Book review: Publics and their health systems: rethinking participation by Ellen Stewart

Drawing on a detailed case study of Scotland’s National Health Service, Publics and Their Health Systems: Rethinking Participation is a novel contribution to the growing academic engagement with the institutionalisation of public participation as a routine feature of governance. Author Ellen Stewart offers a ‘citizen’s-eye view’ of the Scottish health system, challenging dominant policy narratives by exploring diverse forms of public participation around one system. Helen Pallett praises this rich empirical account, which will be vital for future theorising of public participation and for scholarly interventions into broader systems

Organising science policy : participation, learning & experimentation in British democracy

The incorporation of public participation into science policy processes has been an important feature of policy practice and the academic literature for more than two decades, yet it has failed to realise its democratising potential or to engender broader changes in organisational and political cultures. To understand this apparent paradox this thesis focuses on organisational changes and practices around public participation, thus transcending the conventional focus on individual participation processes which characterises much academic work on the topic. Given the apparent lack of learning from and about public participation in key science policy organisations, this thesis explores diverse processes and facets of organisational learning, reflection and reflexivity in and around Sciencewise, a UK Government-funded body, which is emblematic of emerging professionalised organisations of participation. Drawing upon ethnographic and qualitative methods within a co-productionist idiom (Jasanoff 2004a), the thesis tells a number of stories about Sciencewise’s organisational learning processes during 2013; some are localised and specific, others identify more coherent shifts, and others draw connections between Sciencewise and broader political events. Diverse facets of organisational learning are explored from themes of spatiality, formal organisational mechanisms and organisational memory to non-knowledge, future imaginaries and processes of experimentation. It is argued that organisational learning cannot be understood without attention to the minutiae of everyday meetings and communications systems, or to broader political shifts like civil service reform. Despite the apparent rigidity of Sciencewise practices and discourses, there were significant instances of learning and change observed, resulting in shifting organisational categories, understandings and practices. These represent examples of more reflective and reflexive capacities within the programme. The thesis makes significant conceptual contributions to understandings of organisational learning, contributes empirical insights into the institutionalisation of participation in UK policy practice, and offers practical insights into the challenge of conducting engaged research and encouraging organisational reflexivity

Situating organisational learning and public participation: stories, spaces and connections

This paper gives one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of organisational learning in a public participation organisation, the UK Government-funded Sciencewise programme. It develops the concept of ‘organisational spaces’, highlighting the often diverse spaces found within organisational networks, and positing a co-productionist relationship between these different spaces and the kinds of learning processes that occur. The approach taken affirms the significant and active role of space in organisational learning processes, in a science policy context, as well as demonstrating the importance of connections between different organisational spaces in enabling more transformative learning processes. Two organisational spaces are described based on in-depth ethnographic and qualitative research in and around the Sciencewise programme 2013–2014. It is argued that informal, temporary and experimental organisational spaces have the potential to co-produce more transformative instances of learning, making an understanding of their connectedness to more formal and routinised organisational spaces vital for future research

Energy Democracies and Publics in the Making: A Relational Agenda for Research and Practice

Mainstream approaches to energy democracy and public engagement with energy transitions tend to adopt specific, pre-given meanings of both “democracy” and “publics.” Different approaches impose prescriptive assumptions about the model of participation, the identity of public participants, and what it means to participate well. The rigidity of many existing approaches to energy participation is increasingly being challenged by the ever-multiplying diversity of ways in which citizens participate in energy systems, as consumers in energy markets, protesters against new infrastructures and technologies, as initiators of community energy projects, and as subjects of behavior change interventions, amongst others. This paper is concerned with growing areas of scholarship which seek to understand and explore these emerging energy publics and forms of energy democracy from a relational perspective. Such work, grounded in constructivist and relational ontologies, views forms of participatory democracy and publics as being co-produced, constructed, and emergent through the performance of collective practices. It pays closer attention to power relations, politics, materiality, exclusions, and effects in both understanding and intervening in the making of energy democracy. This in turn shifts the focus from studying discrete unitary forms of “energy democracy” to one of understanding interrelations between multiple diverse energy democracies in wider systems. In this paper, we chart these developments and explore the significant challenges and potential contributions of relational approaches to furthering the theories, methods, and practices of energy democracy and energy public engagement. The paper draws on an expert workshop, and an accompanying review, which brought together leading proponents of contending relational approaches to energy participation in direct conversation for the first time. We use this as a basis to explore tensions between these approaches and set out a relational agenda for energy democracy research in terms of: developing concepts and theories; methodological and empirical challenges; and implications for practices of governance and democratic engagement with energy transitions

The new evidence-based policy: public participation between ‘hard evidence’ and democracy in practice

Background: Debates about evidence-based policy (EBP) were revived in the UK in the 2010s in the context of civil service reform and changing practices of policy making, including institutionalisation of public participation in science policy making.  Aims and objectives: This paper aims to explore this revival of interest in EBP in the context of the Government-funded public participation programme Sciencewise, which supports and promotes public dialogues in science policy making. It is based on in-depth ethnographic study of the programme during 2013, considering the impacts on Sciencewise practices and working understandings of engaging in the EBP debate. There is a particular focus on the advantages and disadvantages of categorising public participation as a source of evidence-based policy as opposed to presenting participation as a democratic act which is separate from discussions of EBP.  Key conclusions: At different times Sciencewise actors moved between these stances in order to gain credibility and attention for their work, and to situate the outcomes of public participation processes in a broader policy context. In some instances the presentation of outputs from public participation processes as legitimate evidence for policy gave them greater influence and enriched broader discussions about the meaning and practice of open policy. However, it also frequently led to their dismissal on methodological grounds, inhibiting serious engagement with their outputs and challenging internal frameworks for evaluation and learning

Glitching computational urban subjects

This commentary explores the epistemological vector of glitch/glitch proposed by Leszczynski and Elwood for the study of events which are non-performative or 'do not compute' in computational cities. There is a particular focus on the potential for this disposition to foreground more marginalised urban and computational subjects and their experiences. It argues that glitch/glitch can help analysts to identify and draw attention to instances where these subjects are able to more fully embody the role of citizen

Social justice implications of smart urban technologies: an intersectional approach

Techno-optimistic visions around smart buildings, homes, cities, grids, healthcare, etc. have become ubiquitous over the past decade. Using variations of machine learning and artificial intelligence, smart urbanism (SU) envisions an efficient, digital society. However, research shows that smart technologies reinscribe inequalities by prioritising the interests of the free market, technology-centric governance and data monetisation. Although there has been a growing concern over the injustices SU perpetuates, there is a lack of systematic engagement with power systems such as capitalism or heterosexism that underpin SU visions. A novel framework is presented that situates intersectional justice at the heart of SU. A mapping of 70 cases of ‘trouble’ with the promises of SU is used to address three core research questions: What are the ‘troubles’ with SU? To what extent are they intersectional? What can intersectionality add to the development of a just SU? The analysis shows how SU politics play out in relation to how users are understood and engaged, how different actors institutionalise SU and how dominant power systems are challenged. The presented strategy contributes to understanding not just the data politics in urban spaces, but also how they can be renegotiated and re-evaluated to solve multiple and interconnected urban crises without compromising on social justice