Science and Public Policy, 38(8), October 2011, pages 583–588 DOI: 10.3152/030234211X13122939587653; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/beech/spp
Citizens’ impact on knowledge-intensive policy: introduction to a special issue Erich Griessler, Peter Biegelbauer and Janus Hansen
Citizen participation in terms of participatory technology assessment (PTA) has caused a lot of debate in science and technology policy. However, there are still many open questions: What is the actual impact of PTA on policy-making? On which normative theory of democracy is the evaluation of PTA based and does it make a difference which theory is used? Which framework is appropriate to evaluate the often fuzzy impact of PTA on policy-making? Is PTA actually a central element for policy-making or are other factors much more relevant such as politicians’ involvement or the presence of industry interests? What is the ‘nature’ of the public in different national and institutional contexts? How are expectations of policy-makers played out in the perceived need for regulation? These issues are addressed in a series of comparative papers in this issue which focus on the regulation of xenotransplantation in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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HE PERCEIVED DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT at national and EU levels is a much discussed and lamented policy problem of our times. Citizens, policy-makers and social scientists often call for citizen participation in policy analysis or decision-making for reasons of democratic legitimacy and effectiveness. In the field of science and technology policy calls for increased citizen participation have gained strength over the last two to three decades, in part in response to a series of dramatic public controversies (e.g. nuclear energy, BSE, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and human embryonic stem cell research). Since the 1970s, controversies about societal implications of science and technology have given rise Erich Griessler (corresponding author) and Peter Biegelbauer are at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Stumpergasse 56, 1060 Vienna, Austria; Emails:
[email protected] and
[email protected]; Tel: +43 1 59991 170; Fax: +43 1 59991 191. Janus Hansen is at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Steen Blichers Vej 22, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark; Email:
[email protected]; Tel: +45 38 15 35 46. The project ‘Impact of Citizen Participation on DecisionMaking in a Knowledge Intensive Policy Field’ (CIT-PART, Project Nr. SSH-225327) is funded within the 7th Framework Programme from 2009–2012. We thank the European Commission for their generous support of this research project. For more information see the project website at .
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to the practice and even institutionalisation of technology assessment (TA) in many countries (Van Eijndhoven and Van Est, 2002; Bröchler et al., 1999). TA is a science-based counselling tool, which aims at broadening the knowledge base of political decision-making through an integrated analysis of the possible social, economic and ecological consequences of new technologies. The underlying rationale is that scientific expertise may make political decisions more informed and rational. However, for about 20 years, this expert-oriented approach has prompted criticism on both pragmatic and normative grounds (Joss and Torgersen, 2002: 157). It has become evident that scientific knowledge is fallible and usually incomplete in the face of sophisticated technologies. Simultaneously, it has become clear that modern societies comprise a value plurality, which questions the technocratic ideal that experts can identify the one best solution to societal challenges. Hence, there is a need for broader deliberations on desirable paths of sociotechnical development. One answer to the calls for more citizen participation is to promote various forms of participatory technology assessment (PTA). The normative arguments for PTAs often go hand-in-hand with more pragmatic considerations. On the one hand, PTA has the advantage of taking into account the knowledge of laypeople that is normally beyond the reach of
0302-3427/11/80583-6 US$12.00 Beech Tree Publishing 2011
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Erich Griessler, PhD studied sociology and history at the University of Vienna and the University of Maastricht. He is currently a senior researcher at the Department of Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna and a lecturer at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Business University. He is one of two spokesmen of the Section for Sociology of Science and Technology of the Austrian Sociological Association. His research interests include social studies of science and technology as well as political sociology. He particularly focuses on the development and application of medical biotechnology (genetic testing, human embryonic stem cell research, xenotransplantation) as well as participatory practices in these areas. Peter Biegelbauer is a senior researcher at the Department for Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Vienna and a Master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research work focuses on public policy-making in the fields of research, technology, industry and innovation policy, where he has coordinated several national and international research projects. He teaches policy analysis, comparative political science and political economy at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck and is editor of the Austrian Political Science Journal. Janus Hansen studied sociology at the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD in social and political science from the European University Institute in Florence (2005). He has been at the Department of Business and Politics at Copenhagen Business School since 2006, and is currently an associate professor of sociology. His research interests include the interplay between science, politics and public debate in a comparative perspective. His most recent, major publication in this area is Biotechnology and Public Engagement in Europe (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
