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Science, deliberation, and policymaking: The Brain Imaging

Dialogue as upstream engagement

Oliver Escobar | School of Social and Political Science | University of Edinburgh

[This is a rough WORKING DRAFT, only for discussion]

Scientific communities and policy networks around the UK have come to recognise the

importance of fostering ‘upstream public engagement’, that is, early public dialogue and

deliberation around controversial scientific or technological advances in order to avoid the

public outrage, activist campaigning, and media misrepresentation that some argue has

jeopardised other research agendas in the past (see Wilsdon and Willis 2004; Wilsdon et al.

2005; Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden 2007; Tait 2009). Neuroscience has become one of the

most exciting scientific areas of the last two decades. Brain imaging technologies (BITs) have

advanced accordingly, and with them the challenges that stem from the dual nature of any

technology. On the one hand, new breakthroughs promise an array of future medical wonders.

On the other, uses of the technology for non-medical purposes (e.g. neuro-marketing, neuro-

security, neuro-law) are raising substantial concerns.

This paper presents the case of a deliberative process that took place in Scotland in 2010. The

Brain Imaging Dialogue (BID) brought together national and international scientists, health

practitioners, sociologists, philosophers, ethicists, religious representatives, political

scientists, citizens, policy makers and legal experts in a series of deliberative events about

new, non-medical uses of BITs around the world. The BID represented an effort to create a

deliberative community of inquiry to discuss the implications of current and future uses of

this emerging technology, and, on the basis of such dialogue, inform policy deliberation in

Scotland. This paper tells the story of the process from an insider perspective, focussing on

dilemmas emerging in fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue, as well as on the challenges of

forwarding the results to parliamentary decision-making arenas.

NOTE: SINAPSE (Scottish Imaging Network –A Platform for Scientific Excellence www.sinapse.ac.uk) and Edinburgh Neuroscience (www.edinburghneuroscience.ed.ac.uk) have generously supported this research. They granted me access to their meetings and communications, as well as to every stage of the BID process and all the materials generated. They have also supported the dissemination of this paper with two travel grants.

Tabled paper for the panel Reinvigorating Democracy: Innovations in Deliberative Public Policy Making, 6th

General Conference of the European Consortium of Political Research, Reykjavik, August 2011

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1. Introduction: Learning by shadowing practitioners

In the winter of 2009 I sat for an interview at the office of the Scientific Manager of

Edinburgh Neuroscience, a university-based centre in Scotland. I was there on account of

research that included interviews with a range of science public engagement practitioners in

Scotland (Pieczka and Escobar 2010a, 2010b). For two hours my interviewee shared

experiences running outreach programs, mostly with children and young adults. Then we

came onto “the issue of dialogue and policy making”: she was about to embark for the first

time in the organisation of an ambitious deliberative project.

That encounter sparked my fascination with the topic of brain imaging and my curiosity about

the journey before this practitioner. It also got me access to experience the satisfactions,

challenges and frustrations of organising, facilitating and participating in this kind of process.

Over the forthcoming months I would take roles as scribe, facilitator, participant and

collaborator, while adopting an ethnographic approach to make sense of the experience.

Accordingly, this paper draws mainly on fieldnotes generated through participant observation

during 51 hours of fieldwork, including conversational interviewing and the collection of

various artefacts (i.e. written documents, images, emails).

I developed a number of progressively active roles in the field, from merely shadowing

(Czarniawska 2008) the core group of organisers (e.g. internal meetings; visit to the

Parliament), to facilitating 2 table discussions, and collaborating with the organising team

(e.g. designing a public survey; providing readings of the unfolding policy phase). However,

my official status for most of the process was that of a scribe. As scribes, we were tasked with

writing minutes of the various table discussions, which allowed me to focus on

communication dynamics. Moreover, having my scribe hat on made it easier to openly write

fieldnotes without distracting participants, interrupting interaction, or planting “seeds of

distrust” (Emerson et al. 1995:20). All in all, my research aimed to produce an ethnography

of a deliberative process, and thus, taking cues from interpretive scholars, I tell a story based

on my interpretations of the interpretations of these practitioners as well as on my own

experiences working alongside them (Geertz 1973; Yanow 1996, 1999; Van Maanen 1988,

1995; Bevir and Rhodes 2003, 2006; Schatz 2009). I have also benefited from ongoing

communication with two of the organisers during the writing-up and members-checking stage

of the research (Yanow 2009; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2009).

All in all, this paper draws attention towards PE practitioners and “the work of participation”

(Escobar 2011), a dimension generally overlooked in the literature. If the move towards

science public engagement (PE henceforth) has been talked into existence through UK policy

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discourses and networks in the last 25 years (Hagendijk and Irwin 2006; Irwin 2006; Thorpe

2010; Thorpe and Gregory 2010), the practice of deliberative public engagement remains at

its experimental stage, and very little has been said about those tasked with translating

deliberative ideas into situated practices (but see Chilvers 2008; Burchell et al. 2009; Pieczka

and Escobar 2010b, 2010a).

I articulate this paper around two themes, trying to zoom in and out on micro and macro

practices (Nicolini 2009a, 2009b). More specifically, I focus on some of the micropolitics of

practitioners’ critical choices (process, formats, sequencing), and then share thoughts on the

macro dimension of institutional capacity for deliberative uptake. Trying to make sense of my

practitioner-oriented experience of the BID process, I reach four provisional conclusions.

Firstly, PE practitioners are faced by the science communicator dilemma. For some time their

job was mainly to educate publics and enthuse the next generation of scientists. Now many of

them are having to become facilitators of public dialogue, which requires moving on from the

science advocacy and science literacy mindsets. Secondly, many practitioners find themselves

trapped in a paradoxical policy landscape. While some policy communities are encouraging

science PE, other policy communities don’t know what to do with the results. Thirdly, there

seems to be a mismatch between the policy-driven promotion of proactive (upstream)

engagement and entrenched cultures of reactive policy making. Finally, I join those who

suggest the need for conversations with policy makers about the current capacity of

representative institutions for the uptake of outputs from external deliberative processes.

2. The Science Public Engagement Agenda: mainstreaming and upstreaming

The UK PE agenda is often depicted -in Science &Technology Studies (STS)- as shaped by a

series of key public controversies and policy-driven turning points over the past 25 years. I

will not dwell here on this well-rehearsed narrative (but see Irwin and Wynne 1996; Irwin

2001, 2006; Wilsdon et al. 2005; Thorpe 2010; Thorpe and Gregory 2010; Chilvers 2008,

2010). In the last ten years we have witnessed the somewhat paradoxical intensification of

top-down efforts to foster bottom up participation. I am thinking for instance about major

tooling-up operations such us Sciencewise, the ESRC Genomics Network, or the UK Beacons

for Public Engagement, to name but a few. Moreover, the alleged evolution from the Public

Understanding of Science to the Public Engagement and Dialogue agendas, has not only been

spearheaded by STS and inscribed in policy statements and funding streams (see Rayner

2003; Burchell et al. 2009), but also embraced by key players in the broader science and

technology policy network (e.g. Royal Society, Research Councils UK, Wellcome Trust).

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Many of these efforts can be framed as attempts to cope with two interrelated challenges

stemming from scholarly analysis and political imperatives. On the one hand, both “the white

coat of science” and the “white toga of values” have been shown to be far from hanging in

different wardrobes (Latour 2004:106; Latour and Woolgar 1979). This recognition was not

only fundamental for the emergence of STS, but it actually reframed much of the social

science of recent decades (Fischer 2009). As Fischer (1993:333) puts it:

…the activity of science is a product of the very social world it seeks to explain. Revealing scientific research to involve far more than the passive reception and organization of sense data, postpositivist theory emphasizes science's dependence on the particular constellation of presuppositions, both theoretical and practical, that prestructure empirical observations. Thus science, like all human knowledge, is grounded in and shaped by the normative assumptions and social meanings of the world it explores.

This takes us to the second challenge: the need to constantly negotiate –in the words echoed

by the then Royal Society President - the scientists’ “license to practice”:

As the Lords report stressed, the dialogue is about science’s ‘licence to practise’. Science is, necessarily, run by scientists, but it is ultimately society which allows science to go ahead and we need to make sure that it goes on doing so. So we need input from non-experts to make sure we are aware of the boundaries to our licence; and, conversely, we need good channels of communication if we want to extend those boundaries… (Klug 2000:4)

The “mood for dialogue” proclaimed by the House of Lords in 2000, has been ever since

trumpeted and operationalised by a series of UK networks and institutions. However, that

mood has not been so palpable throughout the many citadels of “the scientific community”,

and the PE agenda hasn’t had a smooth ride:

There has been gradual, sometimes grudging, recognition that mere communication – whilst important – cannot alleviate justifiable anxieties. Now the watchword is ‘engagement’ and with it, ‘dialogue’. The scientific community is beginning to realise, but often reluctantly accept, that we scientists need to take greater notice of public concerns, and relate and react to them. Expressions of despair at public ignorance, impotent polemics about the advantages of technology, assertions that our economy is threatened by reactionary attitudes, attempts at manipulation of the press, are all totally inadequate responses. Neither will mere lipservice about the value of public engagement be helpful. (Wilsdon et al. 2005:12)

Accordingly, key policy statements have often rested on a conspicuous alchemic feat: the

blend of a wholehearted paean to two-way dialogue and a “deep commitment to the ‘power-

house of innovation’”; a mix that allows “managerial approaches to risk management” to be

accommodated alongside “calls for the active involvement of stakeholders (Irwin 2006:309).

Another widespread criticism (e.g. Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden 2007:194) is that PE often

occurs when it is too late to engage in meaningful dialogue about technology that is already

on the shelves. This critique has rallied support for the notion of “upstream public

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engagement” (Wilsdon and Willis 2004), defined by Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon (2007:346)

as “[d]ialogue and deliberation amongst affected parties about a potentially controversial

technological issue at an early stage of the research and development process and in advance

of significant applications or social controversy”. Although praised in theory, the actual

practices that unfold in upstream engagement experiments have begun to undergo close

scrutiny (see Pidgeon and Rogers-Hayden 2007; Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon 2007, 2008;

Kurath and Gisler 2009; Tait 2009; Stebbing 2009). Most observers reflect on emerging

challenges that have watered down initial expectations, including that of developing dialogue

processes capable of influencing policy making. This paper seeks to add to this pool of case

studies.

Constructing, summoning and performing publics (Mahony et al. 2010; Warner 2002) has

thus become a key activity for scientific communities in the UK. The Government has put a

premium on PE, and the message has trickled down, through funding streams, projects,

agencies, research councils, science centres and museums, academic institutions and research

institutes. Indeed, the top-down stimuli have been rather visible. More rare has been to

witness bottom-up approaches, that is, scientific communities seeking to set up upstream

dialogue processes in the light of their own concerns.

3. The Brain Imaging Dialogue (BID)

To welcome you into the BID, let me expose you to some fragments from the “Background

Summary Paper” (a glossy 2-pager) that participants received on arrival:

Nothing is more intimate and private than a person’s thoughts. New technologies from neuroscience are getting closer and closer to “seeing” what we think. These have many possible applications, not all of them for medical use. They could be used as lie detector tests in courts. To decide if a person is dangerous, even if they haven’t committed any crime. To see what we really like and dislike, so that advertising companies can convince us to buy their products. Medical insurance companies could use them to determine if you are a risk or need to pay higher premiums. Mortgage lenders to see if you are truthful in your application. But are all these applications really a good idea? What should we allow, require or prohibit?

The apparent power of fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] to objectively measure thought (as well as the seductive awe evoked by its images) have driven its widespread use outside of neuroscience research and medicine. Marketing companies are using it to see how we choose between brands, lawyers are interested in whether it can help us decide if someone is lying; Insurance companies want to use it to tell if someone will become ill before they show any symptoms. Whether fMRI can achieve these goals remains to be seen, but it raises ethical issues about the abuse of privacy by the government and corporations to invade the thoughts and control the behaviour of the public.

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This use of imaging outside the scientific and medical arenas in which it was originally intended to be used is now creating situations not imagined by the scientists who developed the technology and who currently do the medical research. This debate is about how we currently use this technology in Society, how it might be used in the future, what do the public think and how should we control its use without impeding scientific discovery?

We can see from the outset the main framing of the issues for consideration. Namely, a

preoccupation with the ownership of the “license to practice”, articulated around the tension

of preventing non-medical (mis)uses of BIT, without hindering the medical research agenda

(unquestioned throughout the BID). The fragments reveal an effort to use non-specialist

language, as well as carefully chosen examples with compelling rhetorical power. The text

also presents medical uses of BIT as being in the safe hands of scientists, while it suggests

that unqualified others (e.g. marketing, advertising and insurance companies, mortgage

lenders) are using it for non-medical purposes. Although initial framing is critical, it does not

mean that frames will remain untouched as a deliberative process unfolds (Schon and Rein

1994). Overall, the starting argument of the BID process could be summarised as follows:

“this technology, which has much medical value and potential, is starting to be used for non-

medical purposes; WE are worried about this, are YOU? If so, what should WE do about it?”

Here the first WE is a network of neuro-scientists and imaging experts and practitioners. The

YOU refers to invited multidisciplinary experts (law, ethics, sociology, divinity, politics, etc),

as well as “members of the public”, and various professionals and policy makers. The third

WE refers to the broad community of inquiry that the BID process aimed to create.

“What Are You Thinking? Who Has the Right to Know? Brain Imaging and its Impact on

Society” was the actual title of the program. I shorten it to BID for brevity’s sake. In this

paper I focus on the BID process, rather than its contents. You may check the contents as

interpreted and summarised by the organisers in the final report1 (see SINAPSE et al. 2010).

A key question is always who initiates upstream engagement. For example, government-

sponsored inquiries are often criticized as rhetorical exercises performed to produce a sense

of control over a perceived problem, to “subdue the voices of powerful pressure groups”, and

to command legitimacy and public acceptance while still reproducing hierarchies of

knowledge (Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon 2007:350-1). These are some of the risks inherent in

the top-down creation of “invited spaces” for participation (Cornwall 2002; Cornwall and

Coelho 2007; Cornwall 2008). The BID represents a different kind of process. It constituted

an invited space, but the invitation did not come from a government-sponsored initiative. In

1http://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/Pastprogrammes/BrainImaging/Documents.aspx

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this case, members of a Scottish scientific community had growing concerns, and thus

decided to reach out to other communities of practice in order to make sense of the situation

and provide some groundwork for public and policy deliberation. The project was initiated by

a broad platform including:

• SINAPSE2 (Scottish Imaging Network: A Platform for Scientific Excellence; a consortium of

6 Scottish Universities)

• Edinburgh Neuroscience3 (a multi-partner centre based at the University of Edinburgh)

• Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics4 (a multi-partner centre based at the University of

Edinburgh)

• Scotland’s Futures Forum5 (funded by and based at the Scottish Parliament)

Representatives from these organisations formed the core group of organisers, and they

sought funding from various sources. Eventually, they obtained funding from the then

Institute of Advanced Studies in Glasgow (now expanded and rebranded as the Scottish

Universities Insight Institute6). The remit of Scottish Insight is to “mobilise existing

knowledge” to inform policy and practice7, and it is directed by a senior civil servant on

secondment from the Scottish Government8. The BID organisers made sure that their funding

application pressed the right buttons, and framed the process as a collective inquiry oriented

towards informing policy making in Scotland:

The key objectives of this programme will be to explore the ethical impact of neuroimaging on society. By stimulating debate and gathering opinion between the general public, societal groups (patients, prisoners), scientists, clinicians, ethicists, legal experts and politicians, we will raise awareness of privacy and ethical issues, determine a cross-section of opinion, and through engagement of users and policy makers, publish reports to guide policy outcomes.

The programme is relevant to Scotland as Scotland has its own legal system, and its evidence law in particular needs to respond to these new technologies … It also has

2 http://www.sinapse.ac.uk

3 http://www.edinburghneuroscience.ed.ac.uk

4 http://www.cfslr.ed.ac.uk/index.htm

5 http://www.scotlandfutureforum.org

6 http://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk

7 Quote from http://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/AbouttheInstitute/WhatWeDo.aspx [Accessed on June 2011]

8 Quote from http://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/AbouttheInstitute/PeopleGovernance/Staffbiographies.aspx [Accessed on June 2011]

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its separate health system. Scotland has more research scanners per head of population than the rest of the UK and has played a major role in developing MR imaging. We need to consider the implications of a tool which Scotland helped to develop.

