Citizen Voices: Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication
250
Citizen Voices: Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841507606 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2012 |
| Series: | ISSN |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 250 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Louise Phillips is associate professor in the Department of Communication, Business, and Information Technologies at the University of Roskilde.
Read an Excerpt
Citizen Voices
Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication
By Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho, Julie Doyle
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-760-6
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho and Julie Doyle
The starting point for this book is the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge in which practices claiming to be based on principles of dialogue and participation have spread across diverse social fields (Aubert and Soler 2006; Gomez, Puigvert and Flecha 2011; Phillips 2011). One such field is planned communication and campaigns. Here we find that authorities increasingly supplement or replace information campaigns aiming to transmit or diffuse expert knowledge to recipient target-groups with communication initiatives in which experts and target-groups are reconfigured as participants in sites of dialogue where knowledge is co-produced through mutual learning. Another field is organisational development in which employees are encouraged to participate as agents of change through the collaborative production of knowledge in processes of dialogue, rather than being positioned at the receiving end of organisational changes dictated by management.
Yet another field is politics, and central and local government policymaking across policy areas including urban planning and science and environmental policy. The dialogic turn manifests itself here in so-called participatory governance, in which elite, top-down decision-making has been supplemented by public engagement or public participation activities where citizens participate together with government officials and/or researchers in sites for dialogue. According to proponents of the dialogic turn, these sites for dialogue represent spaces for citizen voices articulating potentially diverse perspectives. These perspectives are recognised as legitimate forms of knowledge and harnessed in decision-making about issues that affect the participants. The legitimacy of the knowledge forms is often taken to lie in their roots in citizens' locally anchored and socially and culturally specific experiences and values. 'Participatory' governance thus entails a reconfiguration – and apparent democratisation – of relations between policymakers, researchers and citizens. As Felt and Fochler (2010: 221) put it, 'governance' is hailed as a new means of collective decision-making in which different social actors participate in 'network-like constellations', in contrast to decision-making characterised by top-down hierarchical relations between government and relevant social actors.
This book concentrates exclusively on the dialogic turn in the governance of science and the environment. Although practices of science communication and public engagement with science and technology concentrate on the natural sciences and technology, the turn to dialogue in research/society relations has not only impregnated science, defined narrowly as research in the natural (including environmental) sciences and technology, but also research in the social sciences and humanities as well. Accordingly, when we write of 'science' in this book, we often use it in this broad sense of 'research', and several of the chapters analyse the production and communication of social scientific knowledge while others focus on knowledge based on the natural and environmental sciences and technology.
We attempt in this book to build bridges across the fields of science and technology studies, environmental studies, and media and communication studies in order to provide theoretically informed and empirically rich accounts of how citizen voices are articulated, invoked, heard, marginalised or silenced in science and environment communication. Across a diverse range of national, social and institutional settings and on the basis of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, the chapters together produce an in-depth, research-based analysis of the different, context-dependent, situated ways in which participation is ascribed meaning and practised in the communication of science and the environment.
In this introductory chapter, we first sketch out how citizen participation is understood and enacted in the communication processes which are constituted within, and constitute, the 'participatory' mode of governance. A key point here is that, in both academic research and everyday practices, 'participation' and 'dialogue' are buzzwords with multiple, vague and shifting meanings (Carpentier and Dahlgren 2011; Phillips 2011). By virtue of their status as buzzwords with a self-evidently positive value, 'participation' and 'dialogue' legitimate the practices that are constructed in their terms: when their positive value is taken-for-granted, critical questions are not raised, and proponents become oblivious to the tensions, contradictions, dilemmas and power imbalances inherent in all forms of knowledge production and communication (Phillips 2011).
Following this outline of the enactment of 'citizen participation' in 'participatory' science and environmental governance, we describe the routes taken in the book through the interdisciplinary terrain of research on public participation in science and environment communication. Here we draw attention to the different ways of conceptualising 'citizens' and 'participation' and the implications of those different conceptualisations for both theory and practice. We also address how different theoretical fields tackle the tensions, contradictions, dilemmas and power imbalances that arise in relation to the participation of citizens in science and environment communication. Finally, we introduce each of the chapters of the book, locating them in that terrain and indicating their contributions to research.
