This document discusses public engagement with science and the politics involved. It examines different approaches to engagement like consensus conferences and debates. However, it notes that engagement activities often face criticism for having limited issues, marginal involvement of the public, and resistance from institutions. There is a debate between representing the public and bringing expertise. While engagement aims to be democratic, it can also be a means of legitimation. The document argues we should recognize disagreement and critique as part of engagement rather than assuming consensus will be reached.

1. Expertise, lay membership and the
politics of engagement
Alan Irwin

2. Phillips Report into BSE
(2000)
‘ The Government did not lie to the
public about BSE. It believed that the
risks posed by BSE to humans were
remote. The Government was pre-
occupied with preventing an alarmist
over-reaction… this campaign of
reassurance was a mistake.’

3. Openness and
transparency
• ‘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’
• ‘Trust can only be generated by openness’
• ‘The advice and reasoning of advisory
committees should be made public’
Lord Phillips, 2000

4. Performing engagement
• Greater transparency and openness
• Public consultation exercises
• Consensus Conferences
• Science Shops
• Constructive Technology Assessment
• ’Lay’ membership on scientific advisory
bodies
• Debate installations
• Large-scale public debates
• Upstream activities

5. GM Nation?
• Agriculture and Environment
Biotechnology Commission as social
innovation
• Public debate: 3rd June – 18th July,
2003
• Focus groups, open meetings,
interactive web site, closed groups ->
steering board final report (September
2003)
• 37,000 feedback forms, 2.9 million
website hits, 600 meetings

6. • 41 in-depth telephone interviews
with stakeholders
• 160 members of the public
• 4 regional groups, each with 40
people
• 3 workshops per group

7. ‘the U.K. experience was prolonged,
costly, and cantankerous. It did not touch
the broad mass of the public. It suffered
from agenda manipulation and did not
reach conclusions that were seen as
clear-cut or legitimate. It informed
policies, but it did not guide them.’
Walls, Rogers-Hayden, Mohr and O’Riordan, Environment. Sept
2005, p.29

8. Tom Wakeford and Jackie Haq, New
Scientist. June 23, 2010
’serious flaws…in the way the dialogue
was commissioned and conducted’
• Commercial market-research
approach
• Discussions held in private
• Scientific fear of the ’ignorant mob’
• Absence of real dialogue

9. Irwin, Elgaard Jensen and Jones, Social Studies of
Science 43(1) 2013: 118-135
’PES studies regularly conclude that the
issues put to the publics are limited, that
the actual involvement of the public is
marginal and that institutional actors
resist engagement by insisting that both
science and innovation should remain
unquestioned and beyond serious
democratic control.’

10. Double Engagement
Impasse
• STS scholarship: ’case study
followed by critical assessment’
• Policymakers: over-loaded
expectations leading to frustration
and marginalisation

12. Public engagement waza
• Move One : contesting representativeness – who are these people to
speak for ‘the public’?
• Move Two: contesting communication and articulation – can participants
articulate their views in a proper and meaningful manner?
• Move Three: contesting impacts and outcomes – does the exercise lead
to tangible and significant outcomes?
• Move Four: Contesting democracy – is this engagement or legitimation?

13. • Move One : contesting
representativeness ‘the U.K. experience was
prolonged, costly, and
cantankerous. It did not
• Move Two: contesting touch the broad mass of
communication and the public. It suffered
articulation from agenda
manipulation and did not
• Move Three: contesting reach conclusions that
impacts and outcomes were seen as clear-cut or
legitimate. It informed
• policies, but it did not
Move Four: Contesting
guide them.’
democracy

14. Irwin, Elgaard Jensen and Jones (2013)
‘ PES proponents and their critics do not engage in
kendo kata, and yet we find it plausible that their form of
adversarial interaction contains some of the same
aspects: a bounded pattern of critical moves, certain
opportunities to anticipate criticism and characteristic
sequences that arise out of the interaction between the
opponents as they attempt to counter one another’s
moves.’

15. Lay membership on Scientific
Advisory Committees (GB)

16. ’Lay members can make the work of SACs
more transparent and aware of the social and
policy issues surrounding their work. Lay
members can provide some common sense.
Where committees get into really esoteric
things that are frightfully interesting, but maybe
have no real relevance to the great majority of
people in so far as they are affected, then there
is a role to play there.’

17. ’ There’s a danger then of having fourteen non-
representational people who were there to
communicate the science and only one
representational person who is there to
represent the general public.’

18. ‘Everybody brings to this committee baggage. If
you’re here long enough you will soon see
some assumptions coming out of some people
fairly consistently. Some members are overtly
conservative for example.’

19. ‘I do think that there might be a, a kind of
fundamental problem here which is if the political
establishment is interested in having lay people
on scientific committees, then their interest in
doing that is presumably grounded upon the idea
that they should be representative. This actually
goes against the fundamental principles of any
SAC – that people are not representative apart
from representing their disciplines as it were; that
they’re bringing their expertise.’

20. • Not all moves carry equal weight
• Not claiming a complete typology
• Challenging notion that engagement
leads inevitably to consensus
• Drawing attention to the disagreement
and critique that is often a key
constituent of action
• Discussion following discursively-familiar
tracks (cf ’closing down’, Andy Stirling: ’rationality or
ritual’, Brian Wynne)

21. Expertise, lay membership and the
politics of engagement
• Engagement as an over-burdened
activity (asking too much)
• Significance of contextual sense-
making
• Institutional insularity
• ’Waza’ are relatively content-free
• Are PES scholars following old
tracks or scouting new routes?