In an interview during the preparation stage, one of the organisers (a scientist turned PE

practitioner) reflected on their goals. On the one hand, they intended to put the issue on the

policy making agenda:

We are not really expecting legislation, because we're not sure what we want to legislate for or against, we will need to decide first...is there a problem? Maybe there isn't, maybe it's fine and we should leave the market forces run the show [...] What there is is a need for awareness. At the end of the process we want the policy makers and the MSPs [Members of the Scottish Parliament] to be aware that these issues are out there.

On the other, they wanted to provide the upstream groundwork for future public engagement:

By having this debate, if that debate then becomes wider, like the GM thing with the public, then there is something already there, that can be drawn on, which will hopefully head off the hysteria

As the first fragment shows, this practitioner wanted to make it clear that they approach the

BID with an open mind, and determined to let the process shape their thinking. In the second

fragment we find the common trope of the UK GM Nation? debate, which has acquired a

quasi-canonical status not only in STS (e.g. Rowe et al. 2005; Irwin 2006; Horlick-Jones et

al. 2007) but also amongst PE practitioners. Indeed, interpretations of that process have

become part of a vivid imaginary in PE communities of practice9. In this case, the practitioner

evokes it to benchmark the kind of “hysteria” that the BID process seeks to prevent. It can be

argued that the GM Nation? imaginary has played a substantial role in drawing PE

practitioners’ (both scientists and professionals) attention towards upstream engagement. It

has also motivated practitioners like the one above to opt for a sort of controlled dialogue that

included selective releases to the media and a sequencing of the BID process that privileged

expert voices. Figure 1 represents that sequence.

9 References to GM Nation? were common during the BID process. They also often came up in our interviews with PE practitioners in a previous project (Pieczka and Escobar 2010a, 2010b). And it is a topical area amongst the UK practitioners I have met during my work as a Public Engagement Fellow of Edinburgh Beltane (UK Beacons for Public Engagement).

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Figure 1. The BID process: What are we thinking? And who should know? Brain Imaging and its

impact on society (adapted from SINAPSE et al. 2010)

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Notwithstanding the elitist bias, the BID included a varied range of voices and perspectives,

including those who occasionally challenged “the agendas and practices of science itself,

rather than solely the present or future representations that a society might hold about that

science: ‘Why this technology? Why not another? Who needs it? Who owns it? Who will

benefit from it? Can they be trusted? Who will take responsibility if things go wrong?”

(Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon, 2007:354). It would be a mistake to judge this type of

multidisciplinary expert-led process in reference to, for instance, “mini-publics” which have

some kind of claim to representativeness of a certain population (Goodin and Dryzek 2006;

Smith 2009). Instead, the BID set the stage for the development of a community of inquiry.

4. Building a community of inquiry

The case I am presenting here is that of a “community of practice” (Wenger 1998) reaching

out to diverse others in order to constitute a broader “community of inquiry”:

Common to all communities of inquiry is a focus on a problematic situation. The problematic situation is a catalyst that helps or causes the community to form and it provides a reason to undertake inquiry. […] The democratic community also takes into account values/ideals such as freedom, equality, and efficiency as it considers goals and objectives. The three key ideas—problematic situation, scientific attitude, and participatory democracy. (Shields 2003:511)

A community of inquiry brings together “professional knowledge and lived experience”

forming an “interpretive community” of citizens and experts (Fischer 2003:222):

Through mutual discourse this community seeks a persuasive understanding of the issues under investigation […] This involves developing arenas and forums in which knowledge can be debated and interpreted in relation to the relevant policy issues.

In the following fragment, a PE practitioner explains their snow-balling invitation strategy

and the thinking behind it:

We collectively put together the invite list, although I contributed more than most I

think – we used personal contacts, asking people from relevant committees for

recommendations (e.g. I spoke to Michael Gazzaniga and got suggestions from him), I

also searched on internet. Joanna suggested imaging people who had written articles

also expressing concern. We wanted UK, Europe and USA people and from many

different fields.

[Interviewer: What was the overall goal of the process?] To understand whether there

were issues that needed to be addressed at a policy level.

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When is a community of inquiry useful? PE practitioners, especially those who are novices to

“dialogue”, often face the question of timing: when is the best moment to convene a public?

If it’s done too downstream, the exercise may become toothless or tokenistic. If it is too

upstream, no one may feel compelled to participate. This PE practitioner put it as follows in

an early interview:

At the minute, for something like this, I don't think that the public will get hysterical about it. The reason why they got hysterical about the genetic food thing was that it was already in the shops, they were eating it. This technology that we are talking about isn't being used against them at the minute. There are other issues related to its use, but most of them won't impact on most members of the public. […] Most of our debate will come from the experts, but with the public behind highlighting the issues.

The “public” is a problematic concept. The “public” is not an entity but a contingent

assemblage resulting from specific contexts and dynamics (Warner 2002). Research has

shown how participation processes do not simply attract a public that is ‘out there’, but they

actually construct their publics by convening and summoning them through various practices

(Mahony et al. 2010; Mahony 2008; Clarke and Newman 2009). The BID organisers

succeeded in attracting to the process members of various expert communities, but left the

non-expert-led phase in the hands of the Scotland’s Futures Forum, who struggled to create a

public for their stage. Accordingly, this was a community of inquiry where expert voices

often dominated, although it included participants from diverse domains and languages of

expertise did not always prevail –indeed, mutual understanding was problematic throughout.

A diverse and multidisciplinary community of inquiry, troubled by the demanding task of

discursively constructing “joint fact-finding” pathways (Laws and Forester 2007), often

undergoes a series of struggles capable of disrupting the stereotypical (expert consensus-led)

engagement dynamics of many PE processes. For example, during the BID, Part 1 was one of

puzzlement: many imaging experts seemed startled when some of their peers suggested that

BIT could actually do what they deemed impossible. Moreover, at least one of them

suggested that it not only could, but it should. The context for the following fieldnote

fragment [verbatim phrases in inverted comas] is that in previous sessions the dominant view,

and emerging consensus, had been that BIT could not reliably produce the results alleged by

neuro-marketing advocates.

To talk about ‘neuroscience in industry’, we have Prof. Gemma Calvert (University of Warwick, and WMG Innovative Solutions). She is an advocate of Neuromarketing, defined as “consumer research measuring biology instead of psychology” and “measuring neural responses in the brain”. She prefers the term Applied Neuroscience rather than neuro-marketing. It is “good for British industry! 80% of new products fail upon launch” “it is unethical not to do anything to help here”. Then she goes on to criticise the reliability of “focus groups” used for the same purpose.

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She then explains BI is currently used by: global packaged goods, flavour and fragrance houses, media owners and planners, advertisement agencies, pharmaceuticals, digital gaming and services. Current applications include: measuring effectiveness of communications (public messages), neuro-ergonomics (human-machine interface), validate focus group output, de-risking marketing decisions, evaluation of traditional market research tools, patents (back up product claims), PR opportunities…These industries’ R+D departments are mostly formed by postdoctoral academics, “scientists like yourselves”, she remarks.

Here Prof. Calvert10 is not only saying that neuro-marketing works, but also that it would be

“unethical” not to use it. She highlights the also tentative nature of other current methods

(“focus groups”; “psychology”), and then goes on to list the variety of BIT current purposes,

uses and fields. In a move that also threw another dimension into relief, she put her finger on

the taken for granted mistrust of scientists working in industry in contrast to those working in

academia and the public sector. Later on she would remind other table-discussion participants

that many scientific advances have come precisely from “scientists working for industry”.

Her interventions dislocated some of the underlying dichotomies that had been formed in

previous discussions (e.g. responsible and precise medical/academic researchers vs. obscure

and lousy industry researchers). This re-framing created visible puzzlement in the room, with

many shaking heads. It unsettled the emerging consensus, and forced the participants to

abandon the scientific debate of whether some things can be done with the technology (and

with it the promise of sorting the issue out through scientific debate), and move on to

normative engagement with the issue of what uses of BIT should or should not be permitted.

