Public engagement and nanotechnology in the UK: restoring trust or ...

Science and Public Policy, 38(10), December 2011, pages 783–793 DOI: 10.3152/030234211X13070021633440; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/beech/spp

Public engagement and nanotechnology in the UK: restoring trust or building robustness? Christopher Groves

Concerns about the social sustainability of emerging technologies are identified as a motivation behind recent interest in public engagement as a mode of formal technology assessment, nanoscale science and technology (NST) being a key example. Two rival understandings of engagement as a contribution to social sustainability, namely ‘restoring trust’ and ‘building robustness’ are identified. These different approaches are analysed as strategic responses to the politics of uncertainty in technological societies, each reflecting different assumptions about how to domesticate an intrinsically uncertain future. Government-sponsored experiments with upstream engagement around NST in the UK were surrounded by rhetoric concerning the need to build robustness into how nanotechnologies develop. It is argued, however, that assumptions held by policy and business actors about the strategic value of narratives of restoring trust, together with deeply embedded assumptions about how technological innovation creates the future, tended to place obstacles in the way of turning this aspiration into reality.

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N DISCUSSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY, the amount of attention paid to concepts of social sustainability, often phrased, for instance, in terms of ‘maintaining social capital’ (Goodland, 2001), is often lower than that paid to its ecological counterpart. By social sustainability is meant a quality that inheres both in individual capabilities (health, education, skills etc.) and communal relationships (trust, solidarity etc.), and which facilitates collective action towards improving general wellbeing and equity. Recent public policy interest in public unease about science and technology reflects broader questions about the social sustainability (or otherwise) of technological societies, and what social factors may be responsible for this unease. The emergence of NST has been accompanied by promises of radical, even revolutionary benefits. It has also been accompanied by affirmations from

Christopher Groves is at the ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3AT, UK: Email: grovesc1@ cf.ac.uk; Tel: (0)2920 876 562; Fax: (0)2920 876 061. This paper is based on research funded by the UK Government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA, Project Code CB0417) and by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Science and Public Policy December 2011

both industry and policy-makers that whether or not NST is viewed as a socially legitimate technology may play a crucial role in shaping the viability and development of its future applications. Both private and public bodies have sought ways to address early on questions about, on the one hand, the many unknowns which surround the potential health and environmental impacts of NST, and on the other, about the wider impacts of what have been framed as its ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) (National Science and Technology Council, 2007: 20). The social sustainability of NST, and science and technology more generally, may be taken to depend on trust, given the dependence, in technological societies, of non-experts on specialist expertise. An appropriate response may therefore be understood as ‘restoring trust in science’ (House of Lords, 2000). However, to restore trust assumes a narrative in which an obstacle – public distrust – has accidentally arisen due to failures in communication between science and society. These obstacles need to be corrected in order to return society to a supposedly preexisting condition of consensual trust in science (Wynne, 2006). Alternatively, we might imagine the conditions of the social legitimacy and sustainability of NST in quite different terms. Technological innovation brings with it multiple forms of uncertainty. If we

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Public engagement and nanotechnology in the UK

Chris Groves has a degree in philosophy and sociology (University of York, UK), an MA in philosophy and social theory (University of Warwick, UK), and a PhD in philosophy (University of Warwick). In 2005 he became a research associate at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. His work focuses on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future. Along with the ethical and political implications of a range of future-oriented discourses and practices (e.g. risk management, precautionary regulation, building resilience), he examines how our ideas about what it means for individuals and societies to take responsibility for their futures are being changed by emerging technologies. His monograph Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill, 2007), coauthored with Barbara Adam, examines these themes in depth.

accept this, society should perhaps recognise that applied scientific knowledge is, at best, uncommonly reliable and socially robust rather than absolutely objective, and that trust in it is therefore always provisionally achieved and vulnerable to erosion. One way of establishing the ‘social robustness’ of science is to involve all the public and private institutions active within technological innovation in discussion with other stakeholders, including publics, over the social value of technologies. Proponents of this approach sometimes justify it on the basis of a consequentialist ethical position in which the ‘democratisation’ of technology is seen to produce indirect benefits, helping us: … to derive greater public benefit from new technologies. (Stilgoe, 2007: 18) Though superficially similar, this position should be distinguished from a political argument for building robustness, i.e. that the democratic governance of technology may revive democratic politics itself in the form of ‘technological citizenship’ (e.g. Winner, 1995). In the UK, the New Labour administration of 1997–2010 promoted such forms of discussion about NST as ‘upstream engagement’ (Dorbeck-Jung, 2007: 263). Proponents of upstream engagement in the UK saw it as enabling an approach to ELSI issues that did not simply relegate them to ‘an obligatory footnote to nanotechnology’s technological promise’ (Stilgoe, 2007: 16). However, experiments with public engagement in the period 2005–2007 ran into obstacles. On the one hand, they failed to explore concrete ways in which engagement could have determinate impact on innovation processes. On the other hand, they failed to adequately develop genuinely multi-stakeholder fora, due to the very marginal role accorded to private industry. Subsequently, policy interpretations of upstream engagement in the context of NST have sought to domesticate it, once again, within discourses of ‘restoring trust’, rather than ‘building robustness’. In this paper, I explore and analyse these issues as examples of what, after Marris (1996), I call the 784

