Weeknotes 2 - Tell the Truth

Contents

1. Developing my weeknote style
2. Emotion, justice, ethics, controversy and the irrationalities of science and policy
3. TL;DR: policy entrepreneurs and self-censuring scientists, two sides of the same coin?
4. References

Developing my weeknote style

I realised that making notes about the podcasts, webinars, talks and conversations that I am exposed to is going to be useful for tracking my thinking. I also realised that it’s going to take longer to write very brief weeknotes. Therefore, these posts will be a documentation of my week(ish), with little filtering. I will end each with a single “where I ended up” (TL;DR) paragraph.

Emotion, justice, ethics, controversy and the irrationalities of science and policy

The end of last week involved more free wine than I am used to, leading to some fun conversations. At one, I tested out my thinking around looking at and beyond rationality in science and policy with an acquaintance at a network mixer. I had just read Gervaise (2023), a post based on an MPA thesis from a couple of years ago. The post draws on the work of Joan C. Tronto (2013) who defines care as a 5 step cycle: caring about, caring for, care giving, care receiving and care with. At the network mixer, I possibly allowed my words to stray too far. When I mentioned “non-human people”, my acquaintance visibly recoiled and shortly afterwards shooed me off to circulate more.

I really enjoyed the feedback episode from Outrage + Optimism, which suggested to me lines of interest including the place of wonder and awe in scientific enquiry (this also came up in Cayley and Daston (2009)), the place of metis and tacit knowledge in scientific practice, as well as the lack of feedback mechanism that our society has for our decisions involving nature. I was also interested in the further discussion of the nervous system responses to danger - we know this as “fight or flight”, some also recognise freeze and fawn (I know I do!). These are all loose threads for now, but I’ll leave them here because they may tie back in at a later date.

Some of the cohorts from UCL’s 3 MPAs organised a fabulous Summit event last week, with some powerful speakers (too many to list here). Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist who has developed his own agency by applying his skills to working on developing agency on climate action in others through the UCL Climate Action Unit, talked to us about the discoveries of the unit and took us through a policy decision scenario. There was masses to take away from this, key points for me were that communications are best when they are stories about action, not issues, and that our attitudes are changed by action (not the other way round) (De Meyer et al. 2020).

A panel session with Fatou Jeng, Selina Newell and Asad Rehman had some delightful challenges between members - which I interpret as caused by the contrast between speaking and acting in the most principled, moral and/or evidence-aligned way and speaking and acting in the most pragmatic way, given the context. I had seen this the evening before at Damon Silvers’ compelling talk The Labour Movement, the State and Climate Change, where arguments for “fighting” climate change (such as concerns about migration) are largely those that appeal to people in the global north without first noting the existential nature of existing harms to the majority world¹. The Summit panel session summed this up well, identifying that climate action is nothing if it creates, perpetuates or worsens the exploitation of peoples and lands.

That was all in my first week. I started my literature review proper this week, firstly looking at the science-policy gap. Almost immediately Karlsson and Gilek (2020) summed up for me the reasons for policy delay both in the science and the policy spheres. I had also been sent a fantastic pre-print from Rafael Mestre considering how policy, regulation and governance be developed for extremely nascent technologies, in their case bio-hybrid robots. They suggest a number of approaches to establishing policy, including early public deliberation, ethics statements and review boards. These two papers performed a curious duet in my mind. Whereas Mestre et al.’s work drew on ethical issues around biomedicine (e.g. embryonic stem cells), classical robotics and artificial intelligence as governance models, Karlsson and Gilek consider outcomes such as climate change, chemical hazards, biodiversity loss and eutrophication, which are all aggravated by policy delay. I wondered if this policy delay could have been prevented, or lessened, if there had been early and sustained public deliberation over the causal technologies. And how do we maintain public discourse when commercial interests begin to engage and there is a drive to disguise negative social and environmental impacts? And, reflecting step 5 of Tronto’s model, could/should we always do policy and science with citizens (see also the CSP model mentioned in last week’s notes)?

Science as a social phenomena has popped up several times this week. The nature of a shifting understanding and knowledge is discussed in Mountford and Dirks (2023) and Cayley and Schaffer (2009), but often these histories are forgotten. Science tends to be presented as a single “truth”, which can affect credibility when new understandings emerge - as we saw frequently during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mountford and Dirks discuss finding new ways to communicate science such that the knowledge shifts do not undermine trust. Cayley and Schaffer describe how studying the controversies themselves (how they manifest and are settled) provides insights into the practices of science, which turn out to be extremely social. This field of controversy studies, described well by Sheila Jasanoff (Jasanoff (2019)), has itself been controversial, perhaps because it offends scientists’ conviction of objectivity. And on that topic, writing a history of scientific objectivity itself challenges this conviction (Cayley and Daston (2009)). Cayley and Daston describe the history of science as a plurality of knowledges. My mental vision is of many coloured threads weaving around each other, with some thicker and more obvious and being tugged on by many, where others are hidden. Curiously, this is not unlike my mental image of Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) model of policymaking (Kingdon 1993; on which I based an assignment in term 1), only in the MSA, the “coming together” of streams is unusual and momentous because this is when issues get on the policy agenda. Cairney (2018) develops this work, drawing on evidence and finds it relevant, yet needing better retelling. He describes how policy entrepreneurs seek problems for their pet (my word) solutions, that these solutions need to be “softened” to gain support and that entrepreneurs know to frame and time and place (venue) their engagement. All this is far from the rational model of policymaking, which has solutions sought for identified issues, but which perhaps rarely, if ever, occurs. And yet, it seems that there are still policymakers who believe in evidence-based policy-making (EBPM), as well as those who are more pragmatic or inclusive about what is evidence necessary, as well as those who are comfortable using individual stories as evidence (Piddington et al. 2024). Whilst I was reading, I was dropping in and out of a discussion on an environmental activist channel for scientists. There was much frustration that science communications about action needed to address global heating does not match the reality. For instance, Simms and Anderson (2020) and Pearce (2024) both note scientists self-censuring in public, and holding very different, much less compromising views in private. It seems that whilst both policy and science claim to be rational and objective there is plenty of evidence that, in reality, neither are.