A community of inquiry can also bring up other assumptions, and break stereotypes that have

prevented important conversations from happening. In this sense, it may be a response to the

malaise pointed out by Collins (2009:30): “Scientists have been too dogmatic about scientific

truth and sociologists have fostered too much skepticism”. A community of inquiry pushes

participants to investigate the issues through a collaborative dialogue premised on the need

for collective intelligence (as in the Buddhist story with the elephant and the 3 blind men11, no

one in the room can have the whole picture). In the process, they share meals, drinks, breaks

and lots of talk. Everyone can bring their knowledge and ways of seeing to bear on the

10 As many other participants in the BID, Prof. Calvert’s attendance was jeopardized by the Icelandic ash cloud that closed the skies at the time. Technology made her participation possible; she gave a presentation and also joined two of the table discussions. However, her limited virtual presence was unfortunate, especially given that she held a dissenting perspective. It prevented her contribution to the conversations during breaks and meals where most of the participants engaged in small-group sense-making, working out their thoughts from talks and discussions, and forging the bones of a certain consensus (pro-regulation).

11 See Shields (2003:513).

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others’, and there is not escape to the safe heaven of compartmented disciplines. It also

requires a huge effort to overcome jargon divides.

One of the strengths of the BID was its cross-disciplinary nature. By bringing together such a

diverse group of people, it broadened the framing of the issues, thus teasing out their

multifaceted implications. Rayner (2003; see also Tait 2009) shows scepticism about

substituting the expertise of scientists for the expertise of social scientists deploying

participation techniques. I believe this misses the point: although participatory assessment can

and is increasingly used in managerial ways to substitute traditional expert-led closed

committees (Chilvers 2008), it can also be used to create a community of policy inquiry.

A community of inquiry is thus an exercise of collective intelligence. The more diverse, the

more difficult and legitimate it becomes. The meaning of the concept can be unpicked from

its terms. It is a community because it constitutes a safe space to engage in meaningful

dialogue, understood as conversational dynamics that build a high quality relationship

amongst participants. This relationship allows for dialogue that is based on inquiry rather than

advocacy dynamics (Escobar 2009; also Escobar forthcoming; Tannen 1998; Deetz and

Simpson 2004; Pearce and Pearce 2004; Gastil and Levine 2005). The spirit of inquiry

promotes deep exploration and critical engagement with the issues under investigation, but

avoids the typical shallow exchange of adversarial debate where mostly pre-packaged

messages are traded in a series of monologues. Advocacy dynamics often prevail in

deliberative processes aimed at decision-making. That is where the hybrid form of

“deliberative dialogue” becomes useful (see Escobar 2009:60). In deliberative dialogue, the

focus on relationship-building and deep understanding that characterises dialogue informs and

modulates the posterior advocacy-based weighing of alternatives and decision-making that

characterises deliberation. That is why scholar-practitioners of dialogue talk about its capacity

to foster collective intelligence by engaging deep exploration rather than ritualised opposition

(Isaacs 1999; Yankelovich 1999; Spano 2001; Innes and Booher 2003, 2010). And that is

precisely what a community of inquiry seeks to do.

However, the unfolding of deliberative dialogue depends on a series of critical choices by its

conveners, and draws our attention to the interesting dimension of the micropolitics of

engagement.

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5. Deliberative dialogue: practices and micropolitics

Deliberative dialogue is a conversational hybrid in the interpersonal communication

continuum. The difference between dialogue and deliberation is one of emphasis (see

Escobar 2009; Innes and Booher 2003; Gastil and Levine 2005; Kim and Kim 2008; Forester

2009). The former aims to focus on relationship building and mutual understanding through

inquiry dynamics, and the latter on weighting alternatives and making decisions through

advocacy dynamics (Escobar 2009:57-62; Levine et al. 2005). By characterising the BID

process as a deliberative dialogue, I am highlighting the features in Table 1.

Table 1. BID’s dialogic and deliberative features

Dialogic features

The organisers tried to create a safe space for open exchange (e.g. framing the

encounters as collaborative exercises; allowing time for relational rituals such as

sharing meals and drinks). The progressive structure of the process allowed for

relationship building amongst repeat participants.

Storytelling was used (e.g. future and current case scenarios) alongside more

formal ways of communication. Emotions were often expressed and respected as

valuable input, especially in small table discussions.

A balance between inquiry and advocacy dynamics characterised most

exchanges. The nature of the topic prevented the mere exchange of pre-packaged

opinions. Generally, participants wanted to know more before advocating

specific positions, and therefore questioning became as important as persuading.

Deliberative features

Participants were exposed to a range of expert views in order to inform their

deliberations (although they didn’t select them, and some interests were

underrepresented –i.e. commercial- or absent –i.e. military)

Rational argumentation and the voicing of public reasons were especially

prominent in the plenary sessions.

Weighting alternatives and making provisional decisions (i.e. about conclusions

and recommendations) was a driving force in each phase.

These features present an overall positive view of the process, but add very little to our

learning of situated practice. To learn about the challenging nature of engagement we must

zoom-in on critical dynamics. The typical structure of the full day encounters in each BID

phase included a range of topical presentations, followed by plenary discussions and then

15

table discussion groups. The myriad communication dynamics that unfold during a process

like this cannot be adequately studied here. Instead, I would like to focus on the impact of

some of the critical choices made by the organisers, and the challenges that such choices

present to PE practitioners. If communication is the “observable part of a relationship”

(Penman 2000:1), I want to zoom-in on the dynamics that forged various relationships

throughout BID. The importance of the micropolitics of science PE is increasingly

documented by authors such as Davies (2011:12; see also Davies et al. 2006):

…dialogue and deliberation are constrained by all sorts of factors, from the specific histories and experiences of participants to the size of the groups they are convened in. Anything from the venue public engagement activities are held in – a bar or a school? – to the way that participants are introduced creates dynamics which shape the content of discussion; it is worth, then, being mindful of the minutiae of dialogue in all its forms.

…equitable dialogue does not come naturally: work must be done to bring it about beyond simply placing those from ostensibly different cultures in the same space. Paying careful attention to the formats of public engagement and to the hierarchies that may be embedded within them will enable us to build increasingly robust and innovative mechanisms for re-working these hierarchies.

One of the first critical choices was to sequence the BID according to areas of expertise (see

Figure 1 above). The bulk of participants in the first two phases were cross-disciplinary

experts who discussed the current state of BIT and the legal and ethical implications. The

third and fourth phases brought to the process additional members and representatives of

various publics and policy makers. The organisers wanted the experts to work out the issues

at stake (e.g. what can the science do? what are the legal and ethical implications?) before

incorporating other voices. As Chilvers (2008:180) points out, this separation of expert

analysis and public deliberation is highly problematic. For instance, it leaves to the experts

the framing of the issues, narrowing the potential scope for non-expert input. However, this

implies a rather deterministic process where experts act as a monolithic block and consensus

comes easily. That was not the case in the BID, where disensus abounded not only across but

also within areas of expertise.

Let’s consider for instance the process of self-alienation engaged by many of the participant

scientists (who seemed as surprised as me while learning about new uses of BIT), as they

distanced themselves from their everyday use of BIT in order to grasp the broader landscape

of the technology. It can be argued that this process fostered the reflection of the scientist as a

citizen. Perhaps we should move beyond totalising concepts such as science or scientist, and

take a more nuanced approach. Scientists share a set of methodologies and ways of knowing,

but do not and cannot know everything even in their subject areas. They are part of a rich and

diverse community where disagreement is as embedded as consensus. As various scientists

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acknowledged, despite their expertise on a particular area of brain imaging, they could not

fully understand the actual possibilities and implications of the technology in other areas. The

dynamics of the community of inquiry offered to these scientists a way of distancing

themselves from their familiar turf and exploring the broader impact of BIT.