‘politics of uncertainty’. I begin in the first half of the paper by outlining a specific analytical approach to the connection between innovation and the politics of uncertainty. This concerns how the framing, interpretation, management and production of uncertainty are central to social practice, and particularly to the governance of technological innovation. I show how the narratives of ‘restoring trust’ and ‘building robustness’ rest on different constructions of the politics of uncertainty. As such, they project different relationships with the future, and support different practical strategies for domesticating uncertainty in the present. These strategies, in turn, have distinct effects on inequalities of power created by the social production of risk and uncertainty. In the second half of the paper, I explore how the 2005–2007 UK experiments with public engagement can be understood in the light of this distinction between different strategies for managing uncertainty, before using it to interpret new data on attitudes in the UK NST industry to public engagement. I argue that experiences with public engagement on NST in the UK show that there the key obstacles faced by a ‘building robustness’ approach are deep, normative assumptions about how the relationship between present and future should be conceived, resulting in strategic orientations towards uncertainty which are as deeply embedded in public institutions as they are in industry. My analysis thus details the social–structural basis for the institutional constraints in industry and government which limit the scope and impact of public engagement: … such as wider policy drivers, the priorities of senior management, and the appreciation within these groups of the usefulness of involving members of the public in their work. (Jones et al., 2006: 4) Analytical perspectives: the politics of uncertainty In this section, I introduce two concepts: first, that of a future horizon, which describes the kinds of consistency that exist between future-regarding knowledge-practices, forms of action, and ethical

The connection between innovation and the politics of uncertainty concerns the framing, interpretation, management and production of uncertainty, which are central to social practice, and particularly to the governance of technological innovation



perspectives here in the present; and second, (after Marris, 1996) that of strategies for domesticating uncertainty, conceived of as ways of building concrete future-regarding perspectives that reflect particular future horizons, and, in the process, provide legitimation for policies and programmes of action in the present. I will then explore how these concepts enable us to understand conflicting positions regarding the governance of technological innovation. Some of the roots of contemporary technological societies have been traced to ancient Greek conceptions of the need to master natural contingencies that expose humankind to a condition of scarcity and uncertainty, and subject it to the ‘realm of necessity’ and fatality (Arendt, 1998). Francis Bacon’s aim of ‘restoring perfection’ to the world (Ovitt Jr., 1987) relied on improving humanity’s knowledge of natural laws to the point where it was possible to remodel nature and humanity itself through the technological application of science, in the process freeing human beings from their dependence upon unpredictable nature. Baconian representations of the relationship between humanity and nature, as represented in 17th century natural philosophy, were gradually transformed into 18th and 19th century visions of the future as open terrain for human progress, in which human nature and the ‘second nature’ of culture are gradually incorporated into an expanding realm of malleable ‘natural’ material (Adam and Groves, 2007; Groves, 2007). This involves a re-visioning of the future as such, in which new forms of knowledge, ways of coordinating social action, and reflections on the meaning of moral justification in a rationalistic world come together to construct the future differently to the forms it took in, for instance, pre-Christian and pre-Enlightenment cultures. In short, what people expected of the future changed radically. The organisation of social practice increasingly reflected the goal of material progress, supported by new intellectual foundations that represented the maximisation of measurable benefits as the criterion of social progress. These same foundations, provided by positivistic sociology and the emerging discipline of economics, set out what were thought to be the immutable laws according to which these benefits could be realised and efficiently distributed throughout societies. The horizon against which the future was projected in the 19th century and into the 20th was no longer the abstract, mechanical future of natural philosophy, nor even the open, humanistic–teleological future of collective political action conceived in the 18th century, but an empty future, a frontier of progress continually crossed by commodification, rational economic planning, and sociologically informed political intervention: a terra nullius open for colonisation and control (Adam and Groves, 2007: 72–75). Against the background of an empty future horizon, particular relationships between forms of knowledge, modes of action, and normative principles coalesced, reshaping in the process a variety of


