Sustainable Participation? Mapping out and reflecting on the field of public dialogue on science and technology

The field of public participation in issues relating to science, technology and the environment is booming. To date much effort has gone into developing new participatory approaches and their evaluation, while most of what we know comes from individual case studies of engagement. This report builds on one of the first ever studies of public participation experts, their networks, roles and relations, to present a broader analysis of the UK public dialogue field as a whole. It draws on a recent project that involved 21 of the UK’s leading thinkers, practitioners, and policy makers in this area reflecting on the following critical questions. • What is the nature of participatory governance networks and the roles and relations of different actors within them? • Who counts as an expert on public participation and how are these meanings changing over time? • What are the implications of increasing institutionalisation, commercialisation and professionalisation of public dialogue? • To what extent are UK science and policy institutions learning about and learning from public dialogue? Taken together, these insights indicate that the field of public dialogue on science and technology has reached a critical moment and highlight a series of challenges and recommendations for its future sustainability

Organizations in the making: Learning and intervening at the science-policy interface

This paper synthesizes recent insights from geography, science and technology studies and related disciplines concerning organizations and organizational learning at the science-policy interface. The paper argues that organizations do not exist and evolve in isolation, but are co-produced through networked connections to other spaces, bodies and practices. Furthermore, organizations should not be studied as stable entities, but are constantly in-the-making. This co-productionist perspective on organizations and organizing has implications for how geographers theorize, study and intervene in organizations at the science-policy interface with respect to encouraging learning and change and in the roles we adopt within and around such organizations

Participation in Transition(s):Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time. In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and ‘the public’. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected ‘ecologies of participation’, and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions