Sheila Jasanoff

States of knowledge : the co-production of science and social order

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index

Handbook of Science and Technology Studies

Keywords: STS ; science and government Reference Record created on 2005-06-20, modified on 2016-08-08

Contested Boundaries in Policy-Relevant Science

In the United States, as in other industrialized nations, regulatory decisions to protect the environment and public health depend heavily on scientific information. Yet the process of decision-making places unusual strains on science. Knowledge claims are deconstructed during the rule-making process, exposing areas of weakness or uncertainty and threatening the cognitive authority of science. At the same time, the legitimacy of the final regulatory decision depends upon the regulators ability to reconstruct a plausible scientific rationale for the proposed action. The processes of deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge claims give rise to competition among scientists, public officials and political interest groups, all of whom have a stake in determining how policy-relevant science should be interpreted and by whom. All of these actors use boundary-defining language in order to distinguish between science and policy, and to allocate the right to interpret science in ways that further their own interests. This paper explores the contours of such boundary disputes in the context of controversies over carcinogen regulation. It focuses on the contested definitions and strategic implications of three groups of concepts: trans-science or science policy, risk assessment and risk management, and peer review.

A New Climate for Society

This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.

Science and Decisionmaking

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses science as an activity independent of society. There is certainly one pathway in science that is a pure investigation of natural processes. But, in this age when the very sustainability of the Earth and its critical ecosystems are in question, it is important to communicate the key findings of environmental science and be used by those who make decisions about the future of the Earth. The challenge is how the scientists can effectively impart appropriate and useful information to decision-makers. Science is an integral part of decision making, as scientific results and model predictions are rarely expressed in terms of end points that have direct meaning or inherent value to decision makers. A number of questions arise to facilitate this interchange between science and decision-making. Three examples of how science is used in making decisions about land management, and their use are explained. Based on the common elements of these examples, a set of questions about appropriate ways to transmit science to decision-makers are also included.

The political science of risk perception

Abstract Psychometric research on risk perception has frequently been invoked as evidence for a distinction between ‘actual’ risk as measured by experts and ‘perceived’ risk as experienced by laypersons. According to this view, perceived risk represents a distorted version of actual risk, shaped by the ignorance, prior beliefs, and subjective personal experiences of non-experts. The goal of risk perception research, it follows, is to illuminate the factors that account for deviations between ‘actual’ and ‘perceived’ risks. By contrast, qualitative social and political analyses of risk perception question the validity of the actual/perceived dichotomy and suggest that all perceptions of risk, whether lay or expert, represent partial or selective views of the things and situations that threaten us. Drawing on social studies of science and risk, as well as studies of quantitative risk assessment, this paper identifies three common models that link risk perception to regulatory policy — labeled for convenience the ‘realist’, the ‘constructivist’, and the ‘discursive’. It calls attention to the ways in which the assumptions underlying each model have influenced risk-related research and decisionmaking in the United States.

(No?) Accounting for expertise

Attempts to alter the range of expertise represented on some US advisory committees have raised questions of accountability in the selection and deployment of expert advice. Governments seem sometimes to adopt the relativist position that all expertise is biased, and that political considerations may therefore determine the official selection of experts; at other times, they endorse the elitist view of expertise as superior knowledge. This paper argues instead that experts exercise a form of delegated authority and should thus be held to norms of transparency and deliberative adequacy that are central to democratic governance. This theoretical perspective should inform the practices of expert deliberation. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Science and citizenship: a new synergy

The relationship of science and citizenship is actively under discussion today in processes of social identity-making, including the identity of the citizen as producer and consumer of knowledge; the merger of consumption and citizenship through the use of market transactions to advance particular ways of knowing the world; and the work of politically relevant knowledge production, with citizens supplementing the role of experts. The papers in this special issue explore how, in each context, powerful institutions such as states and corporations are struggling to define principles by which to determine which citizens should be included, and on what terms, in relevant decisions and debates. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies

Slowly, reluctantly, with almost audible screeches of resistance, the political machinery of the industrial world is gearing up to address the energy crises of the new millennium. The challenge is to bring fuel—that ancient, low-tech, yet most civilizing of human inventions—within the reach of high-tech projects that seek to mitigate the threat of climate change while meeting the demand for global economic growth and development. In place of the dirty, extractive, nonrenewable, fossil fuel systems that currently power much of the world, the energy scenarios of the future are homing in on alternatives that promise to be clean, efficient, and superabundant. Energy transitions of such proportions do not simply involve swapping one resource for another: clean atoms for polluting coal or renewable wind for exhaustible oil. New energy futures will need to reconfigure the physical deep structures of civilization—grids and pipelines, seashores and pastoral landscapes, and suburbs and cities—that were shaped by the energy choices of the past. Equally, we argue here, radical changes in the fuel supply are likely to transform social infrastructures, changing established patterns of life and work and allocating benefits and burdens differently from before. Accordingly analysts should pay greater attention to the social dimensions of energy transitions, complementing more conventional analyses of economic and engineering issues. How will policy-makers meet this challenge? We believe that an exploration of the “sociotechnical imaginaries” that guided energy policies in the past provide some answers, by shedding light on the hidden social dimensions of energy Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 189–196, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786990

Constitutional Moments in Governing Science and Technology

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have recently been called upon to advise governments on the design of procedures for public engagement. Any such instrumental function should be carried out consistently with STS’s interpretive and normative obligations as a social science discipline. This article illustrates how such threefold integration can be achieved by reviewing current US participatory politics against a 70-year backdrop of tacit constitutional developments in governing science and technology. Two broad cycles of constitutional adjustment are discerned: the first enlarging the scope of state action as well as public participation, with liberalized rules of access and sympathetic judicial review; the second cutting back on the role of the state, fostering the rise of an academic-industrial complex for technology transfer, and privatizing value debates through increasing delegation to professional ethicists. New rules for public engagement in the United Sates should take account of these historical developments and seek to counteract some of the anti-democratic tendencies observable in recent decades.