institutions and practices. The future was captured and commodified thanks to the consistency between naturalistic and mathematical ways of representing social laws, bureaucratic forms of management and individualistic conceptions of property rights, and the positing of utilitarian conceptions of the good as the measure of socially justifiable rationality. The performance of quantification and rituals of objectivity become an inescapable part of the legitimation of social authority, crowding out in the process other forms of authority and modes of justification, including expressly political ones (Porter, 1995). As an empty futures perspective became more ubiquitous as a source of legitimation, particular forms of practical strategy became more important as tools for actors to domesticate uncertainties surrounding their own futures. The practical correlate of an empty futures horizon is generally what Marris has called a strategic preference for autonomy (Marris, 1996: 90), that is, for flexibility, freedom of action, for putting off commitment for as long as possible, and for the capture of resources which enable actors to control contingencies which surround them, by for example, capitalising on one’s authority to coerce or persuade others into committing themselves to particular courses of action first. The competitive, individualistic, short-term orientation which characterises a strategy of autonomy is nonetheless complemented by the apparently antithetical naturalistic and even deterministic character of an empty future horizon. The pursuit of quantification, objectivity, efficiency and long-term predictability promised by an empty future horizon provides the most secure armature possible for strategies of autonomy. Throughout the 20th century, however, conflicts between the empty future horizon of the present and the practical strategies which tend to accompany it have continually been played out. The well-worn theme of the collapse of faith in assumptions about the inevitability of social progress is reflected in critiques of the role of technology in creating negative, unintended and unmanageable consequences (Beck, 1992). The 20th century extended the scope of an empty future horizon to encompass global visions of endless technologically assisted transformation and development (Barbrook, 2007; Edwards, 1996; Gilman, 2007). Yet the increased pervasiveness of forms of rationality based on technological logics of efficiency was accompanied by the emergence of technology posited as an ‘other’ to modernity, a naturalised technology (Nordmann, 2005). This placed in question the key assumption behind the brand of technological determinism which often accompanies an empty future horizon, i.e. that the pursuit of efficiency, understood as the immanent imperative of technological progress, determines the overall utility enjoyed by members of a society (Feenberg, 1999: 77). Technology began to be represented as a source of new uncertainty, taking on the form of a resurrected, implacable ‘nature’. Whereas the exposure to non-human nature which the Baconian

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worldview wanted to overcome threatened uncertainty in the form of unforeseen and uncontrollable scarcities of material goods, exposure to naturalised technology offered, alongside material progress, new unforeseeable and uncontrollable hazards (Beck, 1992). For Beck, social responses to this condition are characterised by reflexivity, i.e. trying to cognitively anticipate and manage the unwished-for consequences of the development and deployment of technologies. It is the experience of technology as ‘other’ which makes it possible for it either to be (‘on reflection’) trusted or not. Reflexivity can thus take a ‘first-order’ form, interpreting the experiences of ‘otherness’ as an interruption to the control and colonisation of the future. The aim here is to restore trust in technology, to domesticate it by demonstrating that its inherent risks are subject to rational management. As the history of institutional responses to the hazards of nuclear technology shows (Welsh, 2000; Wynne, 1982), technological rationality gradually extends itself to encompass the control of naturalised technology. To do this, it employs formalised methods of hazard characterisation, risk assessment, and risk management, subject to the same kind of efficiency and utility-based metrics as technological instruments in general. In this way, reflexivity takes on a form shaped by an empty future. Risks are defined as determinate, free-floating objects to be either accepted (when balanced against expected benefits), or controlled and reduced. ‘Objective’ risk assessment thus continues the project of technological control, extending it to cover the unwanted products of naturalised technology itself. The goal of technological progress is reasserted, in the sense that technologies of risk management are expected, with enough research effort, to reduce our exposure to naturalised technology. Uncertainty, in this sense, is represented as being ultimately reducible to known risk (Groves, 2009), given enough time and research. With first-order reflexivity, the consistency of an empty future horizon, and the value of strategies of autonomy are both re-affirmed. Objective risk assessment and management continue to legitimate short-term-oriented actions by specifying a small region of the future as worthy of interest, bracketing off as insignificant interactions which are assumed to be too complex to understand or simply not prioritised as worthy of investigation (Wynne, 1992). In this way, they externalise both hazards and insecurity. By enabling those with access to the relevant expertise to make socially legitimate decisions faster, these practices coerce others into bearing the consequences of risks that the risk-takers now accept as worth taking. In addition to this ‘first-order’ form of reflexivity, another form has nonetheless emerged: one which, as we shall see, operates with a different strategic focus. Instead of reflecting on the potential downstream causal impacts of developing or deploying a

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technology, this approach aims to institutionalise ‘second-order’ reflection on the priorities and purposes which shape innovation (van de Poel and Zwart, 2010). Guiding this approach is a view of science and technology which both acknowledges the inherent, emergent vulnerabilities of the Baconian technological project, and conceptualises uncertainty in terms which acknowledge its internally differentiated nature and complexity. This form of reflexivity has been influenced by both sociological analyses of the institutional basis of science, and epistemological reflections on the vulnerability of scientific knowledge. From the sociological side, the supposed autonomy of science, and the deterministic understanding of technology which often goes with it, are denied. Instead, the emerging historical reality of science in technological societies is interpreted as one in which even basic research is increasingly shaped by implicit and explicit social priorities, creating ‘post-academic’ science (Ziman, 2000: 74–79), increasingly dependent on both government and industry funding. As a result of these new, tighter dependencies, post-academic science increasingly becomes strategic, concerned to consolidate research around those technologies which are expected to hold the most future social and commercial promise (van Lente and Rip, 1998). Rather than being absolutely objective, postacademic science is expected to be, at best, uncommonly reliable. This recognises that scientific knowledge, together with the development and use of technologies, face ineradicable uncertainties, born of ontological complexity as well as temporary gaps in knowledge (Tannert et al., 2007). Facing uncertainty in this sense, it is necessary to aim not only for reliability, but also for robustness. By robustness is meant the outcome of a kind of second-order reflection which exposes, through mechanisms of public debate and assessment, the background priorities which typically help shape technological innovation (such as, for example, the creation of new forms of intellectual property which bolster the economic power of multinational companies). Whether the complex uncertainties and risks which may be associated with new technologies are ethically acceptable or not cannot be settled without reflecting on these priorities and their wider social significance. The aim of second-order reflection is thus to expose and address deeper normative uncertainties (Hansson, 1996) relevant to the governance of innovation. These might include, for example, how far one should extend into the future the scope of one’s assessments, what kinds of values (rights, care, welfare, utility) should inform decisions taken in the face of uncertainty and ignorance, who (and where and when) should benefit from the outcome of decisions, and as a consequence of these kinds of deliberations, whether some kinds of risks are simply unacceptable on the basis of agreed values. What this perspective proposes is therefore a process of ‘extended peer review’, undertaken with adequate



institutional support, in which the wider impacts and social significance of ‘post-normal’ science and technological innovation, and the normative and pragmatic uncertainties which enter into decisionmaking (Hennen, 1999: 307–308; Ravetz, 2004) are subjected to assessment. The experience of post-academic, post-normal science reflected in second-order reflexivity is that scientific expertise cannot settle the kinds of inherently normative (ethical and political) questions to which technological innovation gives rise. To address them requires not faster analysis and more flexibility on the part of social actors, but better, more inclusive and more careful deliberation. By way of illustration, I offer here some examples of how the different kinds of reflexivity discussed above have been reflected in different forms of institutional technology assessment (TA), comparing the kind of approach taken by the now-defunct Office for Technology Assessment (OTA) in the USA with TA programmes in Europe. The methodologies employed in OTA processes, it has been argued (e.g. Shrader-Frechette, 1980), typically based themselves upon theoretical assumptions that were taken as representing a commitment to objectivity but which, in reality, represented a particular set of value judgements about what constitutes rational behaviour (i.e. utility maximisation) in the face of uncertainty (Harsanyi, 1975). This approach interpreted assessment relatively linearly as an expert-led process downstream of relatively autonomous innovation processes. TA is framed as a one-off, a bureaucratic stage in the innovation process in which legitimacy, understood in terms of a form of certification, is achieved. In Europe, by contrast, the history of TA implementation has featured wider acknowledgement of the inherent social ambivalence of technologies and has typically acknowledged the presence of deep controversies about the purposes behind technological innovation (Mohr, 1999). Crucially, a key component of this tradition of TA has been reflection on how to widen participation, using methods like consensus conferences and citizens’ juries. Practices of participatory TA can be seen as attempts to build into the assessment of technologies both levels of reflexivity discussed above, including both reflection on the best way to solve a pre-given problem without exposing society to unwanted hazards, but also including reflection on the background assumptions which make a social problem appear to demand a purely technological solution (Sarewitz and Nelson, 2008; van de Poel and Zwart, 2010: 180–183). Such processes are often conceived of as extended and iterative, and positioned alongside the innovation process. These kinds of processes do not, importantly, construct the future as a terrain of endless progress, imagined either in terms of the perfect control of nature, or of the perfect control of the risks of naturalised technology. Deliberation may well lead to better


foresight and insights which reduce or prevent risks, but their main goal is to build robustness – that is, to build into technological innovation practices and decision-making processes which take into account wider social priorities and values. As a result, TA which manifests second-order reflexivity affirms that social progress with the aid of technology is possible. But it simultaneously affirms that the design and development of technologies is inescapably imbued with value-orientations that reflect particular interests. As a result, it aims at the democratisation of technology, not in the sense that anyone’s opinion of the risks or potential benefits of a technology is equally valid, but that robust technologies can only be developed by having their ‘social constitution’ (Grove-White et al., 2000) thoroughly tested. This can only be done in a deliberative environment that recognises both the ‘objective’ uncertainties (what kinds of hazards? how likely are they to eventually happen?) that may be associated with them, and the ‘subjective’, normative uncertainties to which they give rise. Technologies may facilitate progress, but the goal of second-order reflexivity in the TA process is to establish what kind of progress, and in whose interests. Instead of seeking to control uncertainty through strategies which aim to reduce it to ‘known risk’, building robustness aims to produce forms of technology which are explicitly embedded in different ways of domesticating uncertainty. I argued above that empty futures are reflected in practical strategies oriented towards autonomy. Second-order reflexivity, and the institutions that support it, are oriented away from flexibility and short-termism, and towards reciprocal commitment, towards what Marris calls a strategy of ‘reciprocity’ or solidarity (Marris, 1996: 154). As part of such a strategy, actors acknowledge their mutual reliance, and the value of action oriented towards cooperation. Such a strategy aims to reduce insecurity (not risk), making uncertainty liveable by framing it against a background of reciprocally binding arrangements that create reliable expectations, increasing security and confidence in the process. Strategies of reciprocity strive to articulate a different kind of future horizon, one which actively acknowledges in representation and in practice the future as, not empty, but living and latent in the here and now, and as demanding care rather than competitive striving for maximum benefit (Adam and Groves, 2011). Where first-order reflexivity tends to reinforce the linearity which characterises an empty future horizon and the characteristic ways of imaging the future constructed around it, second-order reflexivity in TA may encourage strategies of reciprocity that can counteract simple linearity. Reflexivity of this kind is iterative, accompanying innovation rather than being a single stage on the way to commercialisation. Politically, they aim to restrict and rein in strategies of autonomy and their tendency to externalise hazards and insecurity, and also to concretise innovation

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in ways which contribute to the realisation of shared priorities in the face of perhaps insuperable uncertainties. Importantly, a strategy of reciprocity does not appeal to a general ‘ethical’ conception for its justification, even if this is to: … derive greater public benefit from new technologies. (Stilgoe, 2007: 17) Instead, it aims to recognise that technologies are, like other social phenomena, embedded in interdependencies that have constitutive value for society (Adam and Groves, 2011: 22–23). As the social relations between scientific institutions, on the one hand, and business and public authorities on the other, tend to be guided by competitive strategies of autonomy, emerging ‘radical’ technologies (like biotechnology and NST) tend to be inherently disruptive of these constitutive relationships. This consideration points towards a political justification for strategies of reciprocity. They can help to concretise technologies through processes of social assessment, building in legitimacy along the way by increasing commitments on the part of economically powerful and politically influential actors to address agreed needs and wider social priorities. Thus social assessment of technology is not simply about ventilating a plurality of values (Hennen, 1999), but ultimately concerned with investigating and intervening within seemingly ‘intransigent’ (Wynne, 2007: 100) political relations that are buttressed by the relationships between technologies and the ways in which social actors orient themselves towards the future. NST public engagement in the UK: future horizons and strategies The framing of public engagement experiments in policy circles associated with the UK’s New Labour administration of 1997–2010, as noted in the first section of this paper, positioned engagement upstream in the innovation process, before any concretisation of applications had taken place, precisely in order to expose and reflect on the values, priorities, and power relationships built into the systems of innovation in which NST is embedded. This kind of approach is quite distinct from other approaches to ELSI in biotechnology and nanotechnology, which are often viewed as a kind of social certification for a technology or its applications, making this topic a kind of ‘footnote’ to the innovation process (Stilgoe, 2007: 16). As such, the rhetoric in which the plans for engagement were cast seemed to point towards just the kind of second-order reflexivity described above. The case for using this kind of approach was built on the gradual penetration into policy discourse (House of Lords, 2000) of critiques of the deficit model of science communication (Wynne, 1991). In this model, the goal of talking to non-experts about science and technology is seen as

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Public attitudes towards technologies should be interpreted as assessments of how far researchers, regulators and industry can be trusted to be honest about the uncertainty surrounding possible risks, and how capable they are of managing these

overcoming a lack of understanding, trust, or perhaps even enthusiasm (Kearnes and Wynne, 2007). These critiques of the deficit model made several points which appear supportive of a central role for second-order reflexivity and for strategies of reciprocity in TA. First, public attitudes towards technologies should be interpreted as assessments of how far researchers, regulators and industry can be trusted to be honest about the extent of scientific uncertainty surrounding possible risks, and to be capable of managing these, should any be realised (Grove-White et al., 2000: 29; RS/RAEng, 2004: 61–62; Walls et al., 2005: 648; Pidgeon et al., 2009: 96–97). Second, public judgements about the promise of a technology often depend on other judgements about its social constitution, rather than simply on some more or less wellinformed weighing-up of downstream risks and benefits (Kearnes et al., 2006: 55–56). Further, assuming that ‘fear of the unknown’ can most effectively be overcome by an appeal to rationality on the basis of the expected benefits to consumers of technologies can, some suggest, be counter-productive. Grove-White et al. (2000, 32–34) argue that such an attitude implies a further assumption that ‘the public’ can best be represented as a multitude of isolated consumers of goods and services, rather than people who are embedded within a multitude of relationships in which they play a variety of roles, including that of citizens. Appealing to them as self-interested individuals in this sense can, in some circumstances, exacerbate mistrust rather than removing it. In the rest of this paper, I outline some lessons of the UK NST public engagement experiments in the period 2005–2007 for future attempts to institute the kinds of social TA discussed in the previous section. I argue that these experiments were unable to overcome limitations which, despite their stated goals, locked them into an empty future horizon and into narratives of ‘restoring trust’. Among these limitations was their failure to achieve the kind of genuinely pluralistic, multi-stakeholder approach required to support strategies of reciprocity, evidenced in their widespread failure to include representatives from industry. However, perhaps this failure is not surprising. Drawing on data from a study conducted



by Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) at Cardiff University on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the NST industry, I outline some assumptions among industry actors regarding public engagement which both reinforce an empty future horizon, and tend to mandate strategies of autonomy in the present. The construction of social TA around strategies of reciprocity will need to directly challenge these kinds of assumptions alongside the practical and organisational limitations which reinforce empty future horizons and strategies of autonomy within public institutions. Government-sponsored experiments with engagement

The importance of second-order reflection and public involvement in TA for NST was affirmed by the RS/RAEng report (RS/RAEng, 2004). The report saw an ideal opportunity with NST for public dialogue to begin early on in the innovation process – a theme which was also present (explicitly as ‘upstream’ engagement) in other strategic government documents at the time (e.g. H M Treasury, 2004: 105). The RS/RAEng report mentioned three additional criteria that public engagement would need to meet, which stressed that engagement should ideally contribute increased reflexivity to innovation processes: Second, dialogue is not useful in and of itself, but has to be designed around specific objectives […] Third, at least some form of commitment from the sponsor (typically government or some other agency) to take account of outcomes is required when commissioning dialogue processes […] Fourth, stakeholder and public dialogue should be properly integrated with other processes of TA for nanotechnologies, as and when they occur. (RS/RAEng, 2004: 65) The report noted that the purpose of engagement should be to improve decision-making in the face of uncertainty and to ‘build public value’ into NST, rather than simply being to educate, or to ‘restore trust’. The UK Government’s response in 2005 to the RS/RAEng report covered a number of topics touching on scientific uncertainty. On the role of upstream public dialogue, it was stated that such dialogue could: …explore the acceptable uses of new technologies, and processes whereby the outcomes of dialogue help to shape the policies introduced by Government. (UK Government, 2005b: 7) Subsequently, several programmes of public engagement activities were sponsored as part of the Government’s Outline Programme for Public


Engagement on Nanotechnologies (OPPEN). Nanotechnology, Risk and Sustainability was led by Lancaster University and Demos, and examined just what form such engagement exercises might usefully take (Wilsdon, 2004: 21). Two schemes were directly funded by the government under Sciencewise: a suite of engagement activities known as Nanodialogues, and the Nanotechnology Engagement Group (NEG), which was set up to help government understand current practices of public engagement, and to help shape ongoing and future activities. The government-administered Copus scheme supported a programme known as SmallTalk. These activities were all intended to run for two years, from late 2005 to 2007. As well as committing itself to principles of transparency concerning the goals and outcomes of engagement, and to ‘timeliness’ in conducting it, the government’s response to the RS/RAEng report contained declarations of principle related directly to the institutional and policy context within which public engagement would be undertaken, and to a set of expectations concerning the outcomes and policy impact of the exercises. Each activity would have to: … be clear in its purposes and objectives from the outset. (UK Government, 2005a: 7) and … feed into public policy – with commitment and buy-in from policy actors. (UK Government, 2005a: 7) A further principle introduced an important qualification. Exercises should: Be clear about the extent to which participants will be able to influence outcomes. Dialogue will be focussed on informing, rather than determining policy and decisions. (UK Government 2005a: 8, emphasis added) Once some of the proposed activities had been set up and had been running for some time, the members of the NEG submitted evidence in 2006 to a review undertaken by the government’s advisory body, the Council on Science and Technology (CST). This report pointed out that engagement activities were running into problems in trying to live up to the various commitments made by the government in 2005 in response to the RS/RAEng report. The NEG related these problems to the text of the 2005 outline programme itself, noting a lack of clarity of purpose in its stated objectives (Jones et al., 2006). In March 2007, the CST’s review of progress on public engagement concluded that there were significant problems with how the engagement exercises had been designed, particularly because they did not offer an adequate range of opportunities for two-way dialogue, and also because there was an absence of

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clear paths through which outputs might feed into policy. There had also, to date, been few opportunities for industry representatives to participate in the exercises. Concerns were expressed, in addition, about the short life of the public engagement process. No initiatives had been sketched out to continue dialogue in coming years, as NST applications continued to emerge (CST, 2007: 35). The findings of this review were reflected in some of the conclusions later reached by the NEG themselves in their final report on the two-year programme of engagement (Gavelin et al., 2007). The lack of clear connections between policy and engagement was noted, deriving, it was suggested, from a failure to set out from the beginning a clear strategic vision for what the programme of activities might achieve (Gavelin et al., 2007: 99). Another drawback was that public institutions had not made clear, formal commitments to respond to the outcomes of engagement exercises, and to indicate how these outcomes might influence (or not influence) policy (Gavelin et al., 2007: 101). Overall, and despite some positive findings, we might characterise the NEG’s report as indicating that, at the very least, more thought was required on how to successfully integrate the process and outputs of public engagement into the institutional networks of strategic science. A similar view was later articulated in 2008, by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) (RCEP 2008: 8). It recommended that, instead of concentrating on one-off engagement activities, iterative and sustained activities should be supported, which it framed as ‘continual ‘social intelligence’ gathering’ (RCEP, 2008: 73). The RCEP concurred with the NEG on the need to ensure that institutions would: … make intelligent and transparent use of the findings, especially if the latter raise fundamental questions about the direction and development of innovation. (RCEP 2008: 75) Industry attitudes

A study undertaken by BRASS at Cardiff University (Groves et al., 2011), examined attitudes among UK companies involved in nanotechnology towards stakeholder and public engagement, using 15 semistructured interviews with company representatives. Wider engagement with specific constituencies within ‘the public’ or simply with ‘the public’ as such was widely seen as problematic, for a variety of reasons. A deficit within public understandings of science, the danger of redundancy of communication should too many companies take part on an uncoordinated basis, a view that the responsibility for engagement lay elsewhere than with companies themselves, and the lack of any reliably mediating institutions to facilitate communication were all cited in justification. The high degree of differentiation within industry sectors involved with NST was also

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seen as an obstacle. These problems tended to lead interviewees towards three conclusions. First, wider public engagement was thought to produce benefits for the NST industry as a whole, if conducted properly by responsible mediating institutions. Little benefit, however, was thought to flow to individual companies involved in it. Secondly, wider public engagement was largely interpreted as meaning public education. This, interviewees suggested, should be undertaken to: (a) inform the public about the diversity of nanotechnologies; and (b) to inform them about the balance of risks and benefits expected for different specific applications on the basis of current scientific knowledge – a view reflected by a recent report from Materials UK, the industry body (Materials UK, 2010), where one of the findings of a survey of NST companies is reported as being that respondents saw a key engagement priority as to: … provid[e] the public with a balanced picture of the true risks and advantages of nanotechnology. (Materials UK, 2010: 7) Those companies BRASS interviewed who had themselves been most involved with wider public engagement were involved with cosmetics and healthcare products, and saw education focused on products as an essential way of differentiating these products from ‘nanotechnology’, interpreted as a risky emerging technology, stressing the wellestablished, even familiar nature of the nanomaterials (such as nanoscale titanium dioxide) used in their products. Thirdly, the commercial success of products was seen as, in general, a more reliable mechanism for generating public trust than public engagement. Two companies cited the example of mobile phones as an instance of a technology where persistent uncertainties about possible health effects had been overcome by consumers’ faith in benefits, and contrasted this example with genetically modified foods, where no such consumer benefits had been visible. The future social acceptance of NST was therefore seen as being dependent upon the rational self-interest of

Future social acceptance of nanotechnology was seen to depend on the rational self-interest of consumers, with public concerns about corporate interests and how they may induce irresponsible behaviour only arising in the absence of obvious consumer benefits



consumers, with public concerns about corporate interests and how they may induce irresponsible behaviour only arising in the absence of obvious consumer benefits.

regard to the future role of citizens in respect to science and technology, it is hoped they will be:

Discussion

Two suggestive but vague remarks open a quickly closed window on a different vision of public engagement: engagement should offer:

The difference between the two models of social sustainability introduced at the beginning of this paper (‘restoring trust’ and ‘building robustness’) was analysed above as reflecting different practical strategies for the domestication of uncertainty, along with contrasting future horizons that underlie and support such strategies. The empirical material introduced above suggests that industry attitudes towards public engagement tend to be shaped by deeply embedded assumptions. On the basis of these assumptions, actors construct engagement as part of a broadly linear and even deterministic understanding of the relationship between technological innovation and society at large. Engagement is presented as a mechanism for restoring trust in ‘objective’ approaches to risk analysis. It aims at educating nonexperts in order to overcome deficits of knowledge and trust, and to reduce business risks that may result from the reactions of an uninformed public. For their part, UK government experiments with public engagement have suffered from crucial limitations in their attempts to develop examples of good practice for building robustness, and to enhance institutional supports for such practice. The key reason, as suggested by the CST and NEG reviews of progress, and by the comments of some lay participants in the exercises themselves, appears to have been the lack of clear objectives, and of firm commitments on the part of policy-makers to incorporate outputs from engagement into innovation policy. In addition, it should be noted that recent government publications have continued to reinforce the kind of assumptions that appear to be held in industry. The 2008 consultation document on the Government’s new ‘science and society’ strategy began by acknowledging that the deficit model of science communication had been unsuccessful, and that: …there is a demand from the public for more consultation on scientific issues. (UK Government, 2008: 12) Nonetheless, the goals of ‘high-quality engagement’ are presented as being to create a society ‘excited by and valuing science’ and that ‘is confident in the use of science’. Engagement extends to encouraging scientists to: … explain why they are doing what they are doing (UK Government, 2008: 15) but not to encouraging reflection and even criticism of the purposes which shape their activities. With


… confident consumer[s] of science and technology. (UK Government, 2008: 27)