experts. This concerns the definition of problems and issues to be investigated (whereby perceptions may vary, e.g. along gender lines and socioeconomic group affiliation), the inclusion of local knowledge, the identification of opportunities and risks involved in a given technology, and the elaboration of innovative solutions. Thus, participation is claimed to increase the analytical depth of TA. On the other hand, the inclusion of affected persons may also facilitate public acceptance of decisions on technology policy (European Commission, 2001). PTAs are thus procedures whereby not only knowledge, but also legitimacy and trust can be created. There is a rich literature on PTA in various countries and also a number of overviews on different PTA methods (Grunwald, 2002; Allen et al., 2003; Bora and Abels, 2004). PTA practices in different technologies have frequently been evaluated at a national scale, in international comparisons (Joss and Belucci, 2002; Hansen, 2010) and in European projects such as ADAPTA (Joly and Assouline, 2001), PESTO (Jamison and Østby, 1997: 1998), EUROPTA (Joss and Belucci, 2002), PARADYS (Bora and Hausendorf, 2004), PATH (2005) and TAMI (Decker and Ladikas, 2004). Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic evaluation of PTA procedures. In particular, with a few exceptions (Einsiedel et al., 2001), there are no studies that systematically contrast PTA procedures in different countries on one
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and the same topic, and no studies that compare processes and the impact of classical expert TA and PTA on one and the same topic. This special issue of Science and Public Policy sets out to fill this critical research gap by drawing on the initial results of the EU funded research project ‘Impact of Citizen Participation on DecisionMaking in a Knowledge Intensive Policy Field’. The main research goal of CIT-PART is to answer the following questions: What is the actual impact of PTA – as one approach to promote citizen involvement and democratic ownership – on decision-making processes? In which ways are PTA processes more or less effective with regards to their impact on decisionmaking compared with expert-based TA processes? In order to address these questions we selected the case of xenotransplantation (XTP). XTP is the transplantation of cells, tissues, or organs from one species to another. It is a medical intervention whose scientific basis and practical application are currently the subject of worldwide research. As with many technological and scientific advances, XTP offers opportunities but it also entails risks and ethical problems. It emerged as a major policy issue during the 1990s and the early 2000s in many countries and international organisations on the basis that, while it might offer a significant means to reduce the shortage of implantable organs currently observed in many countries, it also posed the risk that known or unknown viruses in the so-called ‘source animals’ might infect the human recipients and possibly spread to the population at large, thus causing, in the worst case, a pandemic of yet unknown diseases. Some other questions connected with XTP which were discussed worldwide include: Taking into account religious beliefs and/or ethical convictions, is it acceptable to use animals as ‘sources’ of organs, cells, or tissues for human beings? Would it be tolerable to limit the individual freedom of patients and of their relatives (e.g. by quarantine, monitoring) in order to control the risk of zoonotic infection? Does XTP imply a ‘transgression’ of the barrier between species and how is this to be evaluated? What effect would XTP have on the patients’ identities? In summary, XTP shares many of the characteristics of new technologies, in particular biotechnology, which give rise to public controversy and challenge standard practices of decision-making (Van Eijndhoven and Van Est, 2002). Since the 1990s many European countries have debated whether to stop or to proceed with XTP research, but the issue was also on the agenda of the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the
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XTP is an excellent case with which to study the potential and limits of citizen participation with regard to policy problems which are complex, knowledge-intensive, controversial and pose a challenge for national and international politics
