Remaking Participation

Science, Environment and Emergent Publics

Jason Chilvers, Matthew Kearnes, Jason Chilvers, Matthew Kearnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135084707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Changing relations between science and democracy – and controversies over issues such as climate change, energy transitions, genetically modified organisms and smart technologies – have led to a rapid rise in new forms of public participation and citizen engagement. While most existing approaches adopt fixed meanings of 'participation' and are consumed by questions of method or critiquing the possible limits of democratic engagement, this book offers new insights that rethink public engagements with science, innovation and environmental issues as diverse, emergent and in the making. Bringing together leading scholars on science and democracy, working between science and technology studies, political theory, geography, sociology and anthropology, the volume develops relational and co-productionist approaches to studying and intervening in spaces of participation. New empirical insights into the making, construction, circulation and effects of participation across cultures are illustrated through examples ranging from climate change and energy to nanotechnology and mundane technologies, from institutionalised deliberative processes to citizen-led innovation and activism, and from the global north to global south. This new way of seeing participation in science and democracy opens up alternative paths for reconfiguring and remaking participation in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways.

This ground-breaking book is essential reading for scholars and students of participation across the critical social sciences and beyond, as well as those seeking to build more transformative participatory practices.

1 Science, Democracy and Emergent Publics

Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes

DOI: 10.4324/9780203797693-1

A central feature of democratic systems of government wherever they have emerged – in a polis of ancient Greece, the parliamentary democracies of the eighteenth century or the cosmopolitan systems of governance that characterize late modernity – is the often partial accommodation of competing forms of moral, political and scientific authority. At least since the seventeenth century and the stuttering emergence of a modern scientific and technological enterprise, a central problematic for democratic politics has been the potential conflagration between scientific expertise, on the one hand, and popular representation on the other. In theory (and we must stress the word ‘theory’ here) democracies function not as a system of rule, or indeed government, but as a procedural solution to the problem of authority, with elaborately designed systems of delegation, accountability and oversight. Of course, in practice, democracy has remained anything but a static system of procedural administration. The transformations of democratic systems of government throughout the latter half of the twentieth century – that were precipitated by the failures in, and attempted recoveries and resuscitations of, these systems of bureaucratic resolution – have set the stage for a more reflexive pattern of relations between science and the projects of political ordering.

This volume is situated in the context of fundamental challenges to the accommodations that have, to date, constituted the kinds of institutional fixes deployed to proscribe and balance competing forms of authority and expertise. In a recent review Jasanoff suggests that though ‘scientific ways of knowing have given rise to a politics of demonstration that modern nation states found supremely useful … the optimistic alliance between science, technology and democracy proved short-lived’ (Jasanoff 2012, 2). The comforting assurance that the development of scientific understanding would result in socially progressive discoveries, and that in times of crisis bold assertions of scientific process and methodological rigour would carry the day, have seemingly been supplanted by a more questioning and ambivalent outlook. Technoscientific controversies – around objects such as chemical fertilizers, nuclear power plants, thalidomide and the production of chlorofluorocarbons resulting in holes in the ozone layer – revealed the downsides of science and innovation. At the same time concerns about the politicization of science in debates over anthropogenic climate change, data security, global pandemics and HIV research – together with iconic cases of scientific fraud (both alleged and actual) – have challenged the presumed neutrality of expert judgement. As Bijker et al. (2009, 1) have argued, we are living in profoundly paradoxical times where ‘the cases in which scientific advice is asked most urgently are those in which the authority of science is questioned most thoroughly’.

