Reflecting on public engagement and science policy

The past 15 years have seen a profound evolution in thinking about public engagement with science in the UK. This has been driven by important developments in the underpinning social science. The developments have not been solely academic, however – we have seen a real engagement with science policy makers, and an acceptance of some of the developing principles in National Academies and the Research Councils, particularly in the case of potentially controversial emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology. ¹ However, this debate about public engagement takes place in a broader landscape of evolving science policy, and in this article I want to reflect on what the various actors in this landscape might hope to get out of public engagement.

To put the question at its simplest, what problem do we expect public engagement to solve? The answer to this question, of course, depends on who we mean by ‘we’. The scientific research community, science educators, science funding agencies, technology-intensive businesses, government departments and civil society groups all have stakes in these issues and will have subtly or not-so subtly different agendas. The original public understanding of science movement (Bodmer et al., 1985) was extensively criticized as being based on a ‘deficit model’ of the way the public thought about science and technology (Wynne, 2001). In the crudest caricature of the ‘deficit model’ of public engagement, the problem that needs to be solved is the deficient scientific knowledge of a reluctant public, so that they can be persuaded to accept a controversial technology that ‘science’ has determined to be an appropriate and safe response to some problem. It’s easy to imagine that the deficit model is dead, tested to destruction in a series of science policy disasters, such as BSE and genetically modified food. However, a cursory glance at recent strategy documents from the UK government in the areas of nanotechnology and synthetic biology present a more mixed picture. A recent meeting of the Nanotechnology Strategy Forum, ² chaired by the Science Minister, highlights ‘the need for more effective public engagement, to make the science palatable for lay audiences’, and highlights ‘consumer confidence’ as a key outcome of such public engagement. A UK ‘Synthetic Biology Roadmap’ (Synthetic Biology Roadmap Coordination Group, 2012) makes a very positive commitment that ‘“engagement” means genuinely giving power to a wide range of diverse social groups, including those who will be the end users or presumed beneficiaries of the technologies, taking their concerns seriously, and enabling them to participate throughout the whole pathway of technological development’, yet retains as milestones on its timeline ‘Satisfying public concerns’ and ‘Increasing public recognition of value’.

Nonetheless, a more positive articulation of the benefits of public engagement has become more prominent in the last few years. We have seen the idea of moving public engagement ‘upstream’ (Willis and Wilsdon, 2004), so debates can take place before technological trajectories become locked in, and technology can be steered in directions that are widely embraced by society. An example of this approach in action is provided by the public engagement exercise carried out by the research council EPSRC in connection with the development of a ‘Grand Challenge’ funding call in the area of nanotechnology for healthcare (Jones, 2008); here the results of public engagement provided a significant and useful contribution to the framing of the call. And while the exact terms on which social scientists are engaged with emerging technologies such as synthetic biology may still be contested, nonetheless, the fact of their involvement in exercises such as the development of the roadmap mentioned above is now taken for granted.

These developments fit well into a science policy environment in which research directions are set less by disciplinary priorities and more by the need to address societal challenges, and begin to address the fundamental question posed by the idea of goal-led research – who sets those goals? One might hope that public engagement might be an effective way of ensuring that challenge-led research embraces widely held societal values. Other benefits might be that public engagement could challenge excessively techno-centric framings of problems, such as food security and healthcare for an ageing population, and that it could push back against framings of research agendas that excessively privilege economic growth by reasserting broader social values.

Given that these ideas about two-way engagement have gained some traction with some scientists and science policy makers, are there any grounds for social scientists to be suspicious? Social scientists are permanently cautious that they are being co-opted into a project of generating public acceptance for new technologies, and rightly so. The position that social scientists may find themselves in, as mediators, in effect, between the scientific enterprise and the concerns of the public, may not always be comfortable, but these are tensions that they should be well equipped to find their way through. But they should also consider the possibility that they are being co-opted as unwitting partisans in the internecine struggles for influence within the scientific community. Rhetorical and sociopolitical projects such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology are not universally welcomed in the scientific community, and proponents of these projects have discovered that generating ethical controversies about the potential impacts of emerging technologies is an effective way of generating the impression of consensus about the transformative potential of those technologies (Nordmann, 2007).