WHO and the OECD. These debates differed considerably with regards to intensity, strength of controversy, issues raised, participants involved and conclusions drawn. National governments in the EU and elsewhere, the European Commission and international organisations used different TA and PTA procedures, advisory boards and consultative bodies to evaluate XTP and to deal with the policy problems it gives rise to. Countries differ with regard to the policies taken towards XTP. Although, for example, some countries allow XTP research under certain conditions, others banned clinical research involving humans. This policy process seems to be completed for the moment. The case of XTP thus provides an excellent example with which to study the potential and limits of citizen participation with regard to policy problems which are complex, knowledge-intensive, controversial and pose a challenge for national, European and international politics. To facilitate such analysis the CIT-PART team carried out in-depth case studies on XTP policy formation in 11 different countries (Austria, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Latvia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA) as well as the OECD and the EU. The papers in this issue The six papers included in this issue all take advantage of the potential for comparisons across the CIT-PART case studies. They address different dimensions of the questions outlined above regarding the prospects of, and limitations on, public participation in the regulation of complex technologies. They build on existing research in this field, but also seek to go beyond this literature in important ways, which we will briefly outline in the following discussion. Biegelbauer and Hansen address the question of how normative theories of democracy can be used to evaluate the different modes and intensities of public participation. This is not a novel problem in research on PTA. However, Biegelbauer and Hansen suggest that most of the literature on PTAs relies on deliberative and participatory models of democracy as critical standards. They contrast these assumptions with
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a more mainstream, representative ideal of democracy and show how different democratic ideals install different standards for PTAs. Based on this conceptual discussion, they formulate two sets of normative criteria to classify the CIT-PART cases. The empirical findings show two things in particular. First, the criteria derived from deliberative/participatory understandings of democracy are more difficult to redeem in actual PTA procedures and policy practices than the representative ideals. Second, while much of the literature on PTA focuses on the procedural quality of PTAs, the much discussed question of impacts from such procedures is likely to depend as much on the democratic tradition and institutional practices of existing policy-making institutions as on the internal quality of the PTA procedures. Loeber et al. address the question of evaluating a PTA’s impact. Conceptually and methodologically, the issue of identifying the impact poses complicated issues. The existing literature is characterised by a distinction between what the authors term a first generation of impact assessment studies that analyse a PTAs impact on the state as a bounded unit of political decision-making, and a second generation that includes a wider range of effects and sites in the evaluation. Empirically, in either instance, few convincing examples are found of strong, direct impacts of PTA procedures on actual policy-making. The authors consequently argue for a ‘third generation’ of assessment studies, which feature a process-oriented perspective on the question of impact. Building on the ‘politics of contention’ approach suggested by McAdam et al. (2001) Loeber et al. suggest that such an assessment focuses on how a PTA presents an additional space for contestation, in which relationships between actor-networks on a certain topic as well as problem definitions and technological options may shape up, evolve and change. The concepts offered by McAdam et al. to capture such dynamics (among them diffusion of policy ideas and problem framings, brokerage between different actor constellations, and certification of particular actors) are used to map the dynamics of three cases of PTA: a public debate on XTP in the Netherlands, a consensus conference on XTP in Switzerland and a consensus conference on genetic testing in Austria. Hansen and Allansdottir offer a methodological contribution to the debate about the impacts from PTAs. They note that the literature on PTA impacts contains very little systematic, comparative work spanning more than a few cases, due to the high level of complexity and contingency involved in PTA procedures. However, Hansen and Allansdottir argue that qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can serve as an important methodological stepping stone between in-depth inquiries into one or a few case studies and large-N statistical surveys. They apply the QCA methodology to 11 cases of policy-making on XTP in an attempt to establish common determinants of policy outcomes across the CIT-PART cases. They find that in none of the cases do the PTA
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procedures seem to play any direct, causal role in determining the resulting regulatory frameworks. Instead, the co-occurrence of the factors ‘politicisation’, indicating whether the issue of XTP has been dealt with by politicians or has been delegated to the bureaucratic level, as well as an index of ‘public vigilance’ gauging the level of public concern are the most decisive factors in the introduction of restrictive policies on XTP. On the other hand, less restrictive policies are the result of these factors not being present, as well as the presence of a strong industry interest in XTP. In discussions about public engagement with science and technology the exact nature of ‘the public’ to be engaged is often unclear. A distinction is sometimes drawn between an ‘organised’ stakeholder public, which is assumed to be knowledgeable, but also likely to be biased by partisan interests, and a ‘general’ public, which is presumably unbiased, but not very knowledgeable. In their contribution Einsiedel et al. question the feasibility of this distinction and argue that the configuration of particular publics is usually much more context-dependent and institutionally embedded. This calls for greater attention to the contingencies of