Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics

Recent decades have seen momentum growing beyond what has been called the ‘participatory turn’ in governance. Here, shifts in the policy environment as well as in relationships between civil society and some sectors of business and industry seem to have begun to align with arguments made by theorists of radical democracy, from John Dewey and to Iris Marion Young and John Dryzek.

These transformations have been in response to a legitimation crisis afflicting liberal democratic states, one which arises from a lack of transparency around the workings of public and privatised bureaucracy, as well as concerns over the unintended social and ecological consequences of the products of technoscience. Connecting these issues is the authority accorded to formal scientific expertise as a tool for remaking the world in the face of an uncertain future. The crisis of legitimacy afflicting political and other elites since the 1960s arises from a tension between the claims of actors with access to scientific knowledge regarding their ability to improve the world and to tame uncertainty, and unwanted and unplanned outcomes of their efforts. Furthermore, the presence among these outcomes of evident injustices inflicted on marginalised groups globally adds another facet to the crisis. The result of, for example, resistance to environmental injustice produced by top-down urban planning, along with suspicion towards technologies like genetic modification, nanotechnology and geoengineering, have therefore been demands for more inclusion and effective voice for groups typically excluded from the arenas where technoscientific expertise claims authority for itself. Here is, it might be thought, a site where a good claim can be made by science and technology studies (STS)—to have answered Langdon Winner’s charge against STS and the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)—that these approaches fail to challenge the contingent processes they study, adopting instead a stance that ‘soon becomes moral and political indifference’ (Winner, 1993, p. 372). Supported by philosophers and social scientists, efforts to increase participation beyond the usual channels afforded by representative democracy have become a familiar feature of contemporary public life. With these developments, participation has itself become an industry, with its own corpus of increasingly formalised expertise, and its own standardised technologies (like citizen juries or consensus conferences). A question that has therefore occupied many of those scholars who agitate for the extension of participation is therefore to what extent the explosion in participatory activity has fulfilled the goals motivating many of those who have helped shape it. Is there perhaps a legitimation crisis of participation itself waiting to emerge?

From 2009–2011, Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes, editors of this book, ran a seminar series on critical approaches to participation together with colleagues, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The contributions collected here began with the discussions at these events, and arguably have a single central thread running them: the theme of reflexivity. Where participation is often prescribed as the appropriate means for encouraging reflexivity towards the means and assumed purposes of governance and innovation alike, here reflexivity is inscribed within the theory and practice of participation itself. Social science research has shown how public concerns about technology are often expressions of concern about issues that, rather than having to do with the risks of technologies independent of any social context, tend instead to concern the social meaning of technology – who uses it, who develops it, and for what particular (and generally unquestioned) purposes. The work of Brian Wynne, with an essay collected here, is particularly representative of this tradition, along with that of (for example) Sheila Jasanoff and Andy Stirling. Seeking to institutionalise reflexivity, often early or ‘upstream’ in innovation or policy processes, was a theme central to the expansion of participatory exercises around nanotechnology, synthetic biology and geoengineering in the 2000s, feeding into the emergence of responsible research and innovation (RRI) as a research focus. But as engagement and participation become established within a community of practice with its own institutions and travelling standards (Voss’s essay here), what happens when the critical ratchet is turned one notch further on, and reflexivity is directed towards the purposes and practices of participation itself?

The uses of participation have been various. As Wynne notes in this volume, the much discussed deficit model, in which the main aim of engagement between experts and publics was seen as remedying public ignorance, has proved itself seemingly unkillable. The deficit zombie shambles forth again and again as institutional agendas and participatory agendas flow together, taking the form of assumptions about a deficit of affect and of enthusiasm for science in particular (Kearnes and Wynne, 2007), about a deficit of the right pro-science values, or simply about a deficit of engagement on the part of an uninterested public that needs the application of artificial stimulants. In every case, the assumptions about attitudes of ‘the public’ as a mostly undifferentiated object have necessitated treating this object as a source of risk (protest, rejection and legitimation crisis), while also recognising favourable public perception as the guarantee of a licence to operate for political and corporate actors in an age of uncertain risks (Wynne, Soneryd and Ehrenstein and Laurent in this volume). Understanding engagement and participation in this way is only possible because it is assumed, from the outset, who and what ‘the public’ is and what it knows (or does not know).

One of the key contributions made by this volume is to draw together over a decade’s worth of evolving responses to these assumptions and their effects in helping to lay out a new theoretical framework for a more reflexive approach both to doing participation and to studying it. Chilvers and Kearnes argue in their first two essays here that the trajectory of these responses moves around the application of a developing co-productionist framework to studying and doing participation. In other words, the same theoretical and methodological tools that the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and constructivist science and technology studies (STS) have applied to science itself are here applied to the intersection of technoscience and social science where frontline participatory activities most often take place.

