The Rise of Public Engagement in Japan and the UK: Reconsidering Conventional Narratives through a Cross-country Dialogue

Rather than regarding risk governance as a burden, science should embrace it as an opportunity to build public trust

Fueled in part by governmental regulatory requirements and in part because of science’s own interest, public engagements are used to provide input about the policy, ethical, legal, social, and other impacts of science and technology. While public engagements show promise for ensuring that public values are incorporated into science and technology policy, current models of public engagement are disconnected from empirical evidence, are too general to guide decisions about public engagement in specific contexts or for specific purposes, and fail to adequately explain why public engagement outcomes differ across studies. In this paper we briefly review prior models, as well as an approach to building new models that we are currently employing in our research. We describe preliminary results from an experimental study conducted using our approach, which varies the cognitive goals emphasized by an engagement concerning nanotechnology, and the social context for giving input. Results suggest that variations in these factors do matter: Compared to individual input, group discussion of input questions resulted in less-focused, less argumentative, and more active and self-regulated forms of engagement; and emphasis on cognitive learning goals did appear to support learning to a greater extent than emphasis on critical thinking goals. We conclude that future experimental research is warranted and necessary to populate a social science of public engagement with models that answer questions of which public engagements work under what conditions, for what purposes, and why.

This study traces the claims of a ‘scientization’ and a ‘participatory turn’ in modern governance within the system of temporary policy advisory committees in Norway. It analyzes whether there is evidence of the two claims in these key governance institutions and to what extent these shifts are compatible with each other. As expressions of a participatory turn, a growing emphasis on citizen involvement and transparency in the committee system is searched for. A growing relevance of researchers and of science-based claims in the committees’ reports are taken as indicators of scientization. The longitudinal study shows an overall shift both towards science- and expertise-based governance and towards an increasing openness and public engagement, as well as some variation between policy fields.

Although public engagement is now part of the business of doing science, there is considerable divergence about what the term means and what public engagement ought to be doing. This paper refl ects on these heterogeneous meanings and agendas through an analysis of focus group data from research on public engagement in stem cell research. Three broad visions of public engagement are identifi ed: as education and information provision; as dialogue; and as participation in policy making. In analysing the implications of these visions three dimensions are highlighted: weakly and strongly structured visions of public engagement; the co production of roles and relationships; and the framing of what is at stake. Each of these has the potential to include or exclude some groups in public engagement. We conclude that social scientists should seek to maintain the plasticity of public engagement as a necessary condition for greater participation and reflexivity in science policy, practice and governance.

Approaches to public engagement in biosciences and biotechnologies have been informed by work done by sociologists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars, in particular their critiques of traditional elitist and technocratic approaches to science policy. In this article, we analyse one attempt at institutionalising public engagement in Australia, and focus on points of tension between different actors. We explore the roles of social scientists in policy and in public engagement, and the potential for opening up discussions and decision-making about the biosciences and biotechnologies. We reflect on the difficulties for social scientists in maintaining a critical yet constructive voice and draw attention to care as a possible ethico-political commitment and practice that may create opportunities and spaces for improving public engagement and policy making.

This paper offers a contribution to the literature on science policies and on the possible trade-off between broad science-technology policies and mission-oriented programs. We develop a multi-country, multi-sectoral agent-based model that represents a small-scale monetary union. Findings are threefold. Firstly, symmetric science policies from governments significantly reduce cross-country growth divergence. Secondly, even if economic growth is largely driven by the sectors with absolute advantages, having some flow of open science investments is sufficient for the other industries to survive and innovate. Thirdly, science policy limits monopolistic tendencies and reduces income inequality. Yet, the working of the model suggests that supply-side science policies should be paired with demand-side policies to meet grand societal challenges. • We analyse the emerging trade-off between public investments in open science and mission-oriented policies through a multi-country, multi-sector agent-based model. • Science policies reduce and stabilise growth divergence. • Open science preserves the variety of the economic structure and limits monopolistic tendencies. • Supply-side policies need to be paired with demand-side policies to meet grand societal challenges.

Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communication. Touted as a means of enhancing democratic discussion of science and technology, analysis of public engagement with science and technology has shown that it is often weakly tied to scientific governance. In this article, we suggest that the notion of capacity building might be a way of reframing the democratic potential of public engagement with science and technology activities. Drawing on literatures from public policy and administration, we outline how public engagement with science and technology might build citizen capacity, before using the notion of capacity building to develop five principles for the design of public engagement with science and technology. We demonstrate the use of these principles through a discussion of the development and realization of the pilot for a large-scale public engagement with science and technology activity, the Futurescape City Tours, which was carried out in Arizona in 2012.

MIT Science Policy Review spoke with Dr. Alondra Nelson about the role of scientists and the broader public in shaping policy. Dr. Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey, and is the author of multiple works about the intersections of science, technology, medicine, and inequality, including Body and Soul (2011) and The Social Life of DNA (2016). She previously served as Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). As a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, she has advised at various levels of government and civil society on science-related issues. Dr. Nelson’s unique perspective as a sociologist sheds light on the importance of public participation in policy development, both as a democratic process, and to ensure that scientific and technological progress benefits society. In our conversation, we discussed some of the challenges of science policymaking, strategies to enhance public involvement in policy, and the fundamental value of providing broad public access to science and scientific education.

This study of the science communication views and practices of African researchers ― academics at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Zimbabwe ― reveals a bleak picture of the low status of public science engagement in the developing world. Researchers prioritise peer communication and pay little attention to the public, policy makers and popular media. Most scientists believe the public is largely not scientifically literate or interested in research. An unstable funding environment, a lack of communication incentives and censoring of politically sensitive findings further constrain researchers' interest in public engagement. Most NUST academics, however, are interested in science communication training. We suggest interventions that could revive and support public science engagement at African universities.