the framing of ‘the public’ and what ‘participation’ actually means in practice. This argument is elaborated in a comparison between the role admitted to ‘the public’ in the regulatory debates on XTP in the US, the UK and Canada. The cases share a cultural heritage involving a strong commitment to expert systems in science-based regulatory issues, which is increasingly challenged by demands for greater public involvement. Yet, despite these similarities the framing of ‘the public’ differed significantly, leading to very different regulatory processes and outcomes across the three cases. The question regarding the nature of ‘the public’ that might or might not participate in policy-making around novel biotechnologies is also the topic of the contribution by Hansson et al. They suggest that the public is not a constant entity, but is shaped by the surrounding institutional and cultural context, which may change ‘the public’s’ access to policy-making arenas over time. Hansson et al. focus on how different publics or different sections of the public are included and excluded from debates at different times. Powerful stakeholders such as scientists and political decision-makers ascribe different meanings and roles to ‘the public’, thus in effect producing different positions from which concerns can be voiced, but also producing silences and exclusions from the platforms of public articulation. This argument is developed through a comparative study on the regulation of XTP in Sweden and Latvia. The comparison adds to the picture of the diversity of circumstances in which public engagement with biomedical research is played out. The final paper focuses upon the temporal dimensions of regulation and explores how these shape the possibilities of public deliberation concerning
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technoscience via a detailed analysis of the development of XTP policy in the UK. Beynon-Jones and Brown describe three phases of UK policy-making on this issue and illustrate how each exemplifies a process of short-term decision-making essentially guided by narratives being generated by scientific entrepreneurs. The authors conclude by utilising cross-cultural contrast to underscore the distinctive short-term, reactive dynamics of the UK policy process, and argue that this system of ‘reflex regulation’ both perpetuates institutional amnesia regarding the complex long-term dynamics of biomedical research and effectively precludes thorough public deliberation on contested issues in biomedicine. Cross-cutting issues and outstanding questions Traditionally, government experts and civil servants have played an important role in science and technology policy. By way of contrast, the involvement of the public is a more infrequent and rather recent affair. By and large, the contributions to this issue confirm this pattern for the regulation of XTP. Yet the contributions also show other things. First, whilst experts are more likely to be heard by policy-makers than the public, this neither means that they are going to be asked for advice, nor that their suggestions will be followed. This was the case in countries where XTP did not become a politically sensitive issue. Latvia, Italy and Austria are examples of societies without public debates on this topic, and where it seems that neither experts nor the public were given a voice. Hence, the absence of participation by the public does not necessarily mean that the experts rule, but rather that policies are formulated in haphazard ways, if at all. An important issue raised in two papers relates to the nature and functions of the public. Einsiedel et al. and Hansson et al. both look more closely at the term and at the role of ‘the public’. In the literature on public participation the public indeed is often treated as a given and equipped with the potential to be active and critical. However, the public does not
The public does not exist in a vacuum, but it is part of the power relationships making up a society. It can therefore be effectively silenced in many situations: the shorter and less developed that traditions of societal debates are in a country, the more effective the silencing strategies
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exist in a vacuum of social relations, but it is part of the power relationships making up a society. It can therefore be effectively silenced in many situations: the shorter and less developed that traditions of societal debates are in a country, the more effective silencing strategies are. Additionally, the public is often portrayed as monolithic or as falling into the categories of a general public and the special publics of stakeholder organisations, with the former being impartial and its participation in decision-making processes therefore often being more highly valued. Looking more closely at several cases of regulating XTP, it turns out that neither the public as such, nor the general public, is monolithic – and neither of them are impartial. For example, a comparison of animal rights groups, which in several countries were important in decision-making on XTP, shows how much the specific context of policy-making influences the makeup of the public and the relevance of different specialist publics. The two papers provide important insights into how the embedding in variable, existing social structures fundamentally shapes the ability of different publics to exert influence on policymaking. Most papers deal in one way or another with the processes of and procedures used for decisionmaking. When read together, the papers vividly illustrate the historical contingencies of policymaking. Most cases analysed in this issue follow the path laid out by previous decision-making processes in knowledge-intensive