For many observers now, the problem that public engagement is intended to solve is the tendency for discussions about the future trajectories of technology to be prematurely closed down (Stirling, 2008) by the assertion of an excessively deterministic view of technological progress and a one-dimensional view of the nature of scientific evidence. Participatory processes, on the contrary, open up the possibility of choice between different possible technological futures. They allow the questioning of the otherwise unarticulated judgements based on political and ethical values that sometimes underlie what are presented as value-neutral statements of scientific fact. This should not be taken to mean that evidence and scientific consensus have no value. Having a more nuanced understanding of the social and political context in which science debates takes place doesn’t mean that one can’t recognize that some positions are informed by views on science that are not supported by evidence or are simply not correct.

Recently the discourse around ‘opening up’ science has taken a new turn, with an emphasis first on open access to the scientific literature (Research Information Network, 2012), and more generally on open access to scientific data (Royal Society, 2012). These are important issues – it’s clear that current arrangements for publishing scientific papers are far from optimal, and that it must be beneficial if potentially controversial data sets (such as reconstructions of climate histories) are fully open to outside scrutiny. However, this kind of openness serves a different purpose to public engagement as currently understood, and it would be a pity if the enthusiasm for open access and open data were to eclipse the progress that’s been made in promoting the need for such public engagement. The high levels of expertise and motivation needed to interpret data sets or to read the primary scientific literature are not widely shared amongst the wider publics (though the activists and journalists who might possess such attributes may well provide other channels to wider engagement). If the motivation for public engagement is to open up the process by which the priorities for science are set, open access aims to open up the outputs of science, and in open data what is being opened up is the process of doing science.

There will always be resistance to the idea of public engagement, if it does genuinely succeed in opening up the process of setting priorities. For some, who believe that science and politics can be cleanly separated, and that experts can provide value-free advice based purely on scientific evidence, any influence on decision making by the non-expert is quite inappropriate. For others, any kind of public engagement process that does affect policy is contrary to the principles of representative democracy, in which all such decisions should be made by a minister answerable to Parliament. But perhaps the most important challenge to the idea of public engagement comes from the Hayekian position that the most effective way of aggregating people’s preferences about whether new technologies are desirable or undesirable is through the market.

In this view, which of course goes very much with the grain of the dominance of the free market paradigm in discussions of political economy more widely, there is no place for the public to steer the direction of publicly funded, goal-directed research, because such research should be carried out by private industry responding to market demands. If there is a role for the state in supporting pure science, this should be left undirected, driven by the pure science values of Polanyi’s ‘independent republic of science’ (Polanyi, 1962). Underlying this position, there is very often a view of technology as an autonomous agent that unfolds with something close to a Darwinian logic (see, for example Kelly, 2010), which it is quite futile to attempt to steer.

Perhaps, though, there is an assumption that all these views about public engagement share – that is, that technology is moving forward at an ever-increasing pace. We should ask ourselves whether we are taking too much for granted, in too uncritically accepting the claims of technology enthusiasts that nanotechnology, synthetic biology or whatever emerging technology is currently in the limelight really will prove to be revolutionary. Whether new technologies are developed depends not just on whether they are consistent with the laws of physics, and on whether they are technically possible – they need to be economically viable and with a plausible development pathway as well.

Given the rapidity of development of consumer electronics and information technology, it might seem perverse to argue that technology more generally is stagnating. But in important areas, such as the medical applications of biotechnology (Nightingale and Martin, 2004) and in sustainable energy technologies (Kammen and Nemet, 2005), there is a sense of promise not yet fulfilled. At a time that combines economic crisis and chronic underinvestment in long-term innovation with serious unsolved environmental and societal problems, it may be that our biggest problem is not so much that technology is accelerating in societally undesirable directions, but that it not accelerating at all. In that case, the problem that public engagement might need to solve is not just to open up a choice of different technological futures, but to make sure that some desirable technological developments take place at all.