ABSTRACT
There is considerable emphasis being placed in the UK today upon stakeholder and public dialogue in relation to science and technology issues. Such processes have in many respects overtaken attempts to promote increased ‘public understanding of science’ and greater science literacy through more traditional science communication methods. When discussing the move to greater public engagement in the UK at this moment in time, it is important to take account of the ways in which the UK had been impacted by a recent history of controversy concerning science, technology and risk issues. Above all, two issues have dominated the public policy agenda and thinking. The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or ‘mad cow’) crisis, and the initial controversy over genetically modified (GM) crops, both occurring in the mid-to-late 1990s, marked a turning point in the way UK science policy was viewed. Both the independent inquiry into the causes of BSE (Phillips, Bridgeman and Ferguson-Smith 2000) and a wider House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology (2000) report on Science and Society, argued that there existed a crisis of trust in UK science policy-making. The question of whether a crisis of trust in science itself actually existed at this point in time is debatable. At the level of general beliefs about the contribution of science and technology to society, public attitudes have remained stable and highly favourable in the UK in recent years (see OST/Wellcome 2000; Poortinga and Pidgeon 2003a; DTI/MORI 2005). Where strong concerns are expressed by people, it is typically with respect to operation of the science policy process in relation to much more specific and controversial issues (radioactive waste and nuclear power, GM food, the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine). A contributory factor in the presumed crisis of legitimacy surrounding science policy was assumed to be a failure of the traditional one-way ‘deficit model’ of science risk communication, as advocated in the earlier Royal Society (1985) report on public understanding of science. In
response, both the BSE and Lords reports stressed the importance of openness in government and the science community as a precondition to re-establishing credibility and trust in risk management and policy. The Lords report also highlighted a need to broaden the base of public consultation and dialogue on controversial science policy issues (see also POST 2001). The implication was that we need to move beyond traditional public understanding of science efforts if we are to resolve some of the most contested issues of science policy. Accordingly, the Lords report recommended:
That direct dialogue with the public should move from being an optional add-on to science-based policy-making and to the activities of research organisations and learned institutions, and should become a normal and integral part of the process.
