Participation of the Public in Science: Towards a New Kind of Scientific Practice Participation of the public in science has been the object of an increasing number of social and political philosophical studies, but there is still hardly any epistemological study of the topic. While it has been objected that involvement of the public is a threat to the integrity of science, the apparent indifference of philosophers of science seems to testify to its lack of relevance to conceptions of scientific (...) activity. I argue both that it is not a threat to science and that it is relevant to philosophy of science by showing that it constitutes a new kind of epistemic practice. Two main objections to the idea that the involvement of non-scientists, with their situated perspective and contextual values, can form an epistemic practice will be addressed: the first bears on the epistemic potentialities of the cooperation between scientist and non-scientists; the second on the possibility that this cooperation takes the form of a practice. (shrink)

Imprecise definition of key terms in the “public participation” domain have hindered the conduct of good research and militated against the development and implementation of effective participation practices. In this article, we define key concepts in the domain: public communication, public consultation, and public participation. These concepts are differentiated according to the nature and flow of information between exercise sponsors and participants. According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise’s effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, (...) relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to all appropriate recipients, and combined to give an aggregate/consensual response. Key variables that may theoretically affect effectiveness—and on which engagement mechanisms differ—are identified and used to develop a typology of mechanisms. The resultant typology reveals four communication, six consultation, and four participation mechanism classes. Limitations to the typology are discussed, and future research needs identified. (shrink)

Mechanisms to engage lay citizens in science and technology are currently in vogue worldwide. While some engagement exercises aim to influence policy making, research suggests that they have had little discernable impacts in this regard. We explore the potentials and challenges of facilitating citizen engagement in nanotechnology from the “topdown,” addressing the following questions: Can academics and others within institutions initiate meaningful engagement with unorganized lay citizens from the top-down? Can they facilitate effective engagement among citizens, scientists, and policy makers (...) while building citizen engagement capacities? Is it possible to create independent bottom-up citizen engagement in scientific and technological issues from the top-down, and what are the challenges in doing so? Our experiences show that although academics can build citizens' individual, collective, and political capacities to engage with each other, scientists, and policy makers, this work is enormously time and energy intensive, and institutional support is needed to sustain it. (shrink)

An ongoing trend in technology policy has been to advocate participation. However, the author claims that lay citizens’ participation typically materializes in the form of a laboratory experiment at present. That is, lay participation as currently organized by professional participation experts under controlled conditions rarely is linked to public controversies, to the pursuit of political participation or to individual concerns. Derived from qualitative research on two citizen conferences, the author shows empirically that in practice, this laboratory participation leads to paradoxical (...) effects: successfully carrying out the experiment results in a systematic disappointment of the hope for gains in rationality typically attached to lay participation. Finally, the author relates this result to sociological debates about new modes of knowledge production. Under such a perspective, the author sees a paradoxical development: while society at large is becoming a laboratory in which knowledge is produced, participation practice is retreating from society into the lab. (shrink)

The significance of political-economic context for scientific citizenship is argued through an analysis of New Zealand’s Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. My intention is not to provide an account of why the commission came to the decisions it did but to illustrate how the political-economic context and the culture of regulatory science both exacerbate public concerns about unacknowledged uncertainty and commercial influence and make it difficult for those concerns to influence the outcomes of public dialogues. The discursive flexibility of science (...) as alternately predictive and provisional silences concerns about uncertainty, while a further interpretive choice of science as the autonomous activities of individuals unconstrained by political-economic context occludes the nature of concerns about commercial influence. Rather than the increasingly prevalent focus on processes of engagement, I argue that it is essential that researchers in this area attend to how public dialogue is placed in relation to the cultures and structures of regulatory science and neoliberalism. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for an environmental justice approach to the practice and study of participation and effectiveness in agrobiodiversity governance. It is argued that, in order to understand the conditions under which participation leads to improved outcomes, the concept has to be rethought, both from a political and a methodological perspective. This can be done by applying an ex-ante environmental justice approach to participation, including notions of distribution, recognition and representation. By exploring the approach through empirical examples of (...) participation in biodiversity and environmental governance, a research framework is outlined, attempting to bridge normative and practical approaches to environmental justice, and tested on two cases of agrobiodiversity governance in Western Europe. (shrink)

This article reviews suggestions for how ethical tools are to be evaluated and argues that the concept of ethical soundness as presented by Kaiser et al. is unhelpful. Instead, it suggests that the quality of an ethical tool is determined by how well it achieves its assigned purpose. Those are different for different tools, and the article suggests a categorization of such tools into three groups. For all ethical tools, it identifies comprehensiveness and user-friendliness as crucial. For tools that have (...) reaching a decision in a democratic context as a main purpose, it identifies transparency, guiding users toward a decision and justification of the decision-supporting mechanism. For tools that aim to engage the public, it identifies procedural fairness as essential. It also notes that the scope of use for ethical tools is limited to the same moral community, and that this feature is frequently overlooked. (shrink)

This article analyzes a deliberative forum on nanotechnologies, organized in Portugal within the scope of the research project DEEPEN—Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation in Emerging Nanotechnologies. This event included scientists, science communicators and members of the “lay public”, and resulted in a position document which summarizes collective aspirations and concerns related to nano. Drawing upon our previous experience with focus groups on nanotechnologies—characterized by methodological innovations that aimed at suspending epistemological inequalities between participants—this paper delves into the performativity of the (...) deliberative event, exploring some of the tensions and power/knowledge asymmetries generated by the forum. Recognizing that the design of participatory assemblages matters, we reflect on our role as facilitators and explore the difficulties in organizing exercises of upstream engagement with emerging technologies. (shrink)

Critical analyses of current food systems underline the need to respond to important challenges in questions of nutritional health, environmental sustainability, socio-economic development and protection of the cultural wealth. A wide range of perspectives and methodologies were used to carry out those analyses yielding a significant variety of proposals to undertake the challenges. In most of those analyses, the need to transform our current food systems both from the local to the global level is emphasized, paying attention to food chain (...) processes as well as to decision-makers. The analysis presented in this paper reflects specifically on those proposals based on a common aspect: the need to transform the governance of the EU present-day food system, that is, who makes decisions, how are those decisions made, and which changes need to be made to empower food consumers. The introduction of reforms to change these models is proposed. The focus of these proposals, including those that argue in favour of food sovereignty, the human right to food or the acknowledgement of a food citizenship, share, I believe, a common key. All of them advocate transformations in models of food governance on the basis of a series of mechanisms and principles which for centuries have been employed to control power and grant the governed a status digno vis-à-vis those who govern. Within those proposals we may identify an incipient food constitutionalism, which I will address along with the opportunities and obstacles inherent in the current EU Legal Framework. (shrink)

Deliberative processes provide an important alternative input to environmental politics as they may, in contrast to often used market simulations, provide an arena for 1) discussion of lay participants’ values, 2) articulating arguments grounded in other values than consequentialistic, and 3) capturing weakly comparable values. A case study of a Citizens’ Jury (CJ) on genetically modified plants was used to investigate how the framing of the process affected the attitude formation among the citizens. The formal set up of this specific (...) CJ made value discussions less relevant. While it opened for value plurality, it failed to facilitate the articulation of weakly comparable values. (shrink)

Technologies of democracy are instruments based on material apparatus, social practices and expert knowledge that organize the participation of various publics in the definition and treatment of public problems. Using three examples related to the engagement of publics in nanotechnology in France (a citizen conference, a series of public meetings, and an industrial design process), the paper argues that Science and Technology Studies provide useful tools and methods for the analysis of technologies of democracy. Operations of experiments and public demonstrations (...) can be described, as well as controversies about technologies of democracy giving rise to counter-experiments and counter-demonstrations. The political value of the analysis of public engagement lies in the description of processes of stabilization of democratic orders and in the display of potential alternative political arrangements. (shrink)

Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of ‘health’ as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. This article draws critically on literature about the implications of developments in medical biotechnologies, to argue that a positive acknowledgement of (...) the indeterminate character of health should transform, rather than simply hinder, the quality of debate over what is to be understood and expected in connection with a right to health. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related demands that may not stem from the scarcity of material resources or technical means, but from the misplaced authority of particular voices in defining what possibilities are to be seriously envisaged. This proposition only becomes politically effective, it is argued, when ‘indeterminacy’ (and the capacity for normativity) is referred to life itself and not merely to social and moral judgements about life. Although more immediately pertinent to the concerns of relatively privileged populations, the focus on indeterminacy provides a key to generating a certain symmetry and complementarity of interest, across the privileged/underprivileged divide, in promoting health as a (human) right. (shrink)

A widely touted approach to involving laypeople in science and technology policy-related decisions is the consensus conference. Virtually nothing written on the topic provides detailed discussion of the many steps from citizen recruitment to citizen report. Little attention is paid to how and why the mechanics of the consensus conference process might influence the diversity of the participants in theses fora, the quality of the deliberation in the citizen sessions, the experiences of the participants and organizers, and other outcomes that (...) affect democratic decision making within the conference and more broadly over the long term. As an aid to those interested in utilizing the consensus conference format, the authors outline in detail how they set about organizing their consensus conference on nanotechnology in the spring of 2005. They discuss what specific aspects of their consensus conference worked, and why, and also consider what they learned of relevance to future application. (shrink)

This article argues that the quantitative and quasi-experimental approach to evaluating public participation exercises is deficient in at least two respects. First, casting participants in instrumental terms excludes that participants have an experience and that this may be dramatic and emotional. If people are to be invited, even obliged, to participate, then this experience should be considered in event evaluation. Second, current evaluation frameworks tend not to be sensitive to what actually happened in terms of the actions of participants and (...) how these influenced the proceedings and outcome, thus ignoring that such events are fora where positions, values, decisions, and so forth are constructed and constrained rather than simply reported. This article considers the possible contribution of dramaturgical, discourse and conversation analytic, and ethnographic and phenomenological approaches to evaluating participation exercises and illustrates their potential with data gathered during the U.K. “GM Nation?” public debate. (shrink)

Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission’s report ‘‘Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously’’ to ask how legitimate these efforts to ‘‘democratize’’ scientific expertise really are. While the report borrows (...) from deliberative democrats’ normative accounts of legitimacy, the authors identify a tension between the principles for legitimate rule prescribed by deliberative democratic theory and the report’s celebration of diversity and dissent. While this inconsistency suggests that the legitimacy of deliberative governance arrangements is justified on empirical rather than normative grounds, it remains an open question whether studies of science and technology offer enough empirical support for such a justification. In this article, the authors address this pressing question and propose three possible responses. (shrink)

The politics of innovation involves displacements between various interrelated settings ranging from the context of design to the context of use. This variety of settings and their particular qualities raise questions about the democratic implications of displacements, which have been addressed within science and technology studies for decades from different perspectives and along various theoretical strands. This article distinguishes five different traditions of conceptualizing the relation between technological innovation and democracy: an intentionalist, a proceduralist, an actor—network, an interpretivist, and a (...) performative perspective. They differ in their concepts of “technology,” “politics,” and “democracy”; they imply different roles for the analyst and they suggest or urge other political means. It is suggested that spelling out the differences and similarities between the five perspectives creates the possibility to overcome the limitations of any particular perspective of technology and democracy. (shrink)