Abstract
The present crisis of science’s governance, affecting science’s reproducibility, scientific peer review and science’s integrity, offers a chance to reconsider evidence based policy as it is being practiced at present.Current evidence based policy exercises entail forms of quantification – often in the form of risk analysis or cost benefit analyses – which aim to optimize one among a set of policy options corresponding to a generally single framing of the issue under consideration. More cogently the deepening of the analysis corresponding to a single view of what the problem is has the effect of distracting from what could be alternative readings. When using evidence based policy those alternative frames become a kind of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ which is de facto removed from the policy discourse. All the more so when the analysis is supported by extensive mathematical modelling.Thus evidence based policy may result in a dramatic simplification of the available perceptions, in flawed policy prescriptions and in the neglect of other relevant world views of legitimate stakeholders. This use of scientific method ultimately generates – rather than resolving – controversies and erodes the institutional trust of the involved actors.We suggest an alternative approach – which we term quantitative story-telling – which encourages a major effort in the pre-analytic, pre-quantitative phase of the analysis as to map a socially robust universe of possible frames, which represent different lenses through which to perceive what the problem is. This is followed by an analysis where the emphasis in not on confirmatory checks or system optimization but – the opposite – on an attempt to refute the frames if these violate constraints of feasibility (compatibility with processes outside human control); viability (compatibility with processes under human control), and desirability (compatibility with a plurality of normative considerations relevant to the system’s actors).
Highlights
The use of science for policy is at the core of a perfect storm generated by the insurgence of several concurrent crises: of science, of trust, of sustainability
Evidence based policy has to be replaced by robust policy, where robustness is tested with respect to feasibility; viability, and desirability domain
From the impact of pesticides on bees to the culling of badgers, from the greenhouse potential of the refrigerant liquid used by Mercedes Benz to the impact of endocrine disruptors, from the benefits of shale gas fracking to the fate of children raised by gay parents, from the true long term cost of citizenship for illegal migrants to the desirability of international testing and comparison of the educational attainment of children, all is matter of contention where the relevant science is disputed. Until recently these levels of antagonism were reserved for issues such as anthropogenic climate change and genetically modified organisms (GMO), the quintessential ‘wicked’ issues (Rittel & Webber 1973) - issues so deeply entangled in a web of hardly separable facts, interests and values that there cannot be agreements among different parties about the nature of the problem
Summary
It would be naïve to reconsider the place and the style of science support to policy neglecting the increasing climate of controversy which in recent years has marked practically all instances in which science has been used to a policy end. From the impact of pesticides on bees to the culling of badgers, from the greenhouse potential of the refrigerant liquid used by Mercedes Benz to the impact of endocrine disruptors, from the benefits of shale gas fracking to the fate of children raised by gay parents, from the true long term cost of citizenship for illegal migrants to the desirability of international testing and comparison of the educational attainment of children, all is matter of contention where the relevant science is disputed Until recently these levels of antagonism were reserved for issues such as anthropogenic climate change and genetically modified organisms (GMO), the quintessential ‘wicked’ issues (Rittel & Webber 1973) - issues so deeply entangled in a web of hardly separable facts, interests and values that there cannot be agreements among different parties about the nature of the problem. We postulate that this kind of affection, and the related attitude toward scientific facts, can be found in many other issues, beside climate change, and that the unavoidable presence of cultural and normative bias cannot be silenced by scientific proficiency
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