Reflections from Participants

The Road Ahead: Public Dialogue on Science and Technology brings together some of the UK’s leading thinkers and practitioners in science and society to ask where we have got to, how we have got here, why we are doing what we are doing and what we should do next. The collection of essays aims to provide policy makers and dialogue deliverers with insights into how dialogue could be used in the future to strengthen the links between science and society. It is introduced by Professor Kathy Sykes, one of the UK’s best known science communicators, who is also the head of the Sciencewise-ERC Steering Group, and Jack Stilgoe, a DEMOS associate, who compiled the collection

Deliberation, Dialogue and Debate: Why Researchers need to Engage with Others to Address Complex Issues

As societies have become more differentiated, policy issues are increasingly being analysed using concepts and ideas from the complexity sciences. Policy change involving diverse stakeholders interacting with one another in ways that are shaped by power and politics are increasingly characterised by contestation and unpredictability. Stakeholders other than researchers are collecting information and producing their own knowledge to add new perspectives to those of, and contest the power given to, researchers and their advice. Against this backdrop, I argue that traditional approaches to communicating research to policymakers are inadequate. Researchers now share the field of knowledge production and communication with many others, and where appropriate, those who view their role in relation to policy, should be prepared to engage with stakeholders affected by policy issues and expose their findings to human interaction, review and scrutiny by others

The Social Licence for Research:Why care.data Ran Into Trouble

In this article we draw on the concept of a social licence to explain public concern at the introduction of care.data, a recent English initiative designed to extract data from primary care medical records for commissioning and other purposes, including research. The concept of a social licence describes how the expectations of society regarding some activities may go beyond compliance with the requirements of formal regulation; those who do not fulfil the conditions for the social licence (even if formally compliant) may experience ongoing challenge and contestation. Previous work suggests that people's cooperation with specific research studies depends on their perceptions that their participation is voluntary and is governed by values of reciprocity, non-exploitation and service of the public good. When these conditions are not seen to obtain, threats to the social licence for research may emerge. We propose that care.data failed to adequately secure a social licence because of: (i) defects in the warrants of trust provided for care.data, (ii) the implied rupture in the traditional role, expectations and duties of general practitioners, and (iii) uncertainty about the status of care.data as a public good. The concept of a social licence may be useful in explaining the specifics of care.data, and also in reinforcing the more general lesson for policy-makers that legal authority does not necessarily command social legitimacy

Ecologies of participation in socio-technical change: The case of energy system transitions

Studies of societal engagement with socio-technical change are undergoing a systemic turn. Rather than simply viewing public engagement in science, policy and behavioural change in terms of discrete cases, key social theories in deliberative democracy, practice theory, socio-technical transitions and co-productionist scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) are moving to consider how diverse forms of participation interrelate in wider systems. In this paper we take stock of these advances to develop a conceptual framework for understanding ecologies of participation in socio-technical and democratic systems, grounded in relational co-productionist theory in STS. The framework is illustrated through empirical analysis of a systematic mapping of participation in UK energy system transitions between 2010 and 2015. This provides the first insights into system-wide patternings, diversities and inequalities of energy participation, the significant types of interrelation between practices of public engagement within wider ecologies of participation, and their mutual construction with political cultures and constitutions. The value and implications of adopting an ecologies of participation approach are considered with respect to the theoretical, empirical and practical challenges of understanding and building more inclusive, responsible and just socio-technical (energy) transitions

Development of Space Weather Reasonable Worst-Case Scenarios for the UK National Risk Assessment

Severe space weather was identified as a risk to the UK in 2010 as part of a wider review of natural hazards triggered by the societal disruption caused by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in April of that year. To support further risk assessment by government officials, and at their request, we developed a set of reasonable worst-casescenarios and first published them as a technical report in 2012(current version published in 2020). Each scenario focused on a space weather environment that could disrupt a particular national infrastructure such as electric power or satellites, thus enabling officials to explore the resilience of that infrastructure against severe space weather through discussions with relevant experts from other parts of government and with the operators of that infrastructure. This approach also encouraged us to focus on the environmental features that are key to generating adverse impacts. In this paper,we outline the scientific evidence that we have used to develop these scenarios,and therefinements made to them as new evidence emerged. We show how these scenarios are also considered as an ensemble so that government officials can prepare for a severe space weather event, during which many or all of the different scenarios will materialise. Finally,we note that this ensemble also needs to include insights into how public behaviour will play out during a severe space weather event and hence the importance of providing robust, evidence-basedinformation on space weather and its adverse impacts

Reflexive Engagement?:Actors, Learning, and Reflexivity in Public Dialogue on Science and Technology

This article contributes to a more reflexive mode of research on public engagement with science-related issues through presenting an in-depth qualitative study of the actors that mediate science-society interactions, their roles and relationships, and the nature of learning and reflexivity in relation to public dialogue. A mapping framework is developed to describe the roles and relations of actors mediating public dialogue on science and technology in Britain. Learning within public dialogue networks is shown to be instrumental only, crowding out potentials for reflexive and relational learning. This calls for renewed critical social science research alongside more deliberately reflexive learning relating to participatory governance of science and technology that is situated, interactive, public, and anticipatory