In this research, I set out to understand more about how public opinions and discourses influence the course of science and technological development. Specifically, I wanted to know whether the move in the UK to involving the public in decisions around science through a series of public dialogue events, has had any success in strengthening the public voice in decision-making around technoscientific issues. In particular, I was interested in the substance of the discussions within these dialogue events, not only to try to understand these questions further, but also to shed light on how we as a society learn to live with technoscientific developments and on how expertise and evidence is understood, valued and used in policy.
In this chapter I draw together the results presented in the earlier chapters and set it in the context of previous work in the field, to answer these questions and draw conclusions about the extent to which public dialogue has and could impact on public policy. I also reflect on the methodology used in this research. Finally, I raise a number of further issues for public dialogue which would be worthy of further research and set out some suggestions for how practice can be improved on the basis of this research.
Overall, I conclude that the public talk about new and emerging science and technologies in a way that is very different from the way in which experts and policymakers discuss the same subjects. In particular, the public see the social and ethical issues and concerns arising from technologies as inherent to the technologies themselves, while the experts and policymakers see them as external epiphenomena. I argue that these different ways of talking about science and technology are both a result of and a reflection of two different socio-technical imaginaries that I have identified – a dominant ‘elite’ imaginary of ‘scientific progress’, which is shared by policymakers and scientists, and a counter-imaginary of ‘contingent progress’ which emerges from the public discourses. Since these imaginaries both shape and describe how science and the role of the state is seen, the public imaginary and discourses are seen as oppositional, but are also difficult to accommodate within the ‘machinery’ of policymaking and so have limited influence. Furthermore, public dialogue exercises are not seen as a source of
expertise, nor are they part of the networks that influence policy, further limiting their potential to influence policy.
Using a computer assisted text analysis system to looking across the outputs of public dialogues however shows that the dialogues do generate some interesting discussions and that the public do have contributions to make to public policy around science and technologies. To increase impact, thought needs to be given to the type of decisions that dialogues seek to influence, to engage policymakers in discussions about the sociotechnical imaginaries that are shaping their perceptions of policy and the public, and to ways in which public dialogue can be brought into policymaking networks and coalitions.
So what has been the impact of public dialogue?
1. Dialogue offers insight into public perceptions
To begin, it is clear that the dialogue events have been successful in exploring public perspectives and provide a rich source of insight into how the public talk about and come to know new science and technologies.
By looking at the content of the reports of public dialogue events over the last 10 years, I have identified a series of public discourses around new and emerging science and technologies (Class A1: Drugs: cure or cause for medical or social problems?; Class A4 Challenging our way of life; Class A2 Reaching potential whilst minimising risk; Class A3 Precautionary in principle; Class A5 Messing with nature – where do we draw the line?). By comparing these discourses to those that were produced by the analogous analysis of ‘expert’ documents, I have identified a number of features unique to the public discourses:
a. The public express an optimism towards science that is tempered by a sense of contingency;
b. The public discourses cluster around particular groups of technologies, rather than being ‘generic’ for all science and technology, or specific to each technology;
c. Social and ethical implications of new scientific developments are considered to be inherent parts of the developments;
d. The focus of public discourses is on people rather than technologies;
e. Nature plays a key role in shaping conceptions of the acceptability of technologies and in the way they should be regulated;
f. The public see an active role for government in controlling the direction of research.
Others have previously identified individual aspects of the analysis I describe, but the statistical methodology I have adopted has enabled me to look at subjects side- by-side and to focus on what was said rather than any institutional framing or normative assumptions about the dialogue process, thus bringing new insight to the material. Comparing public and expert discourses has also allowed patterns to be identified that others have not recognised. For example, MacNaughten and Chilvers (Macnaghten & Chilvers 2014) have carried out a similar analysis of public dialogue reports, but focusing exclusively on ScienceWise dialogues from a marginally different timeframe and carrying out the analysis by hand. They identified five cross- cutting themes which they argued were strongly affiliated to which of three ‘models’ of public engagement had been employed. While there was some overlap between the themes they identified and some of the issues arising in my discourses (for instance, they identified the speed and direction of research as a key public concern), their groupings did not map onto my discourses, suggesting that the groupings that I have identified are not a manifestation of the type of dialogue being undertaken but reflect different discourses that are taking place regardless of the style of dialogue being undertaken. Supporting that point, Chess and Purcell’s review of empirical evidence of the success of different participatory techniques concludes that “factors other than the mechanism for the participatory process undoubtedly account for variation in public participation success (Chess & Purcell 1999).