Sujatha Raman

Beyond Counting Climate Consensus

ABSTRACT Several studies have been using quantified consensus within climate science as an argument to foster climate policy. Recent efforts to communicate such scientific consensus attained a high public profile but it is doubtful if they can be regarded successful. We argue that repeated efforts to shore up the scientific consensus on minimalist claims such as “humans cause global warming” are distractions from more urgent matters of knowledge, values, policy framing and public engagement. Such efforts to force policy progress through communicating scientific consensus misunderstand the relationship between scientific knowledge, publics and policymakers. More important is to focus on genuinely controversial issues within climate policy debates where expertise might play a facilitating role. Mobilizing expertise in policy debates calls for judgment, context and attention to diversity, rather than deferring to formal quantifications of narrowly scientific claims.

Governing stem cell therapy in India: regulatory vacuum or jurisdictional ambiguity?

Stem cell treatments are being offered in Indian clinics although preclinical evidence of their efficacy and safety is lacking. This is attributed to a governance vacuum created by the lack of legally binding research guidelines. By contrast, this paper highlights jurisdictional ambiguities arising from trying to regulate stem cell therapy under the auspices of research guidelines when treatments are offered in a private market disconnected from clinical trials. While statutory laws have been strengthened in 2014, prospects for their implementation remain weak, given embedded challenges of putting healthcare laws and professional codes into practice. Finally, attending to the capacities of consumer law and civil society activism to remedy the problem of unregulated treatments, the paper finds that the very definition of a governance vacuum needs to be reframed to clarify whose rights to health care are threatened by the proliferation of commercial treatments and individualized negligence-based remedies for grievances.

Fossilizing Renewable Energies

In 2009, a story began to emerge in the business and financial media on a looming threat to green energy futures (Bradsher, 2009; Indiviglio, 2009; Mason, 2009; Saefong, 2009). The Chinese government was reportedly contemplating new restrictions on their exports of rare earth minerals. Rare earths constitute a group of 17 elements in the Periodic Table, the 15 lanthanides and 2 of their close cousins, yttrium and scandium. They are crucial for making batteries and permanent magnets used in wind turbines (Figure 1), electric and hybrid cars, photovoltaic thin films and fluorescent lights. Since China accounted for 95% of global rare earth production, limits on Chinese exports would stymie the development of green energy as well as numerous other civilian and military industries that relied on rare earths. Business analysts urged Western governments to pay heed to this resource crunch and take action. What does this story about trade politics and an obscure group of minerals signify for sustainable energy transitions? I argue that renewable energy (RE) technologies are becoming fossilized. As the socio-political-commercial-material networks underpinning the production of many RE technologies are made visible, current configurations of RE systems start to resemble the fossil fuel regime they are supposed to supersede. Amory Lovins famously distinguished “hard” energy paths rooted in fossil fuels, nuclear power and geopolitical power games from “soft” paths that would be “flexible, resilient, sustainable and benign” by virtue of their relying on the sun, wind and vegetation (Lovins, 1976, p. 198). It is no Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 172–180, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786998

A social licence for science: capturing the public or co-constructing research?

The “social licence to operate” has been invoked in science policy discussions including the 2007 Universal Ethical Code for scientists issued by the UK Government Office for Science. Drawing from sociological research on social licence and STS interventions in science policy, the authors explore the relevance of expectations of a social licence for scientific research and scientific contributions to public decision-making, and what might be involved in seeking to create one. The process of seeking a social licence is not the same as trying to create public or community acceptance for a project whose boundaries and aims have already been fully defined prior to engagement. Such attempts to “capture” the public might be successful from time to time but their legitimacy is open to question especially where their engagement with alternative research futures is “thin”. Contrasting a national dialogue on stem cells with the early history of research into bioenergy, we argue that social licence activities need to be open to a “thicker” engagement with the social. Co-constructing a licence suggests a reciprocal relationship between the social and the scientific with obligations for public and private institutions that shape and are shaped by science, rather than just science alone.

Representing the Public in Public Engagement: The Case of the 2008 UK Stem Cell Dialogue

Engaging the public as architects, rather than simply as subjects or objects, of the substantive content of interactive dialogue may help fulfill the democratic potential of public engagement.

Responsive novelty: taking innovation seriously in societal research agendas for synthetic biology

The question of what counts as novel and in what context needs to be systematically investigated in societal research around synthetic biology (SB). This would improve understanding of alternative ways of innovating in response to collective challenges including options for addressing socio-economic inequality as well as and together with technical novelty. Responsiveness to different forms and contexts of novelty might also allow SB to be novel in ways not otherwise considered because of a presumption that it will be developed within established socio-economic systems and models.

Regenerative medicine in India: trends and challenges in innovation and regulation

The government of India has heavily promoted research and development in regenerative medicine together with domestic innovation and business development initiatives. Together, these promise a revolution in healthcare and public empowerment in India. Several national and transnational linkages have emerged to develop innovative capacity, most prominently in stem cell and cord blood banking, as well as in gene therapy, tissue engineering, biomaterials and 3D printing. However, challenges remain of achieving regulatory oversight, viable outputs and equitable impacts. Governance of private cord blood banking, nanomaterials and 3D bioprinting requires more attention. A robust social contract is also needed in healthcare more generally, so that participation in research and innovation in regenerative medicine is backed up by treatments widely accessible to all.

Energy Poverty, Institutional Reform and Challenges of Sustainable Development: The Case of India:

This article1 assesses recent efforts by the Indian government to tackle energy poverty and sustainable development. It focuses on the new integrated energy policy and initiatives to disseminate improved cookstoves and develop energy alternatives for transport. The success of government initiatives in cleaner biomass cookstoves and village electrification has historically been limited, and institutional reforms in the 2000s promoted market-led and ‘user-centred’ approaches, and encouraged biofuels as a ‘pro-poor’ route to rural development and energy security. The article argues that such interventions have reopened tensions and conflicts around land-use, intra-community inequalities and the role of corporate agendas in sustainable energy.

A Reply to Cook and Oreskes on Climate Science Consensus Messaging

In their replies to our paper (Pearce et al., 2017), both Cook (2017) and Oreskes (2017) agree with our central point: that deliberating and mobilizing policy responses to climate change requires t...

Delegitimizing Science: Risk or Opportunity?

This response argues that the delegitimization of scientific authority provides a much‐needed opportunity to examine the ethics, pragmatics and metaphysics of science’s relationship to other forms of knowledge. While sharing Nanda’s concerns about an unreflexive valorizaion of indigenous knowledge particularly as it applies to Hindu‐nationalist justifications of its own reactionary project, I suggest that the political implications of science critique can only be evaluated fairly through an understanding of what is at stake in specific contexts. Rather than rejecting STS approaches and visions of ‘alternative modernities’ tout court, I argue that they can assist in furthering the Enlightenment project of critical reason. Using empirical examples form research on health and the environment, the paper suggests ways in which the blurring of nature, technology, society and the human could be politically productive.