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On the limits of public engagement for the governance of emerging technologies

In the first article of the first issue of this journal, Bodmer and Wilkins (1992) discussed what the optimal strategy might be for targeting factual information about science at working class women, a group which survey research had previously identified as being especially low in scientific knowledge. Despite the obvious appeal of targeting this group through a science-themed television drama (“research tells us that these women watch television, particularly programmes like game and chat shows, comedy series and soap operas” p. 8), the authors reported that they had been unable to identify a television company willing to take on the challenge. That, two decades later, such concerns strike the modern reader as amusingly antiquated is testament to the transformation the field has undergone in both content and method during the intervening years. In particular, the founding concern with the public’s apparent ignorance of science is now deeply unfashionable; the suggestion that public opinion might, in some way, be related to what people understand about the technical aspects of science is now widely considered antediluvian. Although the field risks throwing out some potentially interesting babies with the bathwater here, this is not the focus of concern in this short note. Rather, it is the new orthodoxy that has arisen in its stead. In place of the much-lamented ‘knowledge-deficit model’ of the public’s relationship with science and technology have come approaches which, in different ways and to varying degrees, emphasise the importance of ‘two-way dialogue’ between science actors and the public. And, while we may question the extent to which practice has actually kept pace with the participatory rhetoric (Trench, 2008), the content of published articles in Public Understanding of Science confirms the strong underlying trend in the focus of published research. In 1992, just a single article appeared containing the terms ‘public engagement’ or ‘public participation’, a figure which had increased to 43 by 2011. Thus it is that the journal’s very title, if not quite an anachronism, now hardly feels in step with the spirit of the times. There is much that is to be welcomed in the turn away from naïve deficit model thinking toward more dialogical approaches to the interface between science and the public. However, as the participatory movement attempts the awkward transition from high theory to complex and messy practice, a number of dilemmas are encountered which problematise the notion of public engagement as a potential solution to the ‘wicked’ problems of science governance. In the limited space