I was also struck by the demystification of science that unfolded throughout the process. To

see a scientific community hesitating, incapable of publicly performing any kind of rehearsed

consensus, and discussing not only technicalities but moral and practical implications, was an

eye opener for those of us previously exposed to monolithic representations of such

communities. To me, they appeared extremely candid in showing the contested nature of the

‘scientific facts’ under scrutiny in the first leg of the BID. Judging by the reactions of scientist

participants, it was also an eye-opener for them to witness disagreement around what can and

can’t be done with a technology they thought they knew well (e.g. neuro-marketing

discussion above). Accordingly, all participants, including natural scientists, got a glimpse of

what is meant by typical references to the contested / constructed / discursive nature of ‘fact’

and ‘evidence’.

There were many moments of puzzlement in the room. This was not a dialogue dominated by

any single one voice, and it was revealing to see that the people most concerned with

emerging uses of BIT were scientists themselves. Many have depicted deliberative exercises

as prone to being captured by interest groups (Irwin, 2006; Tait, 2009). This did not happened

in the BID, although the voices of public sector scientists –a diverse interest group in itself-

were clearly prominent throughout. In this sense, it can be suggested that the BID was a

reaction by a scientific community to the threat that commercial uses of the technology poses

to their own research agendas, and thus a struggle to define who should have license to

practice in this area. However, what is remarkable about the BID is that this scientific

community reached out to various others in order to make sense of their situation and

concerns.

Pitfalls and micropolitics during the BID

Designing and implementing deliberative dialogues entails small choices that can have

critical impact. I outline here some examples of pitfalls from various stages of BID. In the

first place, the choice of a Chairman Model –rather than a Facilitator Model (more on this

later)- had important consequences for the communication dynamics in table discussions.

Sitting as a scribe in the first 2 group discussions of Part 1, I could observe how a very

outspoken Chairman dominated the exchange. He was an academic expert with a lot to say,

and so he paid little attention to facilitating a multipart conversation. This brought problems

17

of exclusion, with a few expert voices (3 out of 7) dominating both of these table sessions.

The Chairman made no effort to ensure everyone had opportunities to speak, although many

participants may have had little to say given the specialised nature of the issues that the

Chairman emphasised for discussion. He never checked that everyone understood the

discussion, which accentuated the problems caused by the specialist jargon deployed, and did

very little in trying to bridge the language gap between scientists and non-scientists around

the table. This, in addition to the lack of proper facilitation, created a sense of frustration in

some participants –judging by their facial expressions. Most around the table could read the

body language, apart from the Chairman, who was too busy entertaining his concerns.

Most group leads reported during the plenary sessions the difficulty in understanding each

other’s language (i.e. neuroscientists, legal professionals, philosophers, sociologists, etc), a

challenge that characterised the BID throughout, although it seemed to be eased towards the

last phases. In addition, there were problems around the feedback from our table discussion to

the plenary, as the issues reported were strongly filtered by the Chairman’s focus, i.e.

cognitive neuroscience in this case, and criminology in another session. I cannot say whether

the dynamics in other tables were similar. However, judging by the notes taken by the scribes,

most tables had the same type of expert Chairman-led discussion, which, as I will later argue,

can be highly problematic.

The expert mode in which most conversations in Part 1 (Neuroimaging) and 2 (Law) unfolded

can be epitomised in the concluding remarks of one of the speakers: “now it is for the

scientists to clarify what is feasible, what can be done, and for us lawyers and people from the

legal arena to work out what should be done.” The professional-expert framing is here

obvious, and the elitist and exclusionary undertone undeniable. The absence of more lay

participants in this initial phases (anyone not claiming to be an expert in science, humanities,

etc) left the normative dimension of the debate in the hands of cross-disciplinary experts.

Given that many exchanges around ethical issues operated in ‘expert mode’, participants were

often forced to encode personal values into their professional arguments, which left other

valuable input out (e.g. the story behind their positions, personal fears and hopes, etc).

In part 3 (Public), the BID opened its doors to members of the public and representatives

from civic organisations (although some had taken part in previous phases too). As I said

earlier, Scotland’s Futures Forum didn’t manage to attract many people. Still, there were 26

participants, with a high proportion of senior citizens. The format was different for this

encounter. Participants received a quick intro to Brain Imaging, and then were given a series

of “Case studies from the future”, including various fictitious scenarios (medical, security,

commerce, law) that served as stimulus for table conversations featuring volunteer

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facilitators. The twist came at the end of the plenary session, when the convener announced

that some of those scenarios had already happened. During this encounter I facilitated one of

the tables including highly articulate participants, who often used elaborated expressions such

as “individual medical necessity” and “evidence solid beyond reasonable doubt”. It was an

interested public, with many participants retired from the medical profession or academia and

others drawn from patients’ groups.

In part 4 (Policy), the BID brought many of its previous participants to engage in policy-

oriented discussions with various national and international policy makers and actors. It

repeated the format of parts 1 and 2. Summaries of previous phases were presented, alongside

the results of a public and survey conducted by the organisers. Subsequently, there were

speeches by the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government and by Professor

Jonathan Moreno, an American expert who shared his take on how these issues are playing

out in American policy making arenas. When the plenary broke out for table discussions,

some the problems outlined above were repeated, albeit to a lesser extent. Lack of facilitation

by a fully participant Chairman allowed dominant voices to prevail. In the table where I sat,

those voices often took the discussion to their professional territory, closing the conversation

up and avoiding the ethical and policy questions on the agenda. Jargon barriers were still

recurrent, and with no one to care about this dimension of the process, misunderstanding

often led to disengagement by some participants, allowing the most vocal experts to digress

and go on about unrelated issues.

Benchmarking the BID process

Chilvers (2008) outlines a series of criteria to benchmark participatory processes in science

public engagement. See Table 1. I use some of them here to provide brief commentary about

the overall process.

Table 2. Seven effectiveness criteria for participatory processes (Chilvers 2008:159)

Participatory processes should… Criteria

…be representative of all those interested and affected by a decision or action and

remove unnecessary barriers to participation

Representativeness and

inclusivity

…allow all those involved to enter the discourse and put forward their views in

interactive deliberation that develops mutual understanding between participants

Fair deliberation

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…provide sufficient resources (information, expertise, time) for effective

participation

Access to resources

…be transparent to all those inside and outside of the process about objectives,

boundaries, and how participation relates to decision making

Transparency and

accountability

…enhance social learning of all those involved, including participants, specialists,

decision makers, and wider institutions

Learning

…be conducted (managed and facilitated) in an independent and unbiased way Independence

…be cost-effective and timely Efficiency

Representativeness and inclusivity. The BID was only representative of a variety of views

mostly within interested communities of practice. That is probably enough for the purpose of

a community of inquiry12. The difficulty was to attract non-expert stakeholders. Although Part

3 was publicised and invitations widely distributed (press, online, networks), it didn’t attract

as many people as they hoped. Perhaps specific groups should have been directly targeted

(prisoners, religious communities, etc). However, processes like this cannot get away from

the upstream engagement paradox: it is only downstream (when technologies are developed

and applied) that ‘publics’ emerge and stakeholder groups are constituted to dispute the new

discursive space open by the technology. Upstream PE implies acting proactively, but

‘publics’ often emerge and begin to claim a stake reactively. Upstream PE seeks to anticipate

the dynamic of public outrage/mediatisation of the issue by opening up a space for early

public dialogue, but active participant publics are only brought into existence precisely

because the issue becomes an object of public concern and media attention.

Fair deliberation. Despite the problems accentuated by the Chairman model in some of the

table discussions, there were also multiple opportunities for deliberative exchange in the

plenary sessions and few participants remained silent (or silenced?) throughout.

12 Here I follow Goodin and Dryzek (2006:221): “We will be focusing on mini-publics with some claim to representativeness of the public at large. Representation is something of a conceptual thicket in political theory. By “some claim,” we do not mean statistical representativeness—which only one design, the deliberative poll, explicitly asserts. Nor do we mean electoral representation. All “some claim to representativeness” need mean is that the diversity of social characteristics and plurality of initial points of view in the larger society are substantially present in the deliberating mini-public. Social characteristics and viewpoints need not be present in the same proportions as in the larger population, nor need members of the mini-public be accountable to the larger population in the way elected representatives are.”

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Access to resources. There was plenty of information and expertise in the room, the main

problem was the lack of time and effort to bridge the language gap between cross-disciplinary

experts.