policy problems. This most clearly becomes the case with the three countries employing public participation exercises for the regulation of XTP: Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland. At the time of decision-making, in the early 2000s, all three countries had a rich history of public participation in policy-making. The antecedents of the current Swiss direct democratic political system reach back several hundred years, with the basis for more modern direct democratic instruments being set in the mid-19th century. In Canada there is a decades-long tradition of setting up Royal Commissions with expert and stakeholder participation. In the 1970s the decision of one such expert commission was overturned for the first time by the public through consultation exercises. In the Netherlands a first PTA was held in the mid-1980s, on nuclear energy. And, in addition to the example of XTP regulation described here, all three countries have also gone on to use PTAs to address subsequent policy issues. This illustrates how public involvement in policy-making is more likely to take place in systems which have used instruments of public participation than in systems which have not. This is not to say that path dependencies cannot be overcome or that they alone can explain a policy outcome, but nevertheless they are an important factor in understanding policy-making. All the papers deal with the difficult question of impact. Previous research on public participation has
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shown that the concept of impact can easily be defined too narrowly to frame the effects of PTAs on the political system (Hennen et al., 2004). Thus Hansen and Allansdottir turn the question about the impact of PTA around. They analyse which factors were necessary in order to lead to either restrictive or permissive regulations on XTP. Biegelbauer and Hansen propose a new framework for evaluating the processes and outcomes of TAs and PTAs, utilising criteria from several forms of democratic theories. Loeber et al. tackle the problem head-on and suggest a new way of thinking about impact, which is broader and more encompassing than previous research, but which nevertheless can be operationalised in research due to its structured nature. None of the papers deliver final answers to the question of impacts, but taken together they present a rich resource for further research on this important topic. Another issue discussed in several papers is the question of time as a factor in policy-making. The topic comes up in terms of the question of when the regulation of science and technology should set in and when public discussions on knowledge-intensive policy problems should start. Beynon-Jones and Brown analyse the timing of the debates leading to regulation as well as policy-making activities themselves. They highlight the way in which the rapid growth and collapse of the expectations being promulgated by the UK biotechnology industry structured the hurried formation, and subsequent disbandment, of a specialised regulatory body on XTP in the UK. These rapid policy dynamics stand in stark contrast to cases such as Canada and the Netherlands, where policy-making took a far less reactive and much more gradual approach which created the time necessary for public deliberation to take place. Time plays also a role in the question of learning in policy-making. In a number of countries, including the three cases in which PTAs were conducted as part of the regulation of XTP, public participation exercises became more frequent over the course of the period 2000–2010, signifying an institutionalisation process for PTAs in this time span. In the case of Canada the public participation measures on XTP were the first of their kind using several regional exercises, including aboriginal Canadians – a format utilised frequently since then. In the UK public engagement instruments of various sorts have become standard practice for science and technology policymaking after the policy blunders of BSE and GMOs. In several countries, including Canada and Denmark, previous experiences with biotechnology led to the urge to have a closer look at XTP, at an earlier point in time of technology development than was the case with GMOs. These observations raise the question of whether or not there has been learning from experience in policy-making regarding the way in which decision-making takes place in science and technology policy. A closely related issue is the question of the diffusion of XTP regulation at an international level. We
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know that, within a relatively short time span, a number of countries had developed regulations on XTP, but did they learn from each other’s experiences during this process? And if the answer is yes, then through which avenues did they learn? While the cases analysed in this issue focus on national processes, the next steps in the CIT-PART project will involve tracing the trans-national circulation of policy frames, procedures of public participation and regulatory tools. Another topic of interest will be to look at how different societies deal with the distinction between animals and humans and which institutions they fashion in order to come to grips with innovations such as XTP, which challenge traditional understandings of the boundaries between species. Finally, we will take a closer look at how the public is co-constructed in different countries, by whom and with which objectives. As the CIT-PART project once more shows, comparative research is an effective approach with which to question deeply embedded cultural assumptions about science, politics and public participation.
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