5. 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)
6.
7. 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
8.
9. 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
11. 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)
14. 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
15. 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)
16. Dialogue in
practice
• Deliberative opinion
polls
• Citizens’ juries and
panels
• Standing consultative
panels
• Consensus conferences
• Internet dialogues
• Focus groups
17. 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
20. 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’
21. 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
23. 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)
25. Phase 3: Paddling upstream
‘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)
26.
27. 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'
28.
29.
30.
31. “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
33. 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.’
35. ‘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?
36. New deficits
1. Deficit of scientific knowledge
2. Deficit of trust in science
3. Deficit of understanding processes of science
4. Deficit of understanding ethical neutrality
5. Deficit of understanding benefits of science
Wynne, 2006; Also Rayner 2004
37. “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
43. Nanodialogues
Experiments in public
engagement with science
Jack Stilgoe
‘We don’t get asked what we want,
do we?’ . . . ‘But would we know if
we were asked?’ . . . ‘Well, no one’s
asked us.’
‘I object to the fact that we’re called
consumers. We’re not humans
anymore. We’re consumers.’
‘It’s not nanoparticles we need to
govern, it’s the people that are
making them and using them.’
‘I feel lucky. I feel like we can make
some nanoscule contribution
to society.’
44.
45.
46.
47.
48. 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?
