If deliberation is the answer, what is the question? Objectives and evaluation of public participation and engagement in science and technology

ABSTRACT

Public participation and engagement in decision-making regarding science and technology (‘PP&E’) is an increasingly common practice. But what is known of whether PP&E achieves its goals? Surprisingly, little research evaluates PP&E. We put forth three reasons why PP&E advocates and practitioners should take evaluation seriously: the absence of evaluation causes PP&E's advocacy to fail a minimal burden-of-proof standard; PP&E's costs are greater than they appear; and these costs may be disproportionately borne by the already-disadvantaged. Evaluating PP&E would require identifying PP&E's objectives and assessing its success in meeting them. To this end we survey scholarship advocating PP&E and identify three sets of objectives: substantively improving decision-making, deontologically fulfilling widely-held norms, and politically redistributing power away from techno-scientific elites. While there is some ad hoc evidence of progress toward these goals, we find no robust evaluation of PP&E. We offer four recommendations that might assist in evaluating PP&E more thoroughly.

KEYWORDS:

• Public engagement
• public participation
• objectives
• Science and Technology Studies
• decision-making

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘classic’ tripartite division included the instrumental goal of making resulting decisions more legitimate. But legitimacy has multiple definitions. In some contexts, it means that those likely affected – and often the public more broadly – appear to support, accept, or comply with the decision, institution, or process, which can in turn increase effectiveness. We thus include efforts toward this practical, consequentialist ‘sociological legitimacy’ within our substantive objectives. Other times, legitimacy means that the decision, institution, or process satisfies independent norms of justice or democracy. We include efforts toward such ‘normative legitimacy’ within deontological objectives.

Some STS scholars criticise decision-makers utilising PP&E instrumentally with the goal of convincing the public of what they were going to do in any case (Stirling 2006; Stilgoe, Lock, and Wilsdon 2014). Here, we do not assume such Machiavellian motives to rubber stamp pre-existing decisions.

2 These pragmatic ambitions can, of course, be presented in slightly different language in different contexts. As Gudowsky and Bechtold (2013, 1) summarise from the literature, decision-makers’ objectives for public engagement include achieving ‘socially more robust decisions’ that bring ‘citizens and institutions closer together’ (the latter quoting Monaghan 2007), the need to broaden information underpinning decisions, to increase decisions’ perceived legitimacy, and a desire to shape collective identity.

3 Lee goes on to make several important and valuable points developing this general position. For example, deliberative processes can be effective in minimising opposition or extreme views, galvanising support for selected paths, or even just for creating energising processes. As such, we emphasise that this quotation is her characterization of the literature, rather than Lee’s personal analysis. But, even in Lee’s work, lasting evidence of impact can be difficult to find. For example, in the case of the $14.5 billion Unified New Orleans Plan that she examines, ‘little evidence of the congresses appeared online’ even four years later (Lee 2014, 19).

4 Importantly, a dissenting minority of STS scholars views scientific expertise and culture as a democratic check on populism and authoritarianism. Some of these defenders of scientific expertise describe ‘social constructivist’ STS scholars’ position as resembling, at least superficially, populist critiques of science as reflecting the interests of elite social groups (Collins and Evans 2019, 210).

5 The one example we were able to find of arms-length examination, a reference to the initiative in a Government Accountability Office report, doesn’t actually conduct any evaluation, but simply reports testimony from NASA that the effort ‘According to NASA officials, the results of these forums provided NASA with insights into public understanding and views on NASA’s asteroid work’ (p. 44).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Open Philanthropy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [Grant Number: 1006-2019-0001].

Notes on contributors

Jesse L. Reynolds

Jesse L. Reynolds researches how society can develop norms, procedures, and institutions to manage opportunities and challenges at the intersection of sustainability and new technologies. In this, his approach draws from law, political sciences, and economics. Reynolds has extensively researched the governance of geoengineering and is also exploring the roles of new biotechnologies, such as gene drives, and artificial intelligence in the conservation of biodiversity and facilitating sustainability. His book The Governance of Solar Geoengineering: Managing Climate Change in the Anthropocene (2019) was published on Cambridge University Press, and Reynolds’s research has been in WIREs Climate Change, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Climatic Change, Environmental Politics, the Journal of Environmental Law, and elsewhere. He currently is Executive Secretary of the Global Commission on Governing Risks from Climate Overshoot and Senior Policy Officer at the Paris Peace Forum. Prior to these, Dr. Reynolds was an Emmett / Frankel Fellow in Environmental Law and Policy at the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

Eric B. Kennedy

Eric B. Kennedy works at the intersection of expertise, decision-making, and institutional epistemologies. Trained in Science and Technology Studies, his work focuses on knowledge production and decision-making in the context of disaster and emergency management. Kennedy was co-editor of the Rightful Place of Science volume on Citizen Science, and has authored a variety of manuscripts on topics ranging from use of predictive models in wildfire management to forms of expertise used by public constituencies when challenging policy. He is an Assistant Professor of Disaster and Emergency Management at York University, as well as a member of the graduate program in Science and Technology Studies. He is also the founder and director of the Forum on Science, Policy, and Society, a Canadian not-for-profit organization dedicated to training the next generation of science policy leaders.

Jonathan Symons

Jonathan Symons Jon's current research primarily focuses on global climate politics, including debates over solar geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal. His most recent book Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and Climate Crisis (Polity Press, 2019) explores the argument for increased state investment in low-carbon innovation. Jon also works on processes of international norm change. His previous book Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights (co-authored with Prof. Dennis Altman, Polity, 2016) explored the debate between those arguing that ‘LGBTQI rights are human rights’ and those who believe rights protections should not extend beyond the ‘traditional values of mankind’. Jon is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences.