On the weakness of strong ties
By Maja Horst
To be published in Public Understanding of Science as part of a section on ‘20 years of PUS’.
The timing was slightly awkward when the Danish government in April 2012 hosted a conference on ’Science in Dialogue’ as part of the Danish presidency of the European Union. The ambition of the conference was to generate ideas for how the EU could advance a framework of Responsible Research and Innovation as an integrated part of European research efforts. However, five months previously, the government had announced that it would terminate funding for the Danish Board of Technology as part of a political deal to generate more resources for the universities. Founded in 1986 through legislation that mandated a Danish body for technology assessment[i], the Board has been internationally acclaimed for its participatory formats, especially the participatory consensus conference (Klüwer 1995). Against this background, the decision to stop government funding of the Board in late-2011 came as a surprise for people within the field. Nevertheless, as a government official told me[ii], the decision was not primarily directed at closing the Board of Technology. It was a decision to find resources for a different priority and in this trade-off the Board came out on the losing side.
To non-Danes in the field of Public Engagement with Science this all sounded very strange. As an American delegate at the Science in Dialogue conference argued in a plenary session, it seemed like the Danes had forgotten their own heritage. To him and other delegates it was almost a form of sacrilege to close this symbol of Danish participatory democracy. How could the Danes for the sake of saving less than 1 million Euros close an institution which represents a powerful tradition of democracy, dialogue, inclusion and engagement?
In order to understand this, a reality check might be in order. The Danish Board of Technology has existed for more than 25 years. For most of this time, it has experienced a struggle for resources to sustain widespread participatory technology assessment and public engagement with science (Lassen, 2004; Mejlgaard, 2009). The Board’s trademark activity, the participatory consensus conference, has not been enacted since 2005 due to lack of funding, and many Danes don’t know what the Board is. In short, the Board is more celebrated internationally than it is at home. And it is celebrated internationally only among particular groups.
There are many probable explanations for this situation, but I will offer one hypothesis with potentially wide implications. The lack of interest or active support among the Danish public might be an unanticipated consequence of the Board’s successful institutionalization. One could refer to this – with apologies to Granovetter (1973) - as ‘the weakness of strong ties’. By institutionalization I mean that the Board has been legally mandated to organize participatory technology assessment in order to support the policy process and that they have been operating under the oversight of a parliamentary committee. My point is that this institutional integration also serves as a way of ‘taming’ the unruly potential of public interest and protest. Given that there exists a body with the specific task of democratizing science and technology, other social actors might experience less necessity to fight for this political goal. It is certainly the case that the lively public debate about the need for democratic discussion of science and emerging technologies, which existed in the 1970s and 1980s, lost momentum after the institutionalization of the Board of Technology and also another advisory body, the Council of Ethics (Lund & Horst, 1999). Perhaps the Danish public simply directed its attention elsewhere, once there was an institutionalized solution?
Although my hypothesis might appear counter-intuitive, it is well worth reflecting upon in a situation where PUS scholars routinely argue for a greater integration of engagement activities as a normalized part of policy making. It might be that the fragility which is inherent in a situation of non-institutionalization is a powerful source of urgency and action and a driver for engagement activities to have effects. Once the engagement activities have been integrated into policy making as a normalized part, they risk losing some of their critical ability with respect to democratic and social change.
This, however, is not to argue that the Board of Technology has been anything other than very important in the last decades of public engagement with science and technology in Denmark. First and foremost, it has served as a platform for dialogues between many different voices, which would not otherwise have come into contact with one another (Blok, 2007; Jensen, 2005). As has been demonstrated by many of the case studies of engagement activities published by Public Understanding of Science during the last two decades, the process of engaging in dialogue outside one’s normal circles has the potential to open new avenues of understanding and inquiry (Einsiedel, 2002; Lezaun & Soneryd, 2007). Crucially, it is not just a learning experience for the non-experts who participate in these processes. Engagement activities also serve the important function of demonstrating to scientists and policy makers that non-experts can have thoughtful and at times provocative reflections on scientific and technological issues. Engagement processes can therefore familiarize scientists with other types of actors and arguments and pave the way for a positive process of democratic discussion.
A fundamental point in this context is that the engagement exercises are not simply instrumental means to an end of reaching policy recommendations regarding specific areas of science and technology. They are also about enactment of our own identity as democratic nations in which we strive for social cohesion and dialogue (Horst & Irwin, 2010). We therefore have to regard the process of dialogue as more important than the outcome in terms of recommendations or possible consensus statements. The Danes have a long tradition of questioning expertise and arguing with each other in order to try to reach an understanding of the life to be led in common. It is important that this ‘consensus culture’ (Horst & Irwin 2010) does not imply that Danes agree on the proper uses and democratic regulation of science and technology. In Danish controversies over such issues it is usually the case that what some see as a step forward towards a better future, others see as badly disguised efforts to manipulate the public into accepting technoscientific pathways favored by dominant powers of business and government. However, the implicit common territory of these controversies is that the aim is to debate in order to reach some kind of mutual understanding (Horst, 2010).