Through this lens, the phenomena of ‘the public’ and participatory democracy itself are deconstructed, and understood instead as products of extended complex interactions between multiple human and non-human (Waterton and Tsouvalis’ essay) actors. The operational definition of participation that emerges is suitably open and wide-ranging, reflecting the work of Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, Wynne and others:

participation might be understood as the always-partial process of defining objects of political concern – in which the objects of public participation, the constituency of affected publics and what is legitimated as ‘political’ are themselves always a contingent outcome of the processes of participation. (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2015, p. 36)

Such a definition offers an anchor point for a critique of what Chilvers and Kearnes (after Latour) refer to as ‘realism’, a set of assumptions that frame objects of interest (like ‘the public’ and ‘democracy’) as objects with a fixed essence to which the right methodological tools can give access – for example, survey methods for getting at what the public ‘really thinks’ about a topic, or deliberative approaches that can genuinely instantiate a transcendental normative definition of democracy. SSK and STS have shown how scientific knowledge and technologies themselves are mutable, if more or less stable, products of particular practices carried out at specific times and in specific places, rather than the application of an ideal method to reveal the timeless essence of nature. Chilvers and Kearnes apply the same reasoning to participation. Through the practices, methods and events which produce participation, publics and forms of democratic politics are made to appear, but at no point do they appear as they are ‘in themselves’.

In this alternative model, the range of processes and elements that shape how participation defines objects of concern are manifold, opening up what is meant both by publics and by democracy. Affects like ambivalence or indifference are treated as active responses to technoscience (contoured by mistrust or suspicion) rather than simple absences of engagement. Publics enter into participatory activities not as innocent individuals, but as situated subjects with particular identities, some of which are already formed and some which emerge in the course of participating as interests, concerns and aspirations come into play together (see Irwin and Horst’s essay). The polity is affirmed here as always already a technoscientific one. Everyday life is already participation in technoscience, full of affective atmospheres and their accompanying ‘infrapublics’ (Gay Hawkins’ term, used in Mike Michael’s essay here), shaping spaces of concern (as in Michael’s identification of wheeled luggage as a thing that gathers together affects of frustration and questions of responsibility in public spaces) out of which controversies may be born.

Drawing on the case studies presented here and the reflections they contain on the complex processes through which participation happens, Chilvers and Kearnes build an argument for an ecological approach to studying engagement and participation, one that focuses on ‘systems of deliberation’ (Davies’ essay), rather than discrete events or processes. Participation is always in a mutually constitutive relation to spaces of negotiation and often long-standing controversy, and also to political cultures, ‘the systematic and routinized ways in which a political community validates knowledge and makes binding collective choices’ (53). Participation must thus be understood in relation to processes and conditions operating at different spatial and temporal scales.

Overall, the book’s valuable contribution is, by tightening the ratchet of reflexivity one more turn, to help crystallise themes that have been central to research on participation over the last 20 or so years, as well as outlining a new agenda for further research. Here, participation is presented as beginning, not with occasional sanctioned events, but instead within everyday experiences of technology, and also as extending across an interconnected system within which public matters of concern are defined and contested over time. Yet, in assessing where this volume leaves us, it may be instructive to consider once again Winner’s (1993) essay, mentioned above. Many of Winner’s charges against STS, such as that it fails to appreciate how inequalities of power feed socio-technical change, have been comprehensively answered within the body of work that informs and is represented within this volume. At the same time, the treatment of participation advanced here prompts some reflection on some of his other points.

Constructivist STS, in its various shades, now takes as canonical the view that redescription (here, of participation) does not – contra Winner – simply leave things as they are. There is normative content to the constructivist stance, namely that this process of redescription is better than some ‘realist’ alternative. But is this ‘better’ a matter of (1) a stance being pragmatically better at achieving pre-set goals, (2) epistemologically better (more ‘true’), or (3) ethically and/or politically better (productive of more flourishing lives, achieving a more nuanced or richer kind of procedural or other justice)? The first option would slip back into a non-reflexive instrumentalism. The second would accord to constructivist redescription an epistemological privilege it explicitly refuses to ‘realism’, recalling Latour’s problematic remark that the constructivist should ‘just describe the state of affairs at hand’ (Latour, 2005, p. 144). The third calls for ‘us’ to create forms of participation that are ‘cosmopolitan, reflexive, responsible, and [plural]’ (262) in preference to forms of participation that are less so. Here, however, one must explore further the meaning of these terms, and the normative space in which they are gathered. Winner asked whether constructivist STS can position itself, in the light of its analyses, to then ask ‘which ends, principles and conditions deserve not only our attention but also our commitment’ (Winner, 1993, p. 374). Reflexivity, and cosmopolitanism, and responsibility (or response-ability), along with other concepts like care, are presented widely in contemporary STS as demanding our attention, by scholars who call in each case for ‘more’ of a commitment to x. But as to whether, and why, x should ultimately demand our commitment, questions remain. A condition of post-normality demands reflexivity towards our commitments but the treatment of reflexivity in STS leaves us wondering how, as Latour puts it, we are ultimately to distinguish between good and bad attachments (Latour, 2004, p. 457). Without interrogating directly the meaning and justification of such commitments (and therefore edging further into the territory of the philosophy of technology), the reflexivity prized by STS moves towards a perhaps arbitrary limit, and potentially a species of unacknowledged realism about what ultimately reflexivity is for. None of these closing remarks should be taken as denying the specific and considerable value of this book. But by drawing together such a broad and significant range of themes in interrogating the meaning of participation, its value also lies in providing a valuable opportunity to raise again questions with which Winner and others presented us over two decades ago and which still demand further work.