Richard Alan Hindmarsh

Deliberative Speak at the Turbine Face: Community Engagement, Wind Farms, and Renewable Energy Transitions, in Australia

In late 2007, a new Australian federal government committed to significantly boosting Australias energy consumption from renewable energy by 2020. With wind farms the most viable technology for such expansion, nothing, however, was suggested of how to address intense social conflict surrounding wind farm location; a situation provoked by inadequate community involvement in state government approval processes for wind farms. In seeking to redress that democratic deficit, in 2006, the prior federal government proposed a strong participatory National Code for Wind Farms. State governments rejected the proposal as a constraint to wind power and claimed adequate community engagement. In overviewing the debate, we find in favour of the prior federal governments position, refer to European participatory policy lessons, and find the National Code heavily featuring ‘deliberative speak’ in an approach suggesting placation of communities instead of its purported one of consensus-building. That informs some tentative suggestions of how to better engender a more socially viable and constructive approach for wind farm, and more broadly, renewable, energy transitions in Australia.

Personal genomes: Misdirected precaution

Personal-genome tests are blurring the boundary between experts and lay people. Barbara Prainsack, Jenny Reardon and a team of international collaborators urge regulators to rethink outdated models of regulation.

Interdisciplinary foundations: reflecting on interdisciplinarity and three decades of teaching and research at Griffith University, Australia

Interdisciplinarity is widely practised and theorised. However, relatively few studies have reflected on university‐wide attempts to foster the concept. This article examines interdisciplinary teaching and learning at Griffith University, Australia. It reflects on the foundations of interdisciplinarity at the university and situates them within the broader context of innovations in worldwide practice; it draws from the literature on interdisciplinarity to traverse the broad understandings of the term; it discusses the Griffith University innovations implemented in support of the concept; and, it reports on the likely outcomes of current methods designed to improve interdisciplinary practice. Whilst challenging barriers to interdisciplinarity continue to exist, compounded by varied conceptions of what interdisciplinarity entails, positive learning and research outcomes have been accomplished at the university from its interdisciplinary foundations, which also provide a platform to go forward.

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES AND ISSUES IN THE PACIFIC BASIN-SOUTHEAST ASIA REGION

Introduction International concern about the environmental effects of development has grown rapidly over the last three decades. At first, environmental problems were perceived mainly as problems for wealthy countries. Now they have become recognized as problems for poor and rich countries alike, and consideration of the environmental effects of development has become a central rather than a peripheral issue in the planning and assessment of development programmes. Environmental problems relate to questions of ecologically sustainable development including resource use, the maintenance of productive ecosystems and biodi-versity, and human physical and social health. Environment is defined in its broadest sense to incorporate both the natural and the cultural dimensions. Most developing countries in the Asia and Pacific regions are very much aware of the costs of environmental degradation and the effects of development planning and, in some, there are now many years of experience in attempting to assess, mitigate, and monitor adverse environmental impacts of development projects and programmes. However, in other countries, formative steps are only now being taken towards such assessments. This paper focuses on the procedures and the effectiveness of environmental impact assessment (EIA) of 17 countries as they were reported at a training w. orkshop on environmental assessment for development planning at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, in July 1988. All but three of the 37 participants at the workshop came from the Pacific Basin and Southeast Asian countries (as -shown in Table 1) and included government officials, academics, and representatives from industry. All were either practitioners or intending practitioners in EIA but with a variety of backgrounds in planning, engineering, conservation, pollution control, or natural resource management. The purpose of the workshop was to assist in manpower development in the region and to advance the practice of environmental assessment in development planning.

Hot air ablowin! 'Media- speak', social conflict, and the Australian 'decoupled' wind farm controversy

In work in science, technology, and society social conflict around wind farms has a growing profile, not least because it draws our attention to two key interrelated themes: ‘science, technology and governance’ and ‘socio-technological systems’. In this article on Australian wind farm development and siting, these themes are highlighted in contexts of sustainability, legitimacy, and competency for policy effectiveness. There is enduring social conflict around wind farms at the local community level, but little government understanding of this conflict or willingness to respond adequately to resolve it. This article examines the conflict through the lens of print media analysis. A key finding of the five identified is that people seeing wind farms as spoiling a sense of place is a primary cause of enduring social conflict at the local community level around wind farms, alongside significant environmental issues and inadequate community engagement; this finding also indicates a central reason for the highly problematic state of Australian wind energy transitions. In turn, by identifying this problematic situation as one of a significantly ‘decoupled’ and ‘dysfunctional’ condition of the Australian socio-technological wind farm development and siting system, I suggest remedies including those of a deliberative nature that also respond to the Habermas–Mouffe debate. These inform a socio-technical siting approach or pathway to better respect and navigate contested landscapes for enhanced renewable energy transitions at the local level.