TL;DR: policy entrepreneurs and self-censuring scientists, two sides of the same coin?

Not only are there many science-policy gaps, but within both spheres there are huge gaps between what actors say and what they really mean. Most dangerous (IMO) is that the truth is not being told by some scientists about the scale and urgency of the issue of global heating. But, given what we know about getting issues on the policy agenda, what would happen if they did? Actually, I’ll rephrase that, what happened when scientists talked about the necessary scale of action needed? In 2022, Sir Patrick Vallance and other scientists spoke to parliament (Horton 2022), since then there has been a down-scaling, if anything, of climate action. However, returning to De Meyer’s work, because “the scientists made no political recommendations, as they were there simply to present the science” (Horton 2022), it is easy to see why, when presented with issues not actions, even politicians can feel they have no agency when it comes to climate action. From Cairney’s work, issues only make it onto the policy agenda when they are presented as presoftened solutions. Thus, I propose that those scientists who are self-censuring, by not speaking in public about the scale and urgency of global heating, are intuitively framing their communications, much as policy entrepreneurs do. I make no claims about the propriety of framing issues for policy contexts, or even its effectiveness (evidently it is not effective for exigent climate action) and it may be that I am somewhat stretching the notion of framing. Yet, I note that framing is applauded in some contexts and denounced in others. I’m hugely grateful to Kris De Meyer for meeting up yesterday, we discussed how we could explore what success looks like in the context of academics getting their ideas on the policy agenda, and my supervisor Carolina Alves, for helping me pick through all these thoughts to begin to form a new research question:

What are the approaches (methods, processes, tools) employed by academics who influence policy?

Other questions related to the above include:

• Are scientists self-censuring to appeal to policy-makers?
• How can we pre-soften rapid and radical action on climate?
• What happens when scientists tell the truth - to citizens and policymakers?

References

Cairney, Paul (2018). “Three habits of successful policy entrepreneurs”. In: Policy Politics 46.2, pp. 199–215. DOI: 10.1332/030557318X15230056771696. URL: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/pp/46/2/article-p199.xml.

Cayley, David and Lorraine Daston (2009). How To Think About Science - Part 2. URL: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/1.464988.

Cayley, David and Simon Schaffer (2009). How To Think About Science - Part 1. URL: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/1.464989.

De Meyer, Kris et al. (2020). “Transforming the stories we tell about climate change: from ‘issue’ to ‘action’”. In: Environmental Research Letters 16.1. DOI: 10 . 1088 / 1748 - 9326/abcd5a. URL: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abcd5a.

Gervaise, Coralie (2023). Shifting our relationships with the natural world. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. URL: https://medium.com/iipp-mpa-blog/shifting-our-relationships-with-the-natural-world-88cf5ed4855d (visited on 04/29/2024).

Horton, Helena (2022). “Sir Patrick Vallance gives emergency climate briefing to UK MPs”. In: The Guardian. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/13/sir-patrick-vallance-gives-emergency-climate-briefing-to-uk-mps (visited on 05/01/2024).

Jasanoff, Sheila (2019). “Controversy Studies”. In: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc130.pub2.

Karlsson, Mikael and Michael Gilek (2020). “Mind the gap: Coping with delay in environmental governance”. In: Ambio 49.5, pp. 1067–1075. ISSN: 00447447, 16547209. URL:https://www.jstor.org/stable/48727222 (visited on 04/29/2024).

Kingdon, John W. (1993). “How do issues get on public policy agendas?” In: Sociology and the Public Agenda. Vol. 8. 1. Chap. 3, pp. 40–53. DOI: 10.4135/9781483325484. Mountford, Will and Nicholas Dirks (2023). Challenges of trust and communication in science policy. ResearchPod. URL: https://researchpod.org/arts-humanities/challenges-trust-communication-science-policy.

Pearce, Fred (2024). “Mind the Gaps: How the UN Climate Plan Fails to Follow the Science”. In: Yale Environment 360. URL: https://e360.yale.edu/features/un-climate-science-1.5-net-zero (visited on 03/28/2024).

Piddington, Grace et al. (2024). “Do policy actors have different views of what constitutes evidence in policymaking?” In: Policy & Politics 52.2, pp. 239–258. DOI: 10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000032. URL: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/pp/52/2/article-p239.xml.

Simms, Andrew and Kevin Anderson (2020). “Turning delusion into climate action - Prof Kevin Anderson, an interview”. In: Responsible Science. URL: https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/turning-delusion-climate-action-prof-kevin-anderson-interview.

1. Damon Silvers’ talks on the significance of labour movement to climate action are a powerful perspective and worth watching ↩