief of immediate returns, while emphasizing the long-term perspective that comes with the impossibility to foresee scientific and technological breakthroughs. All radical innovations leading to major economic and societal paradigm changes are science based.

A political imaginary that upholds the public value of science without immediate use or impact in sight comes with the correlate that it will not and cannot be pursued by the private sector. It can only be done by the public sector and its continued, dedicated investment into education and research. Upholding such a belief is also part of the political public engagement with science.

What then have we missed over the last few decades?

The focus of STS’s public engagement with science has itself been guided by a collective political imaginary, derived from the Enlightenment ideal with its claims towards inclusiveness and participation. Socially robust knowledge was meant to be nothing more and nothing less than improvement of the outcome by incorporating diverse, and even contradictory and critical approaches and views. Mode 2 was not advancing neoliberal ideologies, but pursuing some of the more radical ideas of the Enlightenment (Nowotny et al., 2001).

Ultimately, political public engagement has to do with our own political imaginaries and our understanding of how political processes, including necessary fictions, work. Not that there is a lack of knowledge of detailed procedures or of how institutions, interest groups and various stakeholders combine in producing certain outcomes. Empirical research has revealed in detail the faulty mechanisms of participatory democracy that prevented citizens – this time concrete persons, with specific grievances, claims and rights – to be given voice and to obtain greater weight in the actual processes of decision making in matters that will affect them.

Again, theoretical and empirical research into the workings of deliberative democracy has yielded detailed description and analysis of various governance modes, their relative advantages and deficiencies. There has been no lack of normative proposals oriented towards ideals of how deliberative democracy ought to function.

But how well conceptualized were our guiding assumptions about the exigencies and tensions that liberal democracies are exposed to? Were we not caught in the beliefs that our Enlightenment ideals of participatory and deliberative democracy held out for us, assuming that an all-inclusive participation was possible, unquestioned and unquestionable? To take but one example: the distinction between invited and uninvited participants to which Brian Wynne alerted us pointed towards a hitherto unnoticed fissure in our collective reasoning and political imaginary. Again, it was Brian Wynne who did not tire in calling our attention to the serious and distracting political-conceptual ‘category mistakes’ committed when reducing participation questions to the public’s qualifications (Wynne, 2007).

There was also much less of a focus, if not a deliberate side-stepping, of investigating changes in the larger political and societal context. One major transformation was brought about by the new communication and information media. Information from many different sources, although differing in quality and reliability, became widely accessible and available. Among the many effects it brought about was a change in authority relations. The extent to which scientific expertise suffered a decline in public trust due to information becoming widely available through the internet and other information and communication technology media remains debatable, but there can be little doubt that the cognitive authority of scientific expertise became diluted.

Speaking about the authoritative voice of universities Lisa Anderson ‘believe(s) that it is the transformation in the availability of information that has diminished authority, undercut hierarchy, and challenged the organizational mechanisms by which knowledge is developed, collected, and disseminated in almost all domains of social life. This systemic environmental change has caused a dramatic decline in interest in and deference to universities, university-based professors, and university-based research around the world’ (Anderson, 2012: 388). This sweeping transformation touches not only knowledge production, but also the media, markets, militaries, banks, governments, parties and other actors that shape public life.

Lowering previous thresholds of intercommunication may have brought about yet another unanticipated consequence: an unintended alignment in the political imaginary between the general public and the neoliberal stance towards science that many governments have adopted. It may have engendered a spiral of heightened expectations among the public, culminating in questions like ‘what have you lately done for us’ or mimicking the rhetoric of wanting to see value for the tax payer’s money. Ironically, the public value of science would then become reduced to a calculable rate of exchange with the aim of increasing the value to be derived from science for the individual taxpayer.

Such a newly acquired sense of ownership of science by at least a part of the public in alignment with their governments might explain yet another twist in the public engagement with science: the rise in expectations and demands that science should acknowledge and incorporate values held by a part of the public. The agnosticism of science regarding societal values then encounters a sense of ownership that induces the feeling that it is its political right to impose values on science. In this collective political imaginary values are not so much the object of intricate negotiations indispensable in a pluralistic society, but part of the quid pro quo of any contractual relationship.

Thus, by restricting the interpretation of public engagement with science to only one dimension, we may have omitted to look for those necessary political fictions that act as safeguards for science as a public good. Science has come under threat budget-wise, if short-term economic considerations become the sole accepted justification for public investment. Even more importantly perhaps, by negating what only science has to offer to policy-making: a long-term perspective based on the kind of systematic inquiry and engagement with the natural as well as the social world that remains open for contestation while seeking to widen our knowledge base for action.

What then could some of the future targets be if we are ready to follow the formation, circulation, transformations and continued shifting of collective political imagination that link science with democracy? Yaron Ezrahi tells us that it is their performativity that transforms mere imagination into effective and powerful imaginaries. He invites us to consider which of the fact-producing imaginaries which consist of metaphorical, cognitive and emotional elements are more likely to promote the democratic experience of freedom and equality we would like to see enhanced.

Perhaps we could begin by looking somewhat closer at some of the current forms of public engagement with science. They range from the unstoppable, but extremely intricate issues raised by the movement for open access to the enthusiasm that comes with crowd-sourcing and the rapid spread of technologies that permit inclusiveness in a novel sense. Citizen science, as practised in scientific discovery games and participatory experiments involving kids and other members of the lay public are fuelled by and fuel collective imaginaries that may hold cues for a newly emerging political reality that goes far way beyond its manifest scientific and technological anchorage. In this context, Manuel Castells’s work on communication power waits to be discovered and transferred to the STS field (Castells, 2009).

Can we contribute, as Yaron Ezrahi asks us, to coming up with a workable definition of the public interest with a focus on the public value of science? Just as issues of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and open access transcend where and how scientists publish or how the line between private and public research is further blurred, workable definitions of public interest appear to be more urgently needed than any calls for evidence-based policy.

Public engagement with science therefore means bringing the political back in, starting with the necessary fictions of our current collective political imaginaries. It needs to extend to the working of institutions and to the design of new institutions that emerge in response to the variety of actual experience. It must keep a close eye on the law and the vastly underestimated power of agency inherent in this human technology (Nowotny and Testa, 2011). It has to follow the engagement of citizens with new technologies and how their use of the new media shapes, constrains and possibly widens the choices open for science and democracy.

Necessary fictions may hold answers we never imagined them to hold.