‘Public engagement with science’ has become a ‘buzzword’ reflecting a concern about the widening gap between science and society and efforts to bridge this gap. This study is a comprehensive analysis of the development of the ‘engagement’ rhetoric in the pertinent academic literature on science communication and in science policy documents. By way of a content analysis of articles published in three leading science communication journals and a selection of science policy documents from the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), the European Union (EU), and South Africa (SA), the variety of motives underlying this rhetoric, as well as the impact it has on science policies, are analyzed. The analysis of the science communication journals reveals an increasingly vague and inclusive definition of ‘engagement’ as well as of the ‘public’ being addressed, and a diverse range of motives driving the rhetoric. Similar observations can be made about the science policy documents. This study corroborates an earlier diagnosis that rhetoric is running ahead of practice and suggests that communication and engagement with clearly defined stakeholder groups about specific problems and the pertinent scientific knowledge will be a more successful manner of ‘engagement’.

This article presents a personal reflection on the evolution of thinking about public engagement with science in the UK, with a particular emphasis on the experience with nanotechnology.

There is a lack of published evidence which demonstrates the impacts of public engagement (PE) in science and technology policy. This might represent the failure of PE to achieve policy impacts or indicate a lack of effective procedures for discerning the uptake by policy makers of PE-derived outputs. While efforts have been made to identify and categorize different types of policy impact, research has rarely attempted to link policy impact with PE procedures, political procedures, or the connections between them. In this article, we propose a simple conceptual model to capture this information, based on semistructured interviews with both policy makers and PE practitioners. A range of criteria are identified to increase the policy impact of PE. The role of PE practitioners in realizing impacts through their interactions with policy makers in the informal “in-between” spaces of public engagement is emphasized. However, the potential contradictions between the pursuit of policy impacts and the more traditional conceptualizations of PE effectiveness are discussed. The main barrier to the identification of policy impacts from PE may lie within policy processes themselves. Political institutions have responsibility to establish formalized procedures for monitoring the uptake and use of evidence from PE in their decision-making processes.

This essay reports on the final session of a 2-day workshop entitled 'Genetic Diversity and Science Communication', hosted by the CIHR Institute of Genetics in Toronto, April 2006. The first speaker, Timothy Caulfield, introduced the intersecting communities that promulgate a 'cycle of hype' of the timelines and expected outcomes of the Human Genome Project (HGP): scientists, the media and the public. Other actors also contribute to the overall hype, the social science and humanities communities, industry and politicians. There currently appears to be an abatement of the overblown rhetoric of the HGP. As pointed out by the second speaker, Sharon Kardia, there is broad recognition that most phenotypic traits, including disease susceptibility are multi-factorial. That said, George Davey-Smith reminded us that some direct genotype-phenotype associations may be useful for public health issues. The Mendelian randomization approach hopes to revitalize the discipline of epidemiology by strengthening causal influences about environmentally modifiable risk factors. A more realistic informational environment paves the way for greater public engagement in science policy. Two such initiatives were presented by Kardia and Jason Robert, and Peter Finegold emphasized that science education and professional development for science teachers are important components of later public engagement in science issues. However, pressures on public research institutions to commercialize and seek industry funding may have negative impacts in both encouraging scientists to inappropriately hype research and on diminishing public trust in the scientific enterprise. The latter may have a significant effect on public engagement processes, such as those proposed by Robert and Kardia.

The promise of scientific and technological innovation – particularly in fields such as nanotechnology – is increasingly set against what has been articulated as a deficit in public trust in both the new technologies and regulatory mechanisms. Whilst the development of new technology is cast as providing contributions to both quality of life and national competitiveness, what has been termed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ is seen as threatening the vitality of this process. However in contrast to the risk debates that dominated the technological controversies of the late 1990s the vitality of technological innovation is now cast as vulnerable to lack of public confidence and trust in the regulatory and governance structures upon which such innovation depends. In order to address this deficit in public trust, science policy has increasingly turned to the social sciences, suggesting that public values might be incorporated into the development of nanotechnology at an early stage. Public ambivalence therefore constitutes the problem addressed by the increasingly central role that public engagement and participation play in contemporary science policy. Although the recent proliferation of public engagement activities is premised on the need to address this ambivalence through direct engagement, we re-interpret ambivalence as an engaged – rather than passive – mode of relating to technological determinism. Whilst the move toward forms of direct public engagement might be regarded as symptomatic of the emergence of affective mode of governance we interpret public ambivalence as a nested set of enthusiasms and anxieties. Accordingly we suggest that public engagement might be re-thought, utilising ambivalence as a creative resource, rather than as the problem.

Even a cursory reading of the public engagement in science (PES) literature over the past decade reveals that public engagement is becoming part of the “orthodoxy of 21st century science policy” (Stilgoe, Nanodialogues: experiments in public engagement with science, 2007, p 16), Moving forward, there appears to be strong consensus that (1) public engagement is an essential component for shaping sound science policies, research agendas, and governance structures; (2) more opportunities for accessible and successful PES need to be developed and implemented to have meaningful impact; and (3) a broader and more diverse range of publics need to be reached through PES activities. This article explores the role that U.S. science museums and centers could play in creating and delivering PES programming focusing on current science and technology developments and issues, with particular attention to nanoscience and nanotechnology. Also addressed will be some of the factors that support increased PES involvement by museums, some of the challenges museums need to overcome to sustain ongoing PES, and several recommendations to achieve broader PES impact through science museum participation.