How social and citizen science help challenge the limits of the biosecurity approach: the case of ash dieback

Protecting tree and plant health remains a concern firmly embedded in the science-based, technocratic discourse of ‘biosecurity’ with its emphasis on regulation, surveillance, and control. Here, Judith Tsouvalis argues that this makes it difficult to have a broader debate on the deeper, more complex causes of the steep rise in tree and plant disease epidemics worldwide

Committing to place:the potential of open collaborations for trusted environmental governance

Conventional modes of environmental governance, which typically exclude those stakeholders that are most directly linked to the specific place, frequently fail to have the desired impact. Using the example of lake water management in Loweswater, a small hamlet within the English Lake District, we consider the ways in which new “collectives” for local, bottom-up governance of water bodies can reframe problems in ways which both bind lay and professional people to place, and also recast the meaning of “solutions” in thought-provoking ways

Co-designing the environmental land management scheme in England: the why, who, and how of engaging ‘harder to reach’ stakeholders

1. Agriculture around the world needs to become more environmentally sustainable to limit further environmental degradation and impacts of climate change. 2. Many governments try to achieve this through enrolling farmers in agri-environment schemes (AES) that encourage them to undertake conservation activities. 3. Studies show that AES can suffer from low uptake, meaning their environmental objectives remain unattained. To succeed for people and nature, policy-makers are increasingly adopting multi-actor approaches in the “co-design” of AES to make them more attractive and inclusive of a full range of stakeholders, including ‘harder to reach’ farmers. 4. To address why some land managers (principally farmers) may be harder to reach in the context of co-designing England’s new Environmental Land Management (ELM) approach, we undertook a quick scoping review of the literature, conducted 23 first-round and 24 second-round interviews with key informants, and held a workshop with 11 practitioners. 5. We outline why farming stakeholders may be harder to reach and how policy-makers can adjust the engagement process to make co-design more inclusive. 6. Based on the results, we make recommendations that could help policy-makers to design better, more inclusive AES that would attract greater uptake and increase their chances of success

Beyond counting climate consensus

Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims such as ‘humans cause global warming’ are distractions from more urgent matters of knowledge, values, policy framing and public engagement.  Such efforts to force policy progress through communicating scientific consensus misunderstand the relationship between scientific knowledge, publics and policymakers. More important is to focus on genuinely controversial issues within climate policy debates where expertise might play a facilitating role. Mobilising expertise in policy debates calls for judgment, context and attention to diversity, rather than deferring to formal quantifications of narrowly scientific claims

Opening up the participation laboratory: the co-creation of publics and futures in upstream participation.

How to embed reflexivity in public participation in techno-science and to open it up to the agency of publics are key concerns in current debates. There is a risk that engagements become limited to “laboratory experiments,” highly controlled and foreclosed by participation experts, particularly in upstream techno-sciences. In this paper, we propose a way to open up the “participation laboratory” by engaging localized, self-assembling publics in ways that respect and mobilize their ecologies of participation. Our innovative reflexive methodology introduced participatory methods to public engagement with upstream techno-science, with the public contributing to both the content and format of the project. Reflecting on the project, we draw attention to the largely overlooked issue of temporalities of participation, and the co-production of futures and publics in participation methodologies. We argue that many public participation methodologies are underpinned by the open futures model, which imagines the future as a space of unrestrained creativity. We contrast that model with the lived futures model typical of localized publics, which respects latency of materials and processes but imposes limits on creativity. We argue that to continue being societally relevant and scientifically important, public participation methods should reconcile the open future of research with the lived futures of localized publics

Making science public: challenges and opportunities

This Programme investigated the relationship between science, politics and publics in the aftermath of an influential 2000 UK House of Lords Science and Society report. We conceptualised top-down initiatives promising greater transparency around the use of scientific evidence in policymaking and opportunities for public engagement around research and innovation agendas, as well as bottom-up instances of public mobilisation around science as an effort to make science public. In principle, such a movement seemed to speak directly to wider arguments for ‘opening up’ controversial domains of evidence and research to public scrutiny of framing, tacit assumptions, and alternative forms of expertise. Yet, these promises raised a number of dilemmas that we sought to examine in a range of cases