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Vision Statement
CSPO Vision Statement
How can science and technology most effectively contribute to an
improved quality of life for the greatest number of people?
This is the organizing question for the Consortium for Science, Policy,
& Outcomes (CSPO). The Consortium is devoted to enhancing the capacity
of public policy to link scientific research to beneficial societal
outcomes.
The Consortium creates knowledge, cultivates public discourse, and
fosters policies to help decision makers and institutions grapple with
the immense power and importance of science and technology as society
charts a course for the future.
Introduction
Man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the
brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages. We can turn rivers
in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Oceans and land and sky
are avenues for our colossal commerce. Disease diminishes and life
lengthens. Yet the promise of this life is imperiled by the very genius
that has made it possible. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create,
and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities.
Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to
erase human life from this planet. – President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Science and technology (S&T) have become the most powerful transforming
forces in society, allowing people to escape fundamental need; fostering
innovation and economic growth; fighting scourges like smallpox, polio,
and AIDS; and joining billions of people together in information and
communication networks that serve democracy as well as commerce. But the
profound changes brought about by S&T have led as well to negative
impacts–often unanticipated. From the industrial revolution to the
information revolution, the march of scientific and technological
progress has left in its wake unemployment, cultural dislocation,
economic inequity, environmental destruction, even war and disease.
Just as science and technology affect our world, they are affected by
public policy decisions about how research funds are allocated,
priorities established, the research enterprise organized, knowledge
communicated and applied, and accountability maintained. Policy
decisions influence the societal consequences–the outcomes–of scientific
research in realms as diverse as the economy, the environment, health,
governance, national security, and social structure.
While it is clear that S&T contribute to large scale societal
transformations, our current understanding of how they do so is
inadequate, and this leaves us unprepared for the task of planning for
the future. Today, decision makers lack the tools necessary to plan for,
respond to, and integrate into public policy the dynamo of S&T progress
that continually reshapes our world.
Our incomplete understanding of the impacts and effects of S&T leads to
such paradoxical outcomes as AIDS drugs that work in post-industrial
cultures but are thus far largely irrelevant to the developing world due
to challenges of cost and distribution, and genetically modified crops
that have the potential to boost nutrition and agricultural productivity
but are fiercely opposed on cultural and environmental grounds.
Our lack of understanding also results in disparities between science
goals and achievements. In the U.S. and abroad, much publicly funded
science is explicitly promoted and justified in terms of the quest for
specified societal outcomes, such as those listed in the table below.
The enormous challenge of using science to contribute to such desired
outcomes rests upon the ability to implement appropriate science
policies.
Desired Societal Outcomes Promoted by National Science
Agencies
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Increase quality and years of healthy life. Eliminate health
disparities. (US Health and Human Services Department)
-
Ensure a safe and affordable food supply. (US Agriculture
Department)
-
Foster a reliable energy system that is environmentally and
economically sustainable. (US Energy Department)
-
Reduce the impacts of hazards caused by natural processes and
human actions. (US Interior Department)
-
Conserve and manage wisely the Nation's coastal and marine
resources to ensure sustainable economic opportunities. (National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
-
Improve the health of the European population. (European Union
BIOMED 2 Program)
While the existing science enterprise includes highly
effective mechanisms for judging the quality of science itself, there
are few mechanisms aimed at understanding and assessing the linkages
between scientific activities and desired outcomes. Such assessment
processes are necessary to ensure progress toward goals. Growing demand
for accountability can be recognized in Congressional action (e.g., the
Government Performance and Results Act) and in public advocacy and
activism (e.g., controversies over stem cell technologies, genetically
modified organisms, and environmental regulations).
CSPO is the only intellectual center dedicated to understanding
the linkages between S&T and its effects on society, and to developing
knowledge and tools that can more effectively connect progress in S&T to
progress toward desired societal outcomes. The Center draws on
the intellectual resources of Arizona State University and other
institutions for the scholarly foundation to assess and foster
outcome-based policies across a broad portfolio of publicly funded
scientific research. The Center's core commitment is to generating
useable knowledge for real-world decision making.
Lessons
Science and technology are demonstrably objective and effective; but
they're unquestionably bound up with power relations as social systems.
– Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
Federal science policy since World War II has been dominated by the idea
that more science automatically generates better societal outcomes. But
connections between scientific advance and societal outcomes are complex
and often surprising. Consider the following examples:
Desired outcomes can drive science: For 50 years, the goal
of materials research in the U.S. has been to produce smaller and faster
devices for advanced military use. Desired outcomes were visualized in
military terms alone, and focused on durability, radiation protection,
and other specialized attributes. The military definition of the problem
drove the science toward sophisticated silicon-based, high temperature
materials with tremendous capacity for miniaturization. We committed to
this path and remain on it, without having considered if it is optimal
for a broader set of outcomes, such as environmental sustainability or
electrical efficiency. Similarly, in the 1960s the world set out to
increase agricultural productivity, and scientific research gave us the
Green Revolution. But research agendas did not consider environmental,
cultural, or socioeconomic impacts, and so the same research
breakthroughs that helped to feed the world also led to environment
degradation and the destabilization of small farming communities world
wide. CSPO will help decision makers craft research agendas that respond
to the broadest possible range of desired societal outcomes.
The societal value of new knowledge is determined by how it is
used, and by whom: Consider the consequences of advances in
atmospheric science that now allow the effects of El Niño to be
predicted up to a year in advance. In Peru, for example, industrial
fisheries used El Niño forecasts to track the migration of fish. The
result was economic gain combined with more serious depletion of fish
populations. Moreover, while companies that owned large fishing vessels
could take advantage of the forecasts, local fishing communities could
not. The forecasts thus undermined sustainability and magnified
inequity. Again, the difficulty comes from a narrow definition of the
problem that did not include consideration of social context, and thus
did not lead to desired societal outcomes. No one asked what type of
climate research would best contribute to sustainability and social
equity. CSPO asks such questions.
The definition of the problem helps determine the relevance of the
research: Combating AIDS requires more than an understanding of
the virus. Yet our research program on AIDS began with a narrow,
biomedical definition of the problem. Because of that definition,
society now is unable to help most of the tens of millions of AIDS
patients throughout the world: the remarkable drugs created by
biomedical research to slow the course of the disease are so costly that
they are available only to a tiny fraction of AIDS sufferers. Fifteen
years ago, if we had envisioned AIDS as a problem of socioeconomics,
culture, and globalization, we could have developed a very different
science policy agenda. Combating the virus would have been one part of a
comprehensive approach that also would have addressed distribution
systems, intellectual property, and human behavior. Our current science
policy precluded such a broad perspective. CSPO will work to encourage
policy makers and scientists to include societal context in the
definition of scientific problems.
These examples have important implications for policy design. The
materials science story indicates that choice of science objectives in
the short term can constrain our options in the long term. The case of
climate forecasting shows that knowledge about the potential users of
information can help determine what types of information would be most
broadly beneficial. The history of AIDS research suggests that
integrating societal context into the definition of research problems
can amplify the benefits of the research results.
A New Approach
We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no
control, no brakes. – Bill Joy, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Sun
Microsystems
Despite the formative influence of S&T on the character and quality of
modern life, there has been no institution devoted to understanding and
enhancing the connections between the advance of science and technology,
and the achievement of desired societal outcomes. The Consortium for
Science, Policy, & Outcomes represents a first step toward filling this
vacuum. The Consortium aims to foster new knowledge, public discourse,
and policy formulation to help decision makers grapple with the immense
power and importance of S&T as democratic society seeks to chart a
course for the future.
How is it that a force of such overwhelming power and significance–the
transforming power of scientific and technological advance–could be so
neglected in the realm of public policy? The most important reason lies
in the pervasive assumption that more knowledge and innovation lead
directly and automatically to desired societal outcomes. In reality, S&T
makes its way into society through institutions, enterprises, and other
social structures that are themselves changed by the course of
scientific progress. This is an entirely dynamic system, complex and
nonlinear in its essence.
There are uncommon opportunities now to harness the synergy between
science and public policy to address contemporary development issues
such as the growing divide between rich and poor, the feminization of
poverty, overpopulation, [and] climate change. –
M.S. Swaminathan,
"Father of the Green Revolution," 1999 Volvo Environmental Prize
Laureate
Until now, our policy regarding S&T was focused almost exclusively on
increasing the supply of knowledge and innovation. This system has led
to disconnects between scientific progress and societal progress:
spectacular advances in biomedical research in the U.S. have been
paralleled by skyrocketing health care costs, expanding inequity in
access to health care, and mediocre levels of public health. Similarly,
astonishing gains in information and communications technologies have
been accompanied by declining educational achievement and stagnant
levels of public awareness of issues of political, scientific, and
cultural import. While science is not the cause of such problems,
outcome-based science policies could make science a more effective
contributor to their solution.
Historically, society has been content to react to the complexities
created by advances in S&T as they arose. Yet the acceleration of
scientific and technological progress increasingly renders such a
laissez-faire approach untenable. The potential of such fields as
information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to transform
society in a very short time challenges our ability to understand and
shape our common destiny. There is an urgent need for open discourse and
creative thinking to avoid the reaction, backlash, and disruption that
can compromise both technological promise and civil society. The
Consortium for Science, Policy, & Outcomes was created to address this
need.
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