It was upon this cultural foundation that the Board of Technology was established. At the same time, it can be said to have been an important instantiation of this culture, because it has provided fora for debate and interaction. However, precisely because it is part of a normal or recognizable way of doing things, the Board might not have seemed very special to the Danish publics – to the extent that they have paid attention to its existence. Perhaps Danes reading about a particular consensus conference in the newspaper saw this as simply ‘ordinary’. What might seem like a major achievement to people outside this culture was possibly taken for granted within the culture. Before the invention of the Board, there was general agreement that it would be a good idea to have such a body but, once it was established, it blended into the establishment.
It is possible to argue that precisely this connection to a cultural tradition should have made the Danes more protective of the Board of Technology. In this case, however, it seems that the Board has not been able to sustain a public profile as a symbol of this consensual culture. Today, even people working within science and technology in Denmark do not know about its existence. In many of my conversations with Danish scientists and science policy makers over the last years, they suggest the establishment of a function which is quite similar to the Board without knowing that it already exists. This reminds me both that the Board is relatively unknown in Denmark – but also that the basic idea behind it has a lot of support.
On this basis, it is undoubtedly sad that the Danish government decided to cut the funding for the Board of Technology, because it has become less obvious how democratic discussion of science and technology in the future will be organized and connected to the policy process. It is currently uncertain how the integrative function of the Board will be continued and whether it is possible to generate platforms which can bring different types of stakeholders together. However, the Danish Board of Technology has not been closed. A solution had been found in which it continues as a private non-profit foundation. On the one hand, this leaves the Board in a more precarious situation, where it does not have basic funding from parliament and where its institutional role has changed considerably. On the other hand, this de-institutionalization might reinvigorate the Board as something that more actors in society think it is necessary to fight for – at least according to the hypothesis I suggested above. This would be supported by Marres, who argues that a public only springs into being once there is an explicit experience of a problem that does not seem to be taken care of by the existing policy framework (Marres, 2005).
A consequence of this line of thinking is that as scholars and practitioners of public engagement, we should not be disappointed when particular engagement activities don’t seem to deliver the outcome we hoped for. Just because they do not solve a specific problem of utilizing and regulating science and technology in a legitimate fashion, they are not futile. Rather, their imperfections might be what keep the idea of engagement alive. At least this is what I learn from Andy Stirling’s argument about ‘opening up’ (Stirling, 2008). I also believe this is what Alan Irwin had in mind when, at the same 2012 Science in Dialogue Conference, he quoted the great Leonard Cohen: ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’ (Cohen, 1992).
If we take seriously my hypothesis concerning the potential weakness of strong ties, it follows that we (as engagement scholars and practitioners) should be careful about how we sell the idea of engagement. We would do well to learn from our own experiences of studying the use of expectations to generate resources in a field (Hedgecoe & Martin, 2003; Väliverronen, 2004). Just as we might urge protagonists of gene therapy, stem cell research and synthetic biology to be careful about hyping the potential outcomes of their technologies, engagement protagonists should be careful not to over-state the ability of the engagement paradigm to deliver solutions. Instead, we should insist that democratic dialogue about science and technology has a value of its own and should be supported in its own right. The major impact of these discussions, however, might not arise by integrating public engagement institutionally into the policy process. There might be a certain strength in weak ties which means that public engagement will always appear messy, fragile and unruly if it is to have worthwhile effects. That’s how the light gets in.
References
Blok, A. (2007). Experts on public trial: On democratizing expertise through a danish consensus conference. Public Understanding of Science, 16(2), 163-182.
Cohen, Leonard (1992): Anthem. The Future. Leonard Cohen Stranger Music, Inc (BMI).
Einsiedel, E. F. (2002). Assessing a controversial medical technology: Canadian public consultations on xenotransplantation. Public Understanding of Science, 11, 315-331.
Granovetter, Mark S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6)1360-1380.
Hedgecoe, A., & Martin, P. (2003). The drugs don't work: Expectations and the shaping of pharmacogenetics. Social Studies of Science, 33(3), 327-364.
Horst, M. (2010). Collective closure? public debate as the solution to controversies about science and technology. Acta Sociologica, 53(3), 195-211.
Horst, M., & Irwin, A. (2010). Nations at ease with radical knowledge. Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 105-126.
Jensen, C. B. (2005). Citizen projects and consensus-building at the danish board of technology - on experiments in democracy. Acta Sociologica, 48(3), 221-235.
Lassen, J. (2004). Changing modes of biotechnology governance in denmark
Lezaun, J., & Soneryd, L. (2007). Consulting citizens: Technologies of elicitation and the mobility of publics. Public Understanding of Science, 16(3), 279-297.
Lund, A. B., & Horst, M. (1999). Den offentlige debat - mål, middel eller mantra. København: Fremad.
Marres, N. (2005). Issues spark a public into being. A key but often forgotten point of the lippmann-dewey debate. In B. Latour, & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making things public - atmospheres of democracy (pp. 208-217). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Mejlgaard, N. (2009). The trajectory of scientific citizenship in denmark: Changing balances between public competence and public participation. Science and Public Policy, 36(6), 483-496.
Science in Dialogue Conference. Odense, Denmark 2012 (http://scienceindialogue.dk/).
Stirling, A. (2008). “Opening up” and “Closing down”: Power, participation, and pluralism in the social appraisal of technology. Science, Technology & Human Values, 33(2), 262-294.