Transparency and accountability. It was made clear from the beginning that a report would

be produced and taken to the Scottish Parliament.

Learning. In my view, and that of other participants I spoke to, this was one of the strengths

of the BID.

Independence. The BID was organised as an independent process by a diverse platform.

However, as I have argued, the facilitation of some table sessions was clearly biased towards

the interest of the respective Chairman. In addition, the BID process never questioned the

technology itself but only some of its non-medical uses. Accordingly, there was an overall

pro-science bias.

It would be too easy to dismiss the BID because of its expert-led dynamics, especially when

at this upstream stage only experts from neuroscience, law, ethics etc seem concerned and

interested in opening the debate. If they were to wait until organised publics demanded it, it

might not happen until the technology is used for non-medical purposes in Scotland. This

simply replicates the reactive modus operandi that upstream engagement seeks to prevent.

Despite its pitfalls, the BID offers an example of a scientific community that aims to

• be self-reflective, exploring the societal implications of a technology

• be open to public scrutiny

• foster cross-disciplinary deliberation

• gather intelligence on the subject from diverse, sometimes opposed, perspectives and

points of view

• offer arguments for informed public debate

• provide part of the groundwork for policy deliberation.

6. Taking it to the Scottish Parliament

Lastly, in Part 5, we took the final BID report (SINAPSE et al. 2010) to the Scottish

Parliament. Scotland’s Futures Forum (SFF) arranged a 1-hour “working lunch” with MSPs

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and Parliament researchers. As Kadlec and Friedman argue, the end of a deliberative dialogue

is not the end of a practitioner’s work, but the beginning on a “new and most challenging

phase of it, an activist phase” (2007:19; emphasis in the original). In this phase, PE

practitioners seek to make the process count. If the BID offered practitioners plenty of

challenges, this final phase was in no way less demanding.

We were a delegation of over a dozen participants and organisers of the BID, and there was

quite a lot of excitement as we enter Committee Room 1.2 at the Scottish Parliament.

Disappointment, however, followed up pretty soon. The convener from SFF opened the

meeting apologising for the “lack of policy makers in the room”, and explained that some

committees had overrun preventing MSPs from coming. Two of the BID organisers go on to

present a summary of the issues. We are all pretty familiar with them, so they are basically

presenting to a handful of newcomers. The organisers’ frustration was palpable. About 15

minutes later some parliamentary researchers come along, as well as 2 MSPs that suggest

ways of taking this forward. One makes the offer of taking it to the attention of the Health

Committee, as well as the possibility of briefing the Science and Technology Committee.

They also offered advice about creating clear messages so that this is ready to go into the

spotlight as soon as media attention increases. During the last 10 minutes there was actually a

sense of relief, as the session seemed more productive in terms of getting the issue on the

agenda. This encounter, which was thought to be the end of the road, became actually the

beginning of another. One that the organisers and PE practitioners of BID were not ready for.

In the forthcoming months there was some movement. A Motion was tabled, but it wasn’t

selected. A presentation to another committee and a discussion with someone from SPICE

(Scottish Parliament Information Centre) didn’t have any follow up. The Justice Committee

were scheduled to look at the report in private in November 2010, but there was not feedback.

In the meantime, the core group of organisers underwent some changes, with people leaving

their organisations. Eventually, they run out of energy to cope with the frustrations of the

activist phase. One of them puts it this way in a recent email conversation:

The MSP's and researchers at the Parliament (the ones who turned up anyway) grasped the issues readily and were very helpful in person. Follow-up was more problematic - the Motion was not well written (we did have the opportunity to input on this but we didn't have any idea of what a Motion should look like), […] and I have no idea what resulted from the appearance at the committee (we don't get any feedback so it is hard to judge impact).

I think my overall comment would be that I was delighted we were able to talk to policymakers/MSP's at all […] However, although I appreciate that people were interested in the issues, I think it has all rather drifted away as it isn't something of immediate usefulness to Parliament. We ourselves have also run out of steam a bit, which is a shame. I feel we identified what we realistically could achieve and

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managed that (raised awareness, identified the issues, identified possible ways forward). The 'wish-list' stuff - actually getting something significant done ([name]'s committee, regulation of MRI practitioners) I can't see us having the energy to keep pursuing as I think it would require a tremendous amount of constantly revisiting the issues with Policymakers. I hope I'm wrong!

What was taken to the Parliament anyway? It was basically a report summarising the BID

process, including key points of agreement, reached through deliberation by a diverse range

of expert and participants in a cumulative process. My impression is that ‘process’ was not

the focal point of interest once we arrived to the policymaking arena. They were interested in

the recommendations and the “evidence”. Policy is made of interweaving elements. Evidence

is one of them, and it is constructed and negotiated discursively (Head 2008). The BID

exemplified the difficulty of arriving to a consensus on what constitutes evidence to be

considered for policy making and potential regulatory frameworks. Rather than a set of

unshakeable data, policy makers got a set of recommendations based on mixed reports on the

current possibilities of the technology, speculations on the feasibility of certain future

developments, and clusters of values, ethical considerations and practical judgements based

on complex inquiry.

Out of this typical mess (Head 2008), they must extract implications for further consultation

and potential regulation . During our visit to the Parliament, an influential policy maker put it

very bluntly: “this report is all very well, but to circulate this to relevant committees and

include it in the agenda I need a 1-pager with six bullet points”. There can be problems with

such processes of distillation. They may create a false appearance of consensus. The Brain

Imaging Dialogue did produce certain level of consensus in terms of the need for regulation

and a watchdog for non-medical uses of BI. But it was a complex, nuanced consensus with

lots of footnotes and balances between critical self-assessment by this scientific community

and the need to avoid hindering research through unnecessary regulatory burdens. Therefore,

on the one hand, we find politicians, science policy networks, and policy makers calling for

public engagement and critical cross-disciplinary deliberations, and yet, on the other hand,

when they get the rich, thick results of such exercises they seem unable to digest a not even

fully fleshed version of a truly complex dialogue.

I wonder how these policy makers and researchers interpreted the BID and its report. Perhaps

they understood this community of inquiry as an advocacy coalition, or as an interest group

with a set of recommendations. My reading is that they did not get that this was a deliberative

process through an ad hoc community of inquiry, and that its ultimate goal was to foster

further and broader dialogue. If that was the case, these policy gatekeepers reframed such

upstream PE as the kind of exercise that the process is precisely trying to avoid. One way or

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another, the issue was not deemed worthy of entering the agenda. The groundwork done

during BID in order to open broader public and policy discussion seems therefore in vain, at

least for the moment.

7. Lessons learned

Practitioners’ live in a “world of tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexing concrete

experience” (W. James, 1907:21; quoted in Shields 2004:352). For most of the BID

organisers this process was their baptism of fire as “deliberative practitioners” (Forester

1999). The majority of them were university scientists turned into science communicators.

Before moving on to the final part of this paper, I present brief reflections about 2 challenges

they seem to face.

The science communicator dilemma: advocating or facilitating?

Science communicators have become an important professional group in the UK, and many

scientists have seen their roles expanded to embed science communication (Pieczka and

Escobar 2010a:12-16, 2010b). However, in many areas, the Public Understanding of Science

era -ushered by the Bodmer Report in 1985- is seen as obsolete. In those areas, especially in

controversial science, the PUS model of scientific literary (educating publics) has given way

to the Public Engagement model, which calls for dialogue and deliberation. In the last

decade, accordingly, many science communicators have become public engagement

professionals. With this new role come new dilemmas. I want to highlight one in particular. It

has to do with the mindset required to develop their new role.