Conceptualising 'citizen participation' in science and environmental governance
As in other fields of social practice in the dialogic turn, the model of communication underpinning science and environmental governance is dialogue in which scientists and citizens engage in mutual learning on the basis of the different knowledge forms that they bring with them. The official aim is to involve citizens in processes of decision-making on scientific and environmental issues, including issues relating to the built environment such as urban planning. And it is argued that public participation in decision-making will improve the quality of decisions and policy processes. In relation to science governance, the dialogue model is presented in policy documents as a decisive break from the previously dominant discourse which articulated a 'deficit' model of communication; this model assumed that the public suffered from a deficit of knowledge about scientific developments curable through the one-way transfer, diffusion or dissemination of scientific truths (Irwin 2001, 2006; Irwin and Michael 2003). In relation to environmental governance, landmark agreements such as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992) and the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (1998) have stressed the importance of public participation in decision making on, and access to information about, environmental issues.
During the past two decades, dialogue-based public engagement initiatives such as citizen consultations, experiments in local democracy and dialogue-with-the-public activities have burgeoned across Europe and the rest of the world with respect to controversial and politically-pressing questions relating, for example, to nanotechnology, food biotechnology, climate change and sustainable development (for example, the British GM Nation? debate over the commercial growing of GM crops [2003], the British Public Consultation on Developments in the Biosciences (PCDB) [1997–1999], the British Nanodialogues project [2005–2007], the German 'Futur' Research Dialogue [2001–2005], the Norwegian CREATE project [2002–2005] and the Swedish Technology Foresight programme [2001–2002]). In both academic texts and policy documents, public engagement exercises such as the above are interchangeably labelled as exercises in public engagement or public participation, and in this book we use both epithets. It should be noted, though, that since around 2000 there has been an increasing preference for the term public engagement, related to the emergence of the concept of upstream public engagement, as Delgado et al. (2010: 2) point out. The concept of upstream public engagement stresses the inclusion of the public in the process of determining the direction of scientific research; here, the public shape science 'upstream' of scientific developments (Wilsdon and Willis 2004). A contrast is drawn discursively to practices within the public understanding of science tradition. These practices treat the public as the recipients or consumers of completed research results: here, the public 'meet' science 'downstream' of scientific developments.
The forms of participatory democracy practised in science and environmental governance often build on models of deliberative democracy developed within political theory (e.g. Benhabib 1994, 2005; Dryzek 2000; Gastil and Levine 2005; Habermas 1996). Participants are positioned as 'ordinary citizens' with a legitimate role to play in deliberations about scientific and environmental developments by virtue of locally anchored, experience-based forms of knowledge, values and preferences. Expertise can be said to be democratised in the sense that scientific knowledge and scientific knowers relinquish their monopoly on expertise (Blok 2007). At the same time, principles of deliberative democracy stipulate the need for expert input in order to supply citizens with expert knowledge about the topic that, together with the other knowledges in their possession, will enable them to exercise the rights of scientific citizenship responsibly (Irwin 2001). In exercising those rights responsibly, citizens act as competent scientific citizens deserving of the voice they have been given in deliberative processes (Elam and Bertilsson 2003).
Citizen participation in processes of decision-making in relation to scientific and environmental issues has been hailed as the guarantor of better and more accountable decisions by virtue of the properties of deliberation (e.g. Coenen 2010; Dietz and Stern 2008; Fischer 2009; Select Committee on Science and Technology, House of Lords 2000;Wilsdon and Willis 2004). At the same time, however, critical questions have been raised by researchers about the extent and nature of the dialogic turn in scientific and environmental governance (as well as more generally). It is argued, for example, that, in practices framed as instances of participatory governance, 'dialogue' and 'participation' are sometimes heavily circumscribed through the top-down design and management of the process (e.g. Goven 2003; Trench 2008; Wynne 2006). The 'ladder of participation' identified by Arnstein in her seminal article of 1969 is often only partially fulfilled, usually in the form of information or consultation and only very rarely deliberation.
Some of this critical analysis suggests that the concepts of 'dialogue' and 'participation' represent buzzwords serving to legitimate practices and thus operating as technologies of power that mask the dominance of certain knowledge interests and forms of knowledge, values and preferences over others. In the worst cases, the concepts serve as a technology of legitimisation (Harrison and Mort 1998; Stirling 2008), functioning instrumentally to pass off 'top-down' decision-making processes as 'bottom-up' democratic ones. This is, as noted earlier in this chapter, because the two concepts have a taken-for-granted positive value that tends to conceal the workings of power and the tensions and contradictions intrinsic to practices based on principles of dialogue and participation. As Carpentier and Dahlgren (2011: 8) point out in relation to the concept of 'participation', 'there is [...] a need for a more cool-headed approach towards participation that does not lose itself in celebratory frenzies'.