A characteristic response to these shifting relations between science and democratic politics, and the emergence of a more reflexive attitude towards notions of scientific and technological progress, is the now commonplace argument that science needs to be made publically accountable in order that its accomplishments will be viewed as more socially acceptable. While economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability and advances in medical intervention are all said to depend on scientific and technological development, the future, as Marilyn Strathern (2005, 465) has eloquently argued, is increasingly ‘forecast as fragile’. When it comes to matters of science, technology and the environment, it is increasingly apparent that it is no longer possible to operate in closed or secluded settings where public interest or social utility can be simply presumed. At the same time, contemporary systems of science policy-making and environmental regulation are no longer guaranteed by formal procedures of political representation. Over the past four decades or so, science and democracy have been increasingly opened up to diverse forms of public engagement and participation and wider civic scrutiny. Indeed, some have begun to suggest that the peculiar cultural and political sensitivities that characterize a distinctly late modern attitude towards science, technology and the environment represent an ‘age of participation’ (Einsiedel and Kamara 2006; Gottweis 2008; Blowers and Sundqvist 2010; Delgado et al. 2011), epitomized by the redistribution of expertise and attempts to incorporate a range of alternative actors and knowledges into processes of techno-political decision-making (Leach et al. 2005; Hagendijk and Irwin 2006; Irwin 2006; Callon et al. 2009).

From a position of relative obscurity, public relations with and understandings of science – accompanied by institutionalized practices designed to understand, move and govern publics – have become a characteristic feature of modern statecraft. So much so that it is now difficult to find processes of decision-making on science and environment-related issues that are not accompanied by forms of public participation and engagement. Take, for example, the case of national energy systems. In contrast to the relative degrees of public support, or at least lack of overt societal resistance, that accompanied the post-World War II development of modern energy systems in Western democracies and the initial establishment of nuclear power generation (Welsh and Wynne 2013), today the ‘political situation’ (Barry 2012) surrounding energy and low carbon transitions animates a multiplicity of public engagements with science, policy-making and innovation. These range from institutional moves to both characterize public opinion and motivate public behaviour change through deliberative consultation processes, opinion polls, e-democracy, citizen science, open innovation and the co-design of energy technologies, through to explicitly ‘citizen-led’ engagements in the form of protests, activism, alternative social movements, community energy initiatives and other forms of distributed innovation. The list goes on. What is striking about this particular example is the sheer diversity of contemporary forms of participation engaged by publics and civil society organizations in domains that have traditionally been the preserve of science, industry and the state. In these conditions it is often argued that science and democracy need to be rendered more democratic, more politically accountable, more publicly transparent and more socially responsive in order that they might be more successfully scientific and democratic.

In the context of this proliferation of participatory politics it is striking that much recent commentary continues to distinguish ‘science’ from ‘politics’ as two separate realms of human endeavour and collective action. While science tends to be viewed in objective terms, democratic forms of public participation are presented as necessary in limiting the transgressive potential of technological innovation and as providing an accountability mechanism that functions as a counterweight to systems of technical expertise.¹ However, viewed from a historical vantage point, this separation between science, politics and democracy appears to be a myopic image at best. In his seminal study of the interweaving histories of liberal democracy and experimental science, Ezrahi (1990) argues that the mutual entanglement of science and contemporary forms of social and political order have made it possible to resolve the competing demands of modern governance. Ezrahi identifies the ways in which an emergent ‘attestive’ visual culture gradually came to replace the ‘celebratory’ visual aesthetics of monarchical power. Rooted in the practices of public witnessing, a mode of scientific truth telling that emerged with the modern nation state, this attestive culture is premised on a notion of the popular equality of perception – a nascent political philosophy that would become a rhetorical hallmark of distinctly liberal modes of democratic participation. In the centuries that ensued, science came to adopt a central and privileged position in the establishment of democratic modes of social and political order, as a driver of social progress and as a source of political legitimacy. Working in the same historical terrain as Ezrahi, Shapin and Schaffer (1985, 332) conclude their groundbreaking study of the interweaving of political thought and emergence of experimental modes of scientific research with the striking claim that ‘solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order’, while the ‘history of science occupies the same terrain as the history of politics’. For Shapin and Schaffer the development of new conventions for authorizing scientific knowledge were tied to the emergence of a new kind of political space characterized by the performance and public witness of experimental knowledge.

