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Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: Historical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective
Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: Historical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective
Human Values
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186
public forms of reasoning, which all together shape practices and policies of
innovation in a national-specific way (Jasanoff 2005, 248-50).
the first set between 1945 and the early 1970s. In this era, science policy was
based on a “social contract for science,” under which the relations between
science and politics were guided by the principle of “blind delegation.” That
principle granted science wide autonomies of self-regulation in terms of the
division and use of funding as well as the instruments of quality assessment
(Guston 2000), not least to prevent the political instrumentalization of science
as in National Socialist Germany or in the Soviet Union. Science became
dominated by the model of basic research, initiating a period of autonomy
that lasted at least until the 1970s. Although after the Sputnik shock in 1957,
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
countries massively expanded public expenditures for research and develop-
ment, building up big science institutions for applied research in the 1960s
and 1970s, the realm of basic science remained the prerogative of autonomous
and self-organized organizations (Elzinga and Jamison 1995, 584-6; Guston
2000, 141). Christophe Bonneuil called this science and research policy
approach a “fordist arrangement,” granting government and business elites
autonomies, whereas the public would receive the medical and technological
advancements in the standard of living in return (Bonneuil 2004). In this
context, participatory claims only marginally mattered in science policy.
4. Only since the late 1960s has the participatory question emerged in its
present form—a development also thoroughly examined in recent science
studies.4 A crucial factor for this process was the technological criticism of
several social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as the feminist
movement, the antinuclear movement, and the ecological movement (Nelkin
1977; Wynne 2002). Against this background, this era has been called a
period of “social relevance” in science and technology policy (Elzinga and
Jamison 1995, 591). Already in the 1970s, the criticisms led to early forms
of participatory science and technology policy. By means of administrative
reforms, the political procedures were opened to reflect differences in scien-
tific opinions and later the perspective of lay citizens in policy making.
Early precursors of participatory deliberation can be found in the fields of
early environment and planning policy, biotechnology, nuclear and other
large-scale technology, and in technology assessment in general (Nelkin
1977, 58-90; Mazmanian 1976; Mazur 1981; Conrad 1983). The first con-
sensus conferences in biotechnology, for example, were organized in the
United States in the mid-1970s, soon spreading to European countries. At
the beginning, they only involved experts with different opinions; at a later
stage, also participants representing the public (Kelly 2003, 345-7; Guston
1999, 451-4; Joss and Durant 1995).
The emergence of participatory approaches was paralleled by new forms
of governance in science and technology policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, the
Notes
1. The articles go back to papers presented at an international conference on “Shifting
Boundaries between Science and Politics: New Research Perspectives in Science Studies”
held in June 2004 at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
für Sozialforschung, WZB). This introduction profited considerably from the collaboration
with Sheila Jasanoff in preparing the congress and from helpful comments by Christophe
Bonneuil.
2. To conceptualize such planning policies, sociologists Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes
Weyer (1994) spoke of an emerging “experimental society,” in which modern science is rec-
ognized as crucial for social process and therefore granted big institutional spaces for its
knowledge production (i.e., big science institutions). For a detailed discussion of Krohn and
Weyer’s argument, see Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris [this issue].
3. For a recent survey based on the American case, see Guston 2000; for OECD countries,
including Western Europe, see Elzinga and Jamison 1995; Braun 1997; Braun 2003; and
Jasanoff 2003.
4. For recent accounts, see Joss 1999 and Jasanoff 2003. See also the contributions to
Kleinman 2000a and Irwin and Wynne 1995.
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Martin Lengwiler is a member of the Project Group Science Policy Studies at the Social
Science Research Center Berlin and an assistant professor of modern history at the University
of Zurich. Combining approaches from social and cultural history with the history of
science and technology, his work focuses on the role of expertise in government and welfare
institutions.