LOOKING FORWARD : Mainstreaming Engagement

The preceding discussion over the challenges (Section 3.2) and the lessons (Section 4.1) arising in past European ‘Science in Society’ initiatives highlights the major obstacles to efforts to improve processes of communication, engagement and participation in mainstream institutions of science governance. In looking forward, if current efforts at public engagement are to bear fruit, then the crucial challenge concerns the establishment of public engagement as a ‘mainstream’ activity in science governance institutions like DG RTD, and not as a minor niche activity of restricted interest to particular communities of stakeholders or researchers. Discussion at the Seminar focused repeatedly and in a variety of different ways on this important issue. First, a number of substantive principles emerge concerning practical ways to make public engagement initiatives more appealing in their own right to mainstream institutions. Consistent with the discussion in the previous section, it is important, where possible; to prioritise efforts to address issues ‘upstream’ at their earliest stages [R]. Here, though a premium will necessarily be attached to ‘proactive’ initiatives, it is important also to retain an ability to work in ‘reactive’ mode in response to an impetus from other social actors [T]. Either way, practitioners should ensure that sufficient attention is given to developing appropriate contacts and resources concerning the technical substance of the issues in question [R]. They should also be sure to secure appropriate venues for face-to-face engagement, providing the right kind of space to foster neutral, responsible, unconstrained deliberation. In the context of the present seminar, it was suggested that the position of science museums at the science society interface are especially important in this regard [R]. At a more general level, there is considerable scope for establishing measures for training and competence raising among both practitioners and researchers in the field of public engagement [I]. This should feed into the promotion of active support networks for developing more operational frameworks and practical tools for implementing public participation [I]. Finally, there is the importance, as emphasised in the last section, of recognising the difference between processes for ‘taking’ and ‘making’ decisions and policies [I]. Here, a particular role for public engagement lies in ‘opening up’ as well as in ‘closing down’ the field of relevant policy possibilities and issues. Second, there are a series of more overtly strategic considerations that might productively be borne in mind in framing advocacy efforts by protagonists of greater participation. Advocates should look out for opportunities presented by the emergence of high profile ‘crises’ associated with complex issues, intractable conflicts of interest or political unrest [T]. More positive opportunities are presented by the episodic rise to influence of visionary individuals in senior positions, or a (likely temporarily) forced state of openness on the part of key agencies, as a response to ‘crises’ [E]. Such conditions are most favourable when they involve the official recognition of potential threats at an ‘upstream’ stage [T]. As such, these will tend to require a move beyond narrow notions of risk, and towards the addressing of wider social interests and values over the visions, purposes and priorities to which science and innovation are oriented [I][J]. Somewhat more specifically, this requires that the participation community itself act more pluralistically in seeking key allies. Priority should be placed on engaging with those governance actors displaying a conjunction of positive interests in engagement with high levels of influence [R]. In the end, practitioners should remember that public engagement is a long-term process, with responsibilities extending beyond any individual exercise. In particular, there is a need to develop sufficient momentum to carry the process as a whole across short term political attention cycles [R]. This means being willing to spend the necessary effort and resources to think beyond ‘final reports’ – for instance by designing more varied follow-up actions like communications campaigns [T]. Finally, there is the importance of moving outside the niche ghetto of ‘science and society’ research to incorporate elements of public engagement as essential features in the funding cycle for conventional scientific and technological development activities [R]. Some specific suggestions in this regard are addressed below (in Section 4.2.4). In amongst these normative considerations, there inevitably arise a couple of ambiguities and tensions that were also reflected in discussions at the Seminar and so warrant explicit attention here. One such sensitivity concerns the injunction that protagonists of public engagement make efforts to “promote high level expectations” [T] and “emphasise the benefits” of participation in all communications [T]. Although expedient in the short term as a means to foster support for particular initiatives, the lessons discussed above do suggest that some longer term risks may arise from such strategies. These lessons highlighted the need for qualities of realism [F], self reflection and self criticism [I] on the part of advocates of engagement, openly recognising the limits [G] and potential shortcomings [K] of participation and the consequent importance of setting boundaries on the expectations entertained by all participants [N] (see Section 3.2.3). As a result, it seems that the best strategy here is to avoid the impulse to over-claim and concentrate on communicating a reflective, measured and realistic picture of the positive role that can be played by public engagement in different areas of science governance. Another tricky issue concerns the need for care over any alignment on the part of practitioners of engagement with particular sectoral interests. For instance, injunctions were variously expressed at the Seminar to develop particular relationships with private industry [R] and harness any emergent convergences of interest in consort with other social actors [R]. This was illustrated with a rather instrumental metaphor likening public engagement to the priming of a pump, in which a key aim is to ‘channel bottom up enthusiasm’ [T]. This led to specific recommendations that practitioners be at pains to “know the customers business” and to “customise activities for natural allies” [T]. Though potentially expedient in securing sectoral support for a particular exercise, such practices sit rather less easily with more normative democratic views of the role of public engagement. They raise questions over which interests are doing the ‘channelling’ and for whose purposes the ‘pumps are being primed’? Overly urgent or instrumental ambitions to ‘mainstream’ participation can be counterproductive if they prompt ‘short cuts’ in relation to the intractable design issues discussed above (Section 3.1.2). Taken too far, they can raise particular queries over the necessary independence of public engagement, from the interests of ‘customers’ or ‘natural allies’. There are obvious tensions with the contrasting injunctions that were also emphasised at the Seminar, concerning the need to be sure to engage in a symmetrical fashion with a wide diversity of different interests (including a full range government, academic, commercial industry and civil society organisations) [R]. In the end, there is a need for a healthy level of caution, self-criticism and realism. The short term interests of sponsors and practitioners of particular engagement exercises, should be balanced against the long term normative implications of enhanced participatory processes in governance systems as a whole. The Business of Persuasion Following on from this discussion of the underlying substantive basis for ‘mainstreaming’ public engagement in existing governance institutions, there arise a series of more specific presentational issues concerning the communication of a ‘business case’ for participation. Despite the message emphasised above concerning the need to avoid any compromise on fundamental structural principles and normative imperatives in public engagement, there is nonetheless considerable scope for the communication of these activities to be more persuasive in the face of what has already been described as the manifestly sceptical perspective of existing mainstream policy making (Section 3.2.1). Perhaps the most obvious recommendation in this regard, is the need for the public engagement community as a whole to concentrate considerably greater resources than has hitherto been the case on the raising of awareness [O] – especially among senior policy makers [I]. This means getting beyond haphazard interactions with individual decision makers – no matter how influential – and aiming for continuous long term structural engagement with policy making processes as a whole [O]. In order to achieve this, high level policy makers need to be addressed in terms of their own interests and values [I]. This does not necessarily mean adopting these same interests and values in an instrumental fashion (as discussed in the last section). Rather, it is a matter of the effective communication of the wider ‘business case’ for participation – taking seriously and treating with respect the pressing nature of real institutional priorities and constraints [I]. This raises the thorny question of the appropriate role for senior policy makers in the process of engagement itself. As long as their perspectives are treated alongside other stakeholders in a symmetrical fashion, the involvement of decision makers in deliberation over the design of engagement, as well as in the participation itself, need imply no necessary compromise on the independence or pluralism of public engagement [O]. Here, one way to mitigate any possible adverse reaction to the discovery that participation does not simply involve the imposition of their own institutional agenda, is to emphasis the function of participation in ‘opening up’ policy debates. This clarifies the role of engagement as a means to inform the ‘making’ – rather than perform the ‘taking’ – of decisions [O]. One practical way to achieve this is provided by the techniques of scenario workshops, in which governance recommendations are more nuanced and conditional than in more consensus-based approaches [O]. To this end, there is a major need for more systematic and authoritative procedures for monitoring and evaluating participatory exercises and practitioners [I]. The institutionalization of such measures would be a considerable aid to the fostering of greater confidence on the part of potential sponsors, in the professionalism and independence of those involved in public engagement. Recognizing that notions of ‘best practice’ are necessarily specific to particular contexts and perspectives (see Section 3.1.2), there is still much that can be done to develop conditional principles for avoiding some of the more obvious pitfalls, such as those discussed in the previous section [O]. At the most practical level, it is important not to underestimate the importance of the style adopted in reporting participatory exercises. There is scope for this to be much more short, accessible and to the point than is often currently achieved [O]. Even if the detailed reporting must at times necessarily (as in the case of the present exercise!) be quite elaborate, there is always a potential for short executive summaries and popular overviews. In this regard, the value of simple process design has already been mentioned (Section 4.1.4) [N], and this bears additional benefits in terms of more straightforward reporting [O]. In the end, the key challenge in the development of a successful ‘business case’ for public engagement in science governance, lies in the effective communication of the move – documented in this report – from the somewhat introspective and reactive preoccupations of the science and society community themselves, to more open and proactive understandings of the wider science in society imperative in governance more generally [O]. Ends