Recombinant regulation: The Asilomar legacy 30 years on

This special issue of Science as Culture deals with one of the most important conflicts in recent science and technology history: the regulatory controversy about recombinantDNA technology. More generally: biotechnology. This controversy began to take shape in the early 1970s, in particular at the 1975 International Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecule Research at the Asilomar Conference Center, and of course still continues in earnest. The various contributions in this issue retrospectively construct the r-DNA regulatory controversy in a number of countries. They journey back to the early 1970s to analyze how the conflict evolved on different continents and in different areas of application of r-DNA biotechnology. Notions and visions of r-DNA biotechnology have a long history. They can be seen to go back at least to the writings of Francis Bacon with his scientific utopian epic New Atlantis. A useful starting point to contextualize the contemporary story, though, begins in 1969, when Michael Crichton’s Sci-Fi book The Andromeda Strain was released. It related ‘the story of a lethal organism brought back to earth by a returning space shot, instantly killing fifty people in the village of Piedmont’ (Van Dijck, 1998, p. 63). To contain the organism, the government recruited six scientists. Yet, despite implementing stringent containment conditions, the organism escaped. Fortunately, it soon became benign. But for the public, this tale popularized the notion of ‘biohazards’ in the form of ‘engineered bugs escaping from the lab, causing unintended mutations in humans or other organisms, and hence threatening the evolutionary balance on earth’ (Ibid.). Soon thereafter, in 1973, the recombinant-DNA technique was ‘invented’ by US scientists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer. In parallels to Crichton’s fantasy, soon thereafter Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 4, 299–307, December 2005

GMO regulation and civic participation at the “edge of the world”: the case of Australia and New Zealand

Civic participation in decision-making about the regulation of genetically modified organisms has become increasingly important in both Australia and New Zealand. This paper explores the somewhat uneven emergence of public participation in discussion and decision-making about GMOs in these different, but closely related contexts. Accounts of public engagement with decision-making about the regulation of GMOs are juxtaposed with critical reflections on what might appear to be opportunities for citizens to exert control over the development and use of genetic science. In this respect, the paper contributes to what Alan Irwin (2006, p. 300) has referred to as “an analytically sceptical (but not dismissive) perspective on the ‘new’ mode of scientific governance”. The paper concludes with some critical reflections on the development of enhanced democratic decision-making with respect to new biotechnologies, particularly GMOs.

“Liberating” social knowledges for water management, and more broadly environmental management, through “place-change planning”

In response to the big policy problem of increasing failures of traditional, largely technical, policy approaches to constructively address transformational or radical socio-environmental problems from major facility siting, landscape modification, and/or new environmental management at the local level, this paper introduces “place-change planning”. This concept is applied to recent calls by Australian water scientists and policy-makers “to liberate the knowledge, skills and individual leadership and collaboration of all stakeholders to reflect a more decentralised, disaggregated and localised water world”. Local community stakeholders appear the most neglected stakeholder currently in such water management, despite increasing international recognition of their importance for constructive change in transitional sustainability contexts. As such, place-change policy design focuses on the importance of collaborative participatory approaches for better understanding of the underlying rationalities, and, by association, of better liberating the social knowledges, of place-based local communities for better policy input to realise new visions of sustainable water management, and beyond.

Genetic engineering regulation in Australia: An ‘Archaeology’ of expertise and power

Strategies of regulation have played a central role in addressing or containing scientific and public controversy about the overall purpose and safety of genetic engineering. A defining reason in Australia for this was provided in revealing documents I attained through Australian Freedom of Information procedures from a federal agency at the heart of strategic manoeuvring in support of the genetic engineering endeavour, and which has played a central role in the Australian biopolicy network: the Department of Industry, Science & Technology. In the early 1990s, as in other parts of the world faced with escalating public resistance to genetic engineering at that time, this network of industrial, bureaucratic, scientific and regulatory players turned to strategizing more on how to best popularize GM amidst the rising dissent. In their discussions, they acknowledged, ‘We know that creating trust [in] the regulatory process is the most effective single factor in gaining public acceptance of gene technology’ (ABA PERC, 1994). Yet, such strategies started much earlier to shape societal outcomes. They started soon after the advent of genetic engineering with the Asilomar conference. The critical historical record (for example, Krimsky, 1982; Wright, 1986; Hindmarsh, 2001) reveals their initial framing was focussed more on facilitating the progress of genetic engineering; to check its most serious excesses that might pose as self-destructive, and to contain dissent that arose to it, than being an endeavour to comprehensively manage its potential harmful effects. Self-regulation, the immediate legacy of Asilomar, was their first expression. Over time, they evolved to various other forms, including legislation, but always it seemed with a clear focus to enable progress to bio-utopian visions cast at Asilomar depicting a cornucopian genetically engineered future based on the manipulation and redesign of living organisms. They combined with strategies of biodevelopment, which involved the development of biotechnology infrastructure programmes, and with strategies of information, which most often has involved the construction of persuasive Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 4, 373–392, December 2005

The need for effective assessment: Sustainable development and the social impacts of biotechnology in the third world

Abstract For sustainable development to occur in the Third World, an effective planning process is needed to control the adverse impacts of technological development. One public policy tool that may fit such a planning approach is development-level social impact assessment (SIA). However, there are grave doubts that SIA could prove effective. This is because Third-World adoption of SIA will most likely mirror the technical-level form of environment impact assessment (EIA) and structural constraints in the global organization of science and technology may inhibit SIAs potential. To demonstrate the effectiveness of developmental-SIA for analysis and the structural constraints that make SIA ineffective, this study evaluates the structural interaction between Third World development, agro-biotechnological change, and past problems from earlier introduction of agricultural technology into Third World countries. The analysis concludes that to really make SIA effective for sustainable development, structural reform is necessary.