The traditional task of science communicators is to disseminate, discuss and advocate science

and technology. They role out large school outreach programs, mount large operations such

as science festivals, and participate in the media (Pieczka and Escobar 2010a:12). In contrast,

their new task as deliberative practitioners is to create spaces for dialogue and deliberation

around science and technology. The focus here is on process, not content. Arguably, they

cannot wear a facilitative and an advocate hat at the same time. Therefore, many PE

practitioners see themselves joggling the demands of contradictory roles. Today they write a

press release praising the research of their organisation, and tomorrow they organise a

deliberative process where participants must appraise the technology involved. As Rogers-

Hayden and Pidgeon have argued:

All of this sets a dilemma for the design and conduct of upstream engagement processes, since it is hard to see how the goals of opening up the research agenda to

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more public scrutiny on the one hand can be reconciled with a push to use engagement to shape public discourses on the other. (2007:355)

The science communicator dilemma is, therefore, one of identity in situated practice. It

presents itself at the nodal point of job descriptions, professional loyalties, personal skills, and

normative orientations. So, can PE practitioners be advocates and facilitators at the same

time? These are critical junctures for which there are no blueprints. Reflection-in-action

(Schon 1983) becomes fundamental in this area of practice. In my view, it is a matter of

having the appropriate mindset. My previous research with PE practitioners suggests there is

much confusion around this issue (Pieczka and Escobar 2010a).

This dilemma, however, was not central to the scientists/science communicators leading the

BID, although as I have argued earlier, only certain uses of BIT were examined and public

sector science was never under question. Nevertheless, given the goal they collaboratively set

up (a frame13 accepted by the participants), I could see the effort they put in creating a safe

space for open dialogue, and their attempt to balance the range of views represented in the

panels of experts. However, I believe their lack of consideration for the intricacies of table

deliberation was a product of the contradictory mindset that underlies the science

communicator dilemma. They chose the Chairman Model out of habit. I would like to argue

that this model is inappropriate for this kind of deliberative dialogue. We are all familiar with

it. Someone, on the back of her/his expertise and reputation, is appointed to facilitate a

discussion. But, why would you put someone who surely has a lot to contribute to the

conversation in charge of moving it along? This is a point often made by deliberative scholar-

practitioners:

this approach can severely constrain the quality of deliberation and can even backfire to such an extent that participants’ cynicism and disengagement are exacerbated rather than mitigated. In such situation, moderators […] consider themselves experts on the subject, they “love to talk,” they have strong feelings about how the problem needs to be addressed […] [This] can be so counterproductive to the process of deliberation that they can have a lethal effect on its quality. […] Once these individuals are given practical control of small-group deliberation, the groups tend to reproduce the inequalities and silences that characterize our larger society. […] The significance of design comes to the fore when we realize that potentially self-defeating dynamics such as these can be easily circumvented. Even minor guidelines to groups about selecting moderators and the moderator’s function can make a major difference here, and an even stronger remedy […] is in-depth moderator training prior to a deliberative process. (Kadlec and Friedman 2007:12-13)

13 See Rayner (2003:168) for a critique of how framing PE processes in terms of ‘risk’ leaves profounder questions about science untouched, rendering participatory processes as managerial rather than democratic exercises.

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In hindsight, it is easy to see that some of the many BID table discussions suffered from this

malaise. Sometimes the hard work PE practitioners put into a process can be tainted by

apparently small details. While the BID organisers dealt with the SC dilemma, many of the

Chairs they chose decided not to wear a facilitative hat. But why would they? They had a lot

to say. Instead of following the usual practice of having a high profile expert chairing, the

organisers could have chosen to provide facilitators who attend “solely to group process,

rather than combining facilitation with content expertise” (Krantz 2003:234). “Strictly

separating these roles, at least in time if not in persons, is considered by many to be a basic

tenet of good facilitation” (Krantz 2003:236 n.22).

Upstream engagement, downstream policy making

Tomorrow a recruitment company sets headquarters in Edinburgh to launch their new range

of revolutionary industry services. They use Brain Imaging Technology to scrutinise

prospective employees and screen behavioural propensities (e.g. absenteeism) in order to

select the right individuals for the right jobs. The next day a newspaper runs the story:

“Scientific advances in brain scanning undermine worker’s rights”. A pundit comments:

“scientific communities work in the shadows of society, advancing technologies used for

dubious purposes. When will scientists learn to be self-reflective and open to discuss new

technologies before things get out of control?”

Avoiding that type of scenario was precisely the goal of the Brain Imaging Dialogue: to carry

out upstream engagement in order to avoid uninformed hysteria and knee-jerk policy

reactions. In many ways, this was a rather elitist process –although this would probably

satisfy those critics who call for policy dialogue based on the “best available evidence” (Tait

2009:21). Indeed, the BID featured some of the foremost international experts, including

Professors Jonathan Moreno and Hank Greely, and Judge Jed Rakoff, whose job was to help

participants to explore the ethical dimensions of BIT. There were also efforts to include

members of the general public (using news items, invitations through networks and an

opinion survey), but in my view that wasn’t the key goal. The organisers wanted to take the

pulse of this scientific community, as well as call upon cross-disciplinary experts to explore

the issues in a safe space.

PE practitioners face the dilemma of working out when to engage wider publics. If a scientific

community is highly divided, shouldn’t they first come to some minimum consensus in order

to clarify what the technology can and can’t do? This goes along the lines of what Collins et

al. (2010) call the ‘technical phase’ (for a critique see Fischer 2009: Ch. 5). If the technology

is underdeveloped, will publics be bothered to participate? Before the BID I interviewed one

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of its organisers. She was very conscious of how the wrong media exposure could actually

make this dialogue process counterproductive. At the end of the day, they wanted a space

where they could be self-critical without being self-defeating. They wanted to consider

whether there was a need for regulation to ensure that they could carry on doing research, and

that non-medical uses of the technology didn’t produce the media frenzy and public outrage

that had stopped other developments on their tracks. That was their agenda, and indeed many

voices made the case for it, albeit other participants also questioned it (e.g. Prof. Calvert).

The biggest challenge in upstream engagement is how to feed its results into policy

deliberation. Government-sponsored upstream engagement rarely has a clear link to policy

making (Irwin 2006:313; Hoppe 2011:180), and so it is no surprising that most reports from

independent processes fall into the vacuum every year in the UK. As some observers argue,

…early dialogue also raises the question, not only of the goals of debate, but of how the relationship between participation and policy outcomes might operate. Evidence with traditional forms of public participation suggests that this can quickly lead to anger and stakeholder fatigue if they do not appear to be linked to policy consideration (Rayner, 2003). Additionally, as Rayner also points out, establishing a linkage between deliberative processes and policy outcomes is inevitably difficult at the best of times and moving debate upstream is unlikely to make this situation any easier. (Rogers-Hayden and Pidgeon 2007:360)

Therefore, what is the point of upstream deliberative engagement in a culture of downstream

policy making?

Advocates of ‘deliberative democracy’ occasionally present it as an alternative mode of governance, but that is not how deliberative engagements work in practice. Governments see public deliberation as commensurable and complementary with other modes of governance. Put more strongly, the European rhetoric of ‘innovation through deliberation’ needs careful scrutiny. Tough questions remain to be asked, raising fundamental issues for the governance of science. […] The case studies suggest that bureaucratic structures tend to subsume deliberative exercises within conventional processes, and return quickly to ‘business as usual’. (Hagendijk and Irwin 2006:182)

The BID case is another example of how the impact of the outcomes of deliberative practice

depends on embedded policy making cultures, including bureaucratic modus operandi,

partisan strategizing, and agenda-setting processes. Once we left the BID’s ‘safe space’ at the

Insight Institute, and entered the Parliamentary Committee Room 1.2, the game changed.

From a process of deliberative dialogue we moved on to a process of advocacy –which felt

short of lobbying only because the organisers “run out of steam”. We may increasingly see

this kind of upstream work originated by scientific communities who reach out beyond their

usual confines. If scientific communities are being asked to be ethically and publically

minded, policy making tables should be willing to take into account these processes.

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Upstream engagement is problematic in many ways, and as the BID suggests there is much to

be done to build the deliberative capacity of organisations and the know-how of PE

practitioners. Indeed, participatory policy making is complex and full of problems, but so it is

technocratic policy making (see Fischer 1990, 1980; Fischer and Forester 1987, 1993;

Fischer 2003, 2009). Participatory policymaking involves a more ambitious conversation, not

perfect –it can never be- but broader, and arguably wiser and more legitimate. For those

worried about the “tyranny of participation” (Cooke and Kothari 2001), suffice to argue that

genuine participation, by definition, never brings closure: any truth, fact or decision that

comes out of it constitutes a temporary agreement in an ongoing conversation. The end of a

community of inquiry engaged in deliberative dialogue is to meaningfully contribute to that

conversation.

