Joanna Goven

Deploying the consensus conference in New Zealand: democracy and de-problematization

The turn toward public participation in technology assessment points to a link between democratization and the problematization of dominant assumptions, explanations, and justifications. Here, I evaluate whether the use of the consensus conference in New Zealand facilitated such problematization. After a brief outline of the Danish model, I discuss the ways in which the New Zealand conference differed from that model and demonstrate how strategies for managing the resulting bias undermined the possibility of problematization. Further, I argue that participants’ attempts to problematize were subsumed into the dominant scientific and economic rationalities through processes I call assimilation, resignation, and externalization. I argue that the effect of the conference process was to assimilate some concerns into the deficit model, produce a sense of resignation to the “inevitable” with regard to other concerns, and externalize those remaining onto the indigenous population.

Processes of inclusion, cultures of calculation, structures of power: scientific citizenship and the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification

The significance of political-economic context for scientific citizenship is argued through an analysis of New Zealand’s Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. My intention is not to provide an account of why the commission came to the decisions it did but to illustrate how the political-economic context and the culture of regulatory science both exacerbate public concerns about unacknowledged uncertainty and commercial influence and make it difficult for those concerns to influence the outcomes of public dialogues. The discursive flexibility of science as alternately predictive and provisional silences concerns about uncertainty, while a further interpretive choice of science as the autonomous activities of individuals unconstrained by political-economic context occludes the nature of concerns about commercial influence. Rather than the increasingly prevalent focus on processes of engagement, I argue that it is essential that researchers in this area attend to how public dialogue is placed in relation to the cultures and structures of regulatory science and neoliberalism.

The Bioeconomy as Political Project: A Polanyian Analysis

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project.

Community engagement in the management of biosolids: Lessons from four New Zealand studies

Biosolids management has been largely overlooked as an issue for environmental co-management, collaborative learning and public participation. This paper summarises four research projects on facilitating community involvement in biosolids management in New Zealand. The authors situate these studies both in relation to the New Zealand institutional and policy context for the management of biosolids and in relation to the themes of public participation and social learning in the literature on community involvement in environmental management. From the studies it can be concluded that: the incorporation of the knowledge and views of Māori is important from both public-participation and social-learning perspectives; both public-participation and social-learning approaches must consider the role of issue-definition in relation to willingness to participate; democratic accountability remains a challenge for both approaches; and locating biosolids management within an integrated water-and-wastewater or sustainable waste-management strategy may facilitate wider community participation as well as better-coordinated decision-making.

A service, rather than a threat, to the credibility of science.

Marcel Kuntz argues that the credibility of science is under threat from postmodern thought and the field of science studies in particular [1]. However, we do not think even Kuntz could really accept his representation of science as a monolithic monopoly of truth, and his misrepresentation of science studies muddies the waters rather than clarifies them. Kuntz writes that “[t]he rational, scientific view of the world has been painstakingly built over millennia to guarantee that research can have access to objective reality.” By using the word ‘guarantee’, he ignores the provisional character of scientific research. He ignores the fact that scientists have been wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future. His claim that “there is only one science, as defined by the application of the scientific method in an objective and unbiased manner” seems to ignore the diversity and variability in scientific practice and infrastructure—a key strength of science. It also ignores scientific disagreements and the failure to replicate many scientific findings [2]. …