Making Science Public as a route to better evidence

It is widely accepted that scientific evidence should play a role in policy decisions, yet the form that this should or could take remains subject to intense debate. Warren Pearce and Sujatha Raman discuss how the Making Science Public project attempts to address these questions

Sociotechnical imaginaries of low-carbon waste-energy futures: UK techno-market fixes displacing public accountability

To implement EU climate policy, the UK’s New Labour government (1997–2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promoted technological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy, especially by treating waste as a resource. This framework discursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as visions of feasible and desirable futures available through technoscientific development. According to the dominant imaginary, techno-market fixes stimulate low-carbon technologies by making current centralized systems more resource-efficient (as promoted by industry incumbents). According to the alternative eco-localization imaginary, a shift to low-carbon systems should instead localize resource flows, output uses and institutional responsibility (as promoted by civil society groups). The UK government policy framework gained political authority by accommodating both imaginaries. As we show by drawing on three case studies, the realization of both imaginaries depended on institutional changes and material-economic resources of distinctive kinds. In practice, financial incentives drove technological design towards trajectories that favour the dominant sociotechnical imaginary, while marginalizing the eco-localization imaginary and its environmental benefits. The ecomodernist policy framework relegates responsibility to anonymous markets, thus displacing public accountability of the state and industry. These dynamics indicate the need for STS research on how alternative sociotechnical imaginaries mobilize support for their realization, rather than be absorbed into the dominant imaginary

Making Science Public as a route to better evidence

It is widely accepted that scientific evidence should play a role in policy decisions, yet the form that this should or could take remains subject to intense debate. Warren Pearce and Sujatha Raman discuss how the Making Science Public project attempts to address these questions

Which publics? When? Exploring the policy potential of involving different publics in dialogue around science and technology.

How should we understand ‘the public’ in public dialogue given the dominant assumption within policy-making that the people brought together in these events must constitute a representative sample of the wider population? To improve the prospects for public dialogue and clarify what it can contribute to policy-making, this report explores ‘who or what is the public’ to make better sense of why and when public dialogue is carried out

Antibiotic stewardship and its implications for agricultural animal-human relationships: Insights from an intensive dairy farm in England

The concept of antibiotic stewardship has recently gained prominence in UK and EU policy and practice as part of wider efforts to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture and respond to concerns about antimicrobial resistance. The purpose of the paper is to provide initial insights into what antibiotic stewardship might mean in practice for agricultural animal-human relationships, particularly within intensive systems. We do this by firstly outlining the anticipated implications for agricultural animals by different stakeholders. Secondly, we develop the concept of heterogeneous biosocial collectivities through engagement with the literatures on care and thirdly we apply this concept to one case study (intensive dairy) farm to explore empirically how animal-human relationships are changing in response to antibiotic stewardship. Three on-farm heterogeneous biosocial collectivities are identified, each of which coheres around a particular problem of life associated with distinctive practices of care and antibiotic use resulting in collectivity specific responses to antibiotic stewardship. These collectivities are: the calf collectivity and the problem of immunodeficient life; the milking cow collectivity and the problem of ‘stoic’ life; the dry cow collectivity and the problem of fatigued life. In conclusion we point to: the uneven effects for animal-human relationships of changes in antibiotic use including in particular practices of care and their consequences; an intensification of human control over animals with variable implications for their health and welfare. The analysis raises questions for future research, in particular the need to test the assumption that reducing antibiotic use will stimulate systemic change in intensive animal agriculture towards sustainable, highwelfare, and more extensive systems of production

Can resistant infections be perceptible in UK dairy farming?

This paper interrogates the claim that antimicrobial resistant infections are rarely encountered in animal agriculture. This has been widely reiterated by a range of academic, policy and industry stakeholders in the UK. Further support comes from the Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA) passive clinical surveillance regime, which relies on veterinarians to submit samples for analysis and similarly reports low levels of resistance amongst key animal pathogens. Building on social science work on knowledge-practices of animal health and disease, and insights from emerging literature on non-knowledge or ‘agnotology, we investigate the conditions shaping what is known about antimicrobial-resistant infections on farms. In so doing, we find that how on-farm knowledge is produced about resistant infection is concurrently related to domains of imperceptibility or what cannot be known in the context of current practices.The paper discusses the findings of ethnographic research undertaken on an East Midlands dairy farm which highlight the following specific findings. First, farmers and veterinarians, when observing instances of treatment failure, draw on an experiential repertoire that effaces resistances and instead foregrounds the complexities of host-pathogen interaction, or failings in human behaviour, over pathogen-antibiotic interactions. Second, the knowledge-practices of both farmers and veterinarians, although adept at identifying and diagnosing infectious disease are not equipped to make resistance perceptible. Third, this imperceptibility has implications for antibiotic use practices. Most notably, veterinarians anticipate resistance when making antibiotic choices. However, because of the absence of farm level knowledge of resistance this anticipatory logic is informed through the prevalence of resistance ‘at large’.The analysis has implications for the existing passive resistance surveillance regime operating in the dairy sector, which relies on veterinarians and farmers voluntarily submitting samples for diagnostic and susceptibility testing. In effect this entrenches farm level imperceptibility and effacement by farmers and veterinarians within the national dairy surveillance regime. However, we also highlight opportunities for providing farm specific knowledge of resistance through the anticipatory logic of veterinarians and a more active regime of surveillance