… the opportunity to play a relevant part in making the best possible decisions for public policy through engagement with science (UK Government 2008: 20) and that technological development should be: … informed by an understanding of the public’s aspirations and concerns around Science. (UK Government, 2008: 33) But nowhere in the document is any significant use made of the evidence that emerged from the experiments with engagement on NST, which showed how foundational assumptions within policy institutions about the nature of innovation prevent engagement from developing structures and processes needed to advance second-order reflexivity. In this respect, the 2008 document directly reflected the discourse of trust-building developed four years earlier (Treasury/DTI/DES, 2004), in which the goals of engagement are represented as being to ‘establish and maintain public confidence in’ science and technology (Treasury/DTI/DES, 2004: 108). The traditional deficit model of science communication in policy discourse may have been under attack, but a new one may also have emerged, in which a lack of confidence and trust among the public became seen as a potential obstruction to the continuing course of innovation. The goal of restoring trust therefore became linked to a more affectively oriented discourse of producing what Kearnes and Wynne (2007) refer to as ‘rational enthusiasm’. Even though engagement was increasingly pictured as beginning ‘upstream’, this shift was seen as being of value mainly as a means of effectively building positive affective responses that would lead to support for developments which governmental foresight exercises had already registered as being ‘on the horizon’, and as inevitable – to be ‘prepared for’. The 2004 RS/RAEng report, as noted previously, mapped out a position largely in support of secondorder reflexivity and building an institutional basis for what the 2008 RCEP report later called continual ‘social intelligence gathering’ on NST. Nonetheless, neither these strategic recommendations, nor the findings of the NEG and CST reports on the positive and negative aspects of the NST engagement programmes have been reflected in key government strategic documents, including the 2010 Nanotechnology Strategy document (UK Government, 2010),

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in which goals for any future engagement activities were listed as to improve: … public understanding of the benefits which nanotechnologies currently hold and … (to create public) confidence that sufficient risk assessments are taking place by companies. (UK Government, 2010: 16) For their part, industry actors (as evidenced by the BRASS interviews and documents such as the Materials UK report) continue to interpret engagement from the viewpoint of a strategy of autonomy, in which flexibility of investment (both financial and in terms of broader capacity) is key. By contrast, making commitments to participate in more deliberative forms of social TA is deprecated as bringing additional business risk (including a ‘head over the parapet’ effect which some industry actors anticipate might result from the mere fact of participating in engagement activities). Despite acknowledging the need to move beyond deficit models of science communication, the government’s own strategic approach has continued to move in harmony with this viewpoint, reflecting a shared empty futures perspective. Its ideal environment for innovation is projected as one of predictability, where the engagement goal of restoring trust is increasingly promoted using mechanistic discourses. In these discourses, engagement is represented as a conduit for transmitting positive affect and thus for building enthusiasm for what are seen as inevitable future technological developments. Conclusion We began with a contrast between two visions of social sustainability. One sees technology and expertise as threatened by dynamics of distrust that disrupt what is imagined as a pre-existing condition of consensual trust in the promises of science. The other sees technology as inherently disruptive of the possibility of consensus, and as requiring new participatory processes to build, in the face of uncertainty, reciprocal commitments around agreed values and priorities between social actors. The policy discourse employed in the government publications discussed in the previous section, however, supports the ‘restore trust’ vision of social sustainability, in a particularly emphatic way. In mirroring the assumptions evident in the industry viewpoints discussed above, it allows an image of strategic effectiveness to be projected, without requiring policy professionals to reduce their own flexibility by making the kinds of commitments that would be required by a strategy of reciprocity. Such a strategy would require institutional transparency about the kinds of

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decision-making processes and links between technology policy and innovation that would be needed to promote ‘commitment and buy-in from policy actors’ (UK Government, 2005a: 7) with regard to the concrete outcomes of systematic and ongoing public engagement, and to thus establish the kinds of expectations necessary to build reciprocity between the institutions involved in innovation, on the one hand, and wider society on the other. I would argue that future work on exploring different forms of public engagement needs to move forward in tandem with research which challenges the strategies for managing uncertainty which prevail in industry and government, continuing to question the taken-forgranted nature of what I have called an empty future perspective. One starting point for such work would be to investigate the concrete: … conditions necessary for participatory TA to be translated in the techno-policy process. (Joly and Kaufmann, 2008: 235) As noted previously, the strategic domestication of uncertainty is a political issue. It concerns the control of resources for defining and living with uncertainties, and in the case of technologies, how the social constitution of technologies affects this political issue of control. Whilst the UK experience with upstream engagement around NST may have included positive developments, such as creating new forms of dialogue between scientists and lay people, it is clear from surveys of industry attitudes, together with the UK policy discourses that now frame official conceptions of the relationship between science and society, that it has had relatively little effect in shifting deeply held assumptions within government about the ways in which innovation determines the future and shapes social progress. Projected against this future horizon, short-term practical strategies for dealing with uncertainty continue to represent the public as a risk (Groves, 2010) to both the viability of industry and to the contribution that emerging technologies can make to the social good. In this context, it is not enough to view genuinely participatory engagement as a means of ‘adding value’ to technological innovation. Rather, it should be conceived of as a constitutive part of a democratic rewriting of the contract between strategic technoscience and society.

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