As has been well documented elsewhere (Latour 1987; Jasanoff 2004), Ezrahi’s and Shapin and Schaffer’s insights regarding the mutually reinforcing constitution of scientific and political authority provide the basis for co-productionist and pragmatist accounts of the relationship between science and democracy. Drawing on this body of work, in this volume we view the development of new modes of public engagement with science and the environment as deeply imbricated in the idiosyncratic, and at times uncomfortable but always mutually reinforcing, relationship between science and social order. It is the phenomenon of ‘participation’ writ large that forms the focus of this volume. However, rather than see ‘participation’, ‘engagement’ or indeed ‘democracy’ as outside or external to science or politics, with Shapin and Schaffer and Ezrahi we view these developments as an index of the contemporary social and cultural conventions that shape relationships between science and democracy, and the means through which societies legitimate claims to both political and epistemic authority. At the same time we argue that attempts to deal with the aforementioned ruptures, tensions and disconnects between science and democracy have been productive in bringing forward whole areas of (social) scientific scholarship, professional communities, expert bodies, industries, (non-) governmental organizations and social movements involved in constituting diverse forms of ‘public participation’ (see Chilvers 2008; Laurent 2011).

Developing the insights of co-productionist readings of the interweaving of science and the political, in this volume our goal is to both reflect on and move beyond the imperatives and dominant imaginaries of participation evident in much existing scholarship and practice in this mushrooming area of interest and activity. Simply put, contemporary analyses of public participation have been dominated by work focused on the development and extension of participatory methods and their evaluation and critique. This methodologically focused work has, in turn, adopted pre-given (often highly specific) normative models of participation that assume a correspondence theory of an external ‘public’ existing in a natural state waiting to be discovered and mobilized by participatory techniques and procedures. As we will outline below, this ‘residual realist’ perspective is shared by normative accounts of the value of public participation in technoscientific decision-making and more critical assessments of public participation practice.

Our ambition in this volume, then, is to rethink the taken-for-granted methodological and theoretical realism of this work, and the notion that public participation practices might be adjudicated with reference to pre-given and external democratic norms. The chapters that comprise this volume develop a picture of public participation as emergent and in the making. Instead of seeing publics as external to processes of public mobilization, the chapters take forward analyses of the ways in which the publics of science and democracy are actively brought into being through matters of concern and the various instruments, tools and forms of mediation deployed to know and move them. Similarly, rather than insist on a dualism between science and politics, in which democracy is figured as a pre-given and relatively timeless norm, we are interested in exploring the practical enactment of contemporary democratic politics and the creation of participatory spatialities. Questions and judgements of democratic legitimacy, in this sense, emerge within the practices and projects of democratization and participation. This focuses our attention on the shifting means through which societies arrive at collective determinations about science and democracy, arbitrate between competing forms of expertise and knowledge, and legitimate particular forms of political performance.

In other words, the volume aims to develop, articulate and explore a co-productionist approach to public participation and democratic engagement with science, technology and the environment. A tradition of co-productionist analyses at the interface between science and technology studies (STS), political t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Science, democracy and emergent publics
• Part I Rethinking participation
• 2 Participation in the making: rethinking public engagement in co-productionist terms
• 3 Engaging in a decentred world: overflows, ambiguities and the governance of climate change
• 4 Engaging the mundane: complexity and speculation in everyday technoscience
• 5 Ghosts of the machine: publics, meanings and social science in a time of expert dogma and denial
• Part II Making participation
• 6 State experiments with public participation: French nanotechnology, Congolese deforestation and the search for national publics
• 7 Technologies of participation and the making of technologized futures
• 8 Participation as pleasure: citizenship and science communication
• 9 The temporal choreographies of participation: thinking innovation and society from a time-sensitive perspective
• Part III Remaking participation
• 10 An ‘experiment with intensities’: village hall reconfigurings of the world within a new participatory collective
• 11 Against blank slate futuring: noticing obduracy in the city through experiential methods of public engagement
• 12 Reflexively engaging with technologies of participation: constructive assessment for public participation methods
• 13 Remaking participation: towards reflexive engagement
• Index