Assessing the journey of technology hype in the field of quantum technology

The 'second quantum revolution' promises new technologies enabled by quantum physics and has been the subject of substantial hype. We show that while creating expectations has helped secure support for quantum research, their iterative effects can come to affect the field in concrete ways. These iterative impacts for quantum include emerging discussions about ethics and the delivery of promised outcomes. Such contestations could open up alternative quantum futures, but this will depend on how the 'hype helix' of iterative expectations unfolds.Die 'zweite Quantenrevolution' verspricht neue, durch Quantenphysik ermöglichte Technologien und hat einen großen Hype ausgelöst. Die durch diesen Hype geweckten Erwartungen haben zu erheblichen Spekulationen und Investitionen von Nationalstaaten und Unternehmen geführt. Wir zeigen, dass das Schüren von Erwartungen zwar die Forschung im Bereich der Quantenphysik vorangebracht hat, ihre iterativen Auswirkungen jedoch auf unerwartete Weise nachwirken können. Es tauchen auch umfassendere Fragen zu Quanten auf, die sich mit Ethik, Energie-Fußabdrücken und unmöglichen Versprechen befassen. Diese Auseinandersetzungen könnten im Prinzip alternative Quantenzukünfte eröffnen, dies wird allerdings davon abhängen, wie sich die 'Hype-Helix' der iterativen Erwartungen entfaltet

Making Science Public as a route to better evidence

It is widely accepted that scientific evidence should play a role in policy decisions, yet the form that this should or could take remains subject to intense debate. Warren Pearce and Sujatha Raman discuss how the Making Science Public project attempts to address these questions

Integrating social and value dimensions into sustainability assessment of lignocellulosic biofuels

The paper clarifies the social and value dimensions for integrated sustainability assessments of lignocellulosic biofuels. We develop a responsible innovation approach, looking at technology impacts and implementation challenges, assumptions and value conflicts influencing how impacts are identified and assessed, and different visions for future development. We identify three distinct value-based visions. From a techno-economic perspective, lignocellulosic biofuels can contribute to energy security with improved GHG implications and fewer sustainability problems than fossil fuels and first-generation biofuels, especially when biomass is domestically sourced. From socio-economic and cultural-economic perspectives, there are concerns about the capacity to support UK- sourced feedstocks in a global agri-economy, difficulties monitoring large-scale supply chains and their potential for distributing impacts unfairly, and tensions between domestic sourcing and established legacies of farming. To respond to these concerns, we identify the potential for moving away from a one-size-fits-all biofuel/biorefinery model to regionally- tailored bioenergy configurations that might lower large-scale uses of land for meat, reduce monocultures and fossil-energy needs of farming and diversify business models. These configurations could explore ways of reconciling some conflicts between food, fuel and feed (by mixing feed crops with lignocellulosic material for fuel, combining livestock grazing with energy crops, or using crops such as miscanthus to manage land that is no longer arable); different bioenergy applications (with on-farm use of feedstocks for heat and power and for commercial biofuel production); and climate change objectives and pressures on farming. Findings are based on stakeholder interviews, literature synthesis and discussions with an expert advisory group

How should land be used?: bioenergy and responsible innovation in agricultural systems

Bioenergy has been proposed as both a problem and a solution for land use conflicts arising at the nexus between food security and environmental conservation. But such assessments need to be considered in light of differences in the way people value the use of land and the facts that are considered or excluded in making such judgements. While technical and policy appraisals of food security favour a target-based approach that considers land as a global resource to be managed in accordance with universal targets and technological innovation for food production and nature conservation, social researchers highlight the need for a context-based approach where considerations of the role of land in people’s everyday lives and its historical and cultural attachments ought to shape interventions. This Chapter highlights the assumptions and value judgements that underpin different visions of how land should be used by opening up conflicting judgements that arise when we position bioenergy in the context of current and future agricultural systems. We develop a ‘responsible innovation’ framework to highlight the fact that there are multiple pathways for any technological intervention. Drawing on research undertaken in the UK, we apply this framework to valuations of land use and biomass in agricultural systems. We identify a number of, often conflicting, value dimensions related to different uses of land (for food, fuel or fodder), to land quality (should marginal land be used for fuel production) and to different uses of biomass (including competition for the use of straw, the use of biomass for on-farm energy generation as opposed to national energy targets, and biomass for large-scale biorefining to meet multiple objectives at the food/fuel/environment nexus). By opening up to scrutiny the assumptions that reinforce particular innovation pathways we were able to look beyond technical innovation in agricultural systems and land use choices to consideration of social innovations that draw attention to alternative visions of land use in agricultural futures