I’m on the train leaving Arc-et-Senans, heading back to Paris to fly home. After four days of boundary-crossing conversation – linguistic, cultural, disciplinary – the IHEST summer school has left me pleasantly exhausted, with many conversations to continue.
Further conversation with IHEST affiliates is going to require further assistance in the language department, so maybe I’ll have to finally take French lessons after all. I was a little perplexed to hear from several French scholars that they don’t intend to have their books translated into English. One philosopher who is fully conversant with the Anglo-American literature in his field, and whose books I would love to read, explained that he’s satisfied with sticking to a francophone audience. That sounds nice, in a way, but I still wish I could read his books.
There is certainly a lot to read and do and talk about. Among other topics, the IHEST affiliates are deeply involved with questions of public involvement in sociotechnical controversies, even more than I expected. I’ll devote the rest of this post to a few more thoughts on the matter.
On Friday afternoon, in addition to introducing his nano-bear Benny, Jamey Wetmore gave a candid account of his work on a 2008 citizens’ forum on nanotechnology. It produced some useful results, he said, but it also cost a lot of time and money, and it did not attract much public attention.
Compare that to “the Dien Bien Phu of science and society,” which is what one speaker called the 2009 nano debate in Grenoble. As Jamey wrote earlier this week, environmental groups opposed to nanotechnology disrupted many of the deliberative forums organized by the French National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP). The speaker said the situation in Grenoble was even worse than a public dialog he helped organize long ago on nuclear power, when protesters with baseball bats initially disrupted the meeting, but then ended up participating in three hours of debate leading to some practical proposals. In Grenoble, as we saw in a vivid documentary film shown Friday afternoon, they just shut it down.
But consider this: if you had to choose, would you rather be shut down in Grenoble or ignored in Arizona? As Jamey pointed out, even though the protests were disruptive, they at least showed that the topic was stimulating public interest.
The need to generate more public interest for debates on science and society was emphasized by other speakers as well. One presenter explained that the Royal Society of the UK, which conducted its first “technology assessment” of the King’s forests in 1662, has become increasingly interested in moving beyond one-shot public engagement exercises like citizen juries. In the coming years, she said, the Royal Society plans on promoting more ongoing forms of public engagement, in part by enlisting a wider range of civil society organizations than in the past.
Rinie van Est of the Rathenau Institute in the Netherlands said they’ve been doing that for 25 years. They do not try to control or “organize” public debate on sociotechnical issues, but to foster a space for public debate outside of formal decisionmaking processes. They think of public debate as occurring at the intersection of science, society, and politics. He talked about promoting a network conception of public debate, facilitating diverse kinds of input from diverse sources. What’s the point of involving lay citizens, he asked, if government bodies, civil society groups, social and technical experts, and the mass media are not also involved?
He asked me later how the Rathenau Institute’s approach fit with the notion of democratic representation outlined in my book. I said it sounded like he could have written it.
About the Author: Mark Brown is a CSPO affiliate and is an associate professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy.