The critical science and technology studies literature on public engagement tends to concentrate on the framing and outcomes of participatory public-engagement exercises, including how the design positions citizens in particular ways with particular consequences for the results and the effects. The ways in which citizens actually 'fill out', perform and negotiate those positions in the communication processes at the core of the exercises are given little attention. However, there is a growing body of research that does explore empirically how 'citizens' and 'publics' are constructed in the communication processes central to public participation in science and technology – often together with an analysis of the design. Many cases of such research have been published in journals in science and technology studies and environmental studies (e.g. Felt and Fochler 2010; Kerr, Cunningham-Burley and Tutton 2007; Michael 2009). Citizen Voices is distinguished by being the first edited book to examine the multiple meanings ascribed to practices of 'participation' in science and environment communication and to its actors – such as 'experts', 'citizens' and 'publics' – and to consider the implications of those meanings for participants' scope for action in the governance of science and the environment. Thus it goes beyond the buzzword of 'participation' and explores how 'participation' is enacted in different ways in different contexts. Here, we use the term 'enactment' in its everyday sense to refer to how 'participation' is played out in practice rather than in the sense in which it is used in actor-network theory (see e.g. Mol 1999/2005).
Citizen Voices is also distinguished by its interdisciplinary scope, straddling science and technology studies (STS), environmental studies and media and communication studies. Since science communication has developed as a subfield of STS with relatively little contact with media and communication studies, the combination of STS and media and communication studies opens up for new opportunities for cross-fertilisation. In drawing both on STS and media and communication studies, and by focusing specifically on science and environment communication, the book contributes to the research area in media and communication studies on citizen participation and engagement in the media. This research area has been neglected in the past but now represents an emerging area (e.g. Carpentier 2011a, 2011b; Carpentier and Dahlgren 2011; Dahlgren 2011; Lewis et al. 2004), connected to the development of digital media which are widely seen to carry the promise of participation and dialogue across differences including those of geography, social class, gender and ethnicity.
One of our primary motivations in compiling the book has been to bring together studies which both critically interrogate and empirically investigate the different meanings and enactments of 'citizen participation' in different forms and contexts of scientific and environmental communication. The overall purpose of the book is to provide theoretically informed and empirically rich analyses of how 'citizen voices' are brought into being, articulated, invoked, marginalised or silenced in communication processes in a variety of practices of scientific and environmental governance. Two of the chapters (Chapters 7 and 8) theorise 'citizen voices' along the lines of Bakhtin. Bakhtin understands a voice not just as the medium for speech or the uttered speech of an individual, embodied person but as a discourse, ideology, perspective or theme that transcends the individual (Bakhtin 1981); for Bakhtin, meanings – including understandings of self and other – are generated in the tension between different and often contradictory and opposing voices. Thus a Bakhtinian perspective can form the basis for the analysis of processes of inclusion and exclusion whereby particular voices, articulating identities such as those of 'citizens' and particular forms of knowledge, dominate and others are marginalised or silenced (see Chapter 7). Some of the other chapters use the term 'citizen voices' in an everyday sense to refer to the articulation or representation of the perspectives or viewpoints of citizens. The rest of the chapters use the term rarely or not at all, referring instead to citizens or publics or particular groups.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction – Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho and Julie Doyle
PART I: Public Participation and Media
Chapter 2: When Citizens Matter in the Mass Mediation of Science: The Role of Imagined Audiences in Multidirectional Communication Processes – Ursula Plesner
Chapter 3: Contested Ethanol Dreams – Public Participation in Environmental News – Annika Egan Sjölander and Anna Maria Jönsson
Chapter 4: Citizen Action and Post-Socialist Journalism: The Responses of Journalists to a Citizen Campaign against Government Policy towards Smoking – Pavel P. Antonov
Chapter 5: Discourse Communities as Catalysts for Science and Technology Communication – Hedwig te Molder
Chapter 6: Online Talk: How Exposure to Disagreement in Online Comments Affects Beliefs in the Promise of Controversial Science – Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele and Michael A. Xenos
PART II: Public Participation and Formal Public Engagement Initiatives
Chapter 7: Communicating about Climate Change in a Citizen Consultation: Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion – Louise Phillips
Chapter 8: Public Engagement as a Field of Tension between Bottom-up and Top-down Strategies: Critical Discourse Moments in an ‘Energy Town’ – Anders Horsbøl and Inger Lassen
Chapter 9: The Stem Cell NetWork: Communicating Social Science through a Spatial Installation – Maja Horst
Chapter 10: Issue-centred Exploration with a Citizen Panel: Knowledge Communication and ICTs in Participatory City Governance – Pauliina Lehtonen and Jarkko Bamberg