8. Coda: The Deliberative Uptake Office

…talk of engagement can backfire unless it has a demonstrable impact. Those whose engagement is being sought need to know that their participation will affect the policies and processes under discussion. They want assurance that trajectories of change and innovation will take meaningful account of their views. (Wilsdon and Willis 2004:16)

Many organisations and networks have a go every year at setting up science public

engagement processes that include some measure of dialogue and deliberation. In the case

reflected here, I have followed a group of PE practitioners as they go through that kind of

experience. I began the paper with the interview of a seasoned practitioner who was about to

embark for the first time in a policy-oriented dialogue. Recently I have asked her how does

this experience compare to her traditional PE activity. She highlights the frustration produced

by the “lack of control and dependence on other parties […] which act as gatekeepers to the

policymakers”, the “longer timeframes” and also that it is “harder to identify the outcomes as

[there is] no feedback”. She goes on to epitomise their predicament in the current activist

phase of the BID:

I'm used to things getting done in a quick timeframe and in a no-nonsense manner and we are not really set-up for longer timeframes. I think we need to change our expectations in this regard; where the Parliament suffers from short election-cycle timeframes, the University is also often hostage to short-term contracts […] and this makes it difficult for us to keep pursuing things over many years […]. Still, with [3 BID academic organisers] and myself on permanent contracts, perhaps we can keep pursing this, if only we knew where to go next...

It is not only, as Kadlec and Friedman (2007:19) put it, that deliberative practitioners often

“feel as if their work is done when deliberations conclude and a report is written”. It is also

that they rarely know where to go next. This got me thinking about pathways for deliberative

28

outputs. There is perhaps an issue around systemic incentives: what makes it to the Scottish

policymakers table? I am thinking about the kind of incentives that shape and consolidate

certain modus operandi within a particular policy making culture. From the practitioners’

experience interpreted in this paper, there seem to be no clear pathways for the Parliamentary

uptake of results from external deliberative processes14.

The conveners of BID knew little about his. Otherwise they might have opted for a different

course of action. For instance, if they knew that the BID’s complexity would be abandoned at

the doors of the Parliament, they probably could not see the point of setting up the broad

community of inquiry that deliberated on the issues. Instead, if 6 bullet points is all that the

Parliamentary intake machine could swallow, they might as well just get a selected committee

of neuroscientists and lawyers to come up with a few concerns and recommendations. This

suggests a bias –or incentive- towards technocratic input.

The organisers relied mostly on the force of the BID as a process of collective inquiry. They

believed –and I did too, despite the pitfalls I have analysed- that the richness and depth of

BID could carry it through the corridors of Holyrood. But how could that be when the

Parliament does not seem geared for deliberative uptake? It seems used to a different kind of

modus operandi. Accordingly, the BID conveners might have decided to go for the elite

committee, and spend the money not on a deliberative process but on hiring a savvy Public

Relations consultant. She would spend 20 hours per week along 8 months getting the Scottish

media interested on new uses of BIT (outrageous stories, expert interviews, etc), seeking

meetings with influential stakeholders, and making sure glossy policy briefs reach the right

people in the right Parliamentary committees (so that they are available when the media come

knocking). This suggests a bias –or incentive- towards reactive, rather than proactive, policy

making. Indeed, the promise of public deliberation seems to be sacrificed on the altar of habit

and complacency placed at the centre of some policy-making arenas. For some scholar-

practitioners the problem is that

those with real power to shape policy are under no obligation to respond to the outcomes of even the most conscientiously designed instances of public deliberation. Rather, in most instances deliberative processes are such that decision-makers and

14 On the problems of coupling participatory and deliberative cultures see Hoppe (2011:181): “deliberative- participatory approaches to policy making obey a legitimatory logic that differs from the broader political-institutional landscapes in which they are practised: A crucial problem is that of the uneasy coupling of decisional arenas that operate under different principles of legitimation, deliberation and negotiation between (sometimes collective) stakeholders in participatory procedures versus competition for authorization in the representative circuit.”

29

influencers can choose to respond to them or not at their discretion. The result is that the potential role that deliberation might play in public life is diminished as power politics picks up where deliberation leaves off. (Kadlec and Friedman 2007:18 original emphasis)

This relates to what Goodin and Dryzek call “the problem of how the macro-political ‘takes

up’ the micro-deliberative.” (2006:223). One tentative, partial response may be to set up

something that could be called the Deliberative Uptake Office (DUO). It could sit alongside

SPICE (Scottish Parliament Information Centre -the research unit that feeds policy makers

various intelligence diets15). As a departure, they may want to open a deliberative dialogue to

establish standards and benchmarks that help them to categorise the myriad processes out

there. Benchmarks such as transparency (audit trail), representativeness and inclusivity (a

range of stakeholders and views), etc, could function similarly to current SPICE’s criteria to

gather external research. When deliberative processes comply with certain standards, their

outputs would enter the pool of discursive resources available in Parliamentary arenas.

The DUO would be a clearly located entry point for the outputs of many deliberative

processes. Currently, most of those outputs never reach policy-making arenas, and a lot of

energy, resources, and public trust are squandered because of a lack of clear channels to feed

into policy deliberation. The DUO could be a stimulus for bottom-up participatory processes.

The many communities of policy and practice that foster inquiry processes would have clear

incentives to establish high procedural standards in deliberative processes. It would also be a

statement about what kinds of input is welcomed by the Parliament. To be sure, I am not

arguing

that leaders are generally obligated to do everything that a deliberative assembly recommends as if it were an exercise in direct democracy. […] We do think, however, that leaders and experts are well served, and in a very real sense obligated—as leaders, citizens and beneficiaries of a democratic society—to take seriously sincere and carefully constructed deliberations by citizens and to respond to them in authentic ways that move the policy process and debate forward. (Kadlec and Friedman 2007:21)

In their recent International comparison of public dialogue, Sciencewise16 –the UK

Government-sponsored Expert Resource Centre on science policy dialogue- proposes to

create a “government-backed but independent National S&T Engagement Institution”

modeled on “government-funded technology assessment institutions (such as the Danish

15 E.g. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/research/index.htm [accessed 19/06/11].

16 http://www.sciencewise-erc.org.uk [Accessed on 20-08-11]

30

Board of Technology and the Dutch Rathenau Institute)” (Sciencewise 2011:56). It would

work towards integrating participatory and representative politics in the S&T world, fostering

“third generation engagement” (Ibid.). Basically, they call for a top-down institution that

promotes and organizes deliberative processes directly connected to policy making. There is

probably a good case for it, however, it still misses the point: it ignores independent and

bottom-up processes and the learning they produce. Accordingly, it still doesn’t solve the

problem of what to do with so much upstream PE. Furthermore, it establishes as “legitimate

deliberation” only what comes from government-sponsored processes, and arguably risks

accentuating the problem of managerial, rather than democratic, uses of participation. Instead,

I would argue that a more desirable scenario might be to let the deliberative modus operandi

spread across multiple communities of place, practice and interest. Otherwise we face the

prospect of participatory politics that only matter when they are performed in “invited spaces”

(Cornwall 2008).

All in all, there seems to be a policy paradox. Some UK and Scottish S&T policy-making

networks are investing -discourse and capital- in the notion of upstream PE. However, policy

makers sitting elsewhere don’t have the capacity or will to uptake the results of participation.

In other words, policy makers encourage and fund PE processes, and yet, they don’t get the

results, and if they do, they don’t know what to do with them. If the point of upstream

engagement is to stimulate proactive policy deliberation, then the BID has failed. Indeed, in

this case, policy makers seem to wait for public outrage as the green light for reactive policy

making.

Authorities that stimulate deliberative experiments “but fail to institutionalise relations

between deliberative procedures, representative bodies and their normal processes of decision

making, do indeed deserve suspicion.” Furthermore, by “keeping open the option for

themselves to not even respond to the outputs and recommendations, they give the impression

of not taking seriously procedures they have themselves set in motion” (Hoppe 2011:180).

This may explain some of the cynicism around the PE agenda. However, I also wonder why

some have the expectation that deliberative democracy may achieve in a few decades what it

took centuries for representative democracy.

31

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