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11 Despotism and Democracy in the United Kingdom: Experiments in Reframing Citizenship Robert Doubleday and Brian Wynne At the turn of the millennium, a series of fiascos over scientific advice to government challenged the peculiarly British ways in which such advice had been procured, framed, and used. Prominent episodes included controversy over decommissioning the Brent Spar offshore oil facility, resulting in Greenpeace’s victory over the UK government and Shell in 1994; and the crisis over the UK government’s handling of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease) which came to a head in 1996 (Grove-White 1997; van Zwanenberg and Millstone 2005). Such challenges to the presumptive authority of scientific advice over public policy and public life proved fertile ground for controversy over genetically modified (GM) crops over several years straddling the millennium. These crises expressed and intensified what we argue has amounted to a constitutional unsettlement of relations between the state, science, and citizens in Britain. Developments in the twentieth-century roles of science in government— developments that, in keeping with the theme of this volume, we would call (bio)constitutional—led in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) to a turn-of-millennium condition in which science had become deeply entrenched as scientism. Scientific advice and authority were being systematically exaggerated in regulatory control and public debate, as in the regular use of risk assessment for public reassurance, as if that reassurance were based on science’s full independence from policy commitments and assumptions. Further, as scientific advice took on a greater role in post Second World War public policy, it became by default not only an informant of public policy (its classical role), but also a powerful cultural agent, as arbiter of public meanings. This extension of science into scientism was not a consequence of deliberate design but rather of mutual accommodation and mutual reinforcement between policy and science as institutionalized 240 Chapter 11 epistemic (and hermeneutic) authority. Thus science assumed the role of authoritatively providing the meaning of many public issues, which came to be defined as “risk issues” or even “scientific issues,” obscuring other key dimensions. The shocks of the Brent Spar, BSE, and GM controversies provoked a significant shift in scientific governance in Britain, marked by an explicit concern for building public trust through greater openness to public scrutiny and participation. Foremost among the many articulations of the British state’s newfound concern for public engagement in science were a series of interventions by Parliament, the executive, and the judiciary in the year 2000: the House of Lords Science and Society report; the establishment of the Food Standards Agency, as well as inclusive standing commissions covering human genetics and agricultural biotechnology; and the Phillips Inquiry into the BSE crisis (Phillips 2000). This shift condensed around a set of practices for eliciting public views through formal techniques of “public engagement.” A departure from past governance approaches, this potential space for democratizing science policy was itself shaped by British political institutions and civic epistemologies—negotiating consensus around empirical demonstrations of public attitudes (Jasanoff 2005, 247–271). Alan Irwin characterizes these developments as actualizing a new governance of science in which public trust is equated with social consensus, achieved through official modes of public participation. Irwin (2006, 303) rightly calls for greater effort to be paid to describing these shifts in governance as forms of social experiment “symptomatic of the contemporary culture of scientific and technological change.” In this chapter, we contribute to this goal by focusing on how citizenship was reframed through this partial realignment of governance with respect to the science, technology, and innovation politics of genetic modification. Our central argument is that the recent history of British policy toward public engagement with science can be described as a playing out of tensions between competing versions of the place of citizens in shaping public meanings (and thus also, material trajectories) of what is at stake in a “knowledge economy.” We characterize these contending versions of the capacities of citizens as “despotic” or “democratic” with respect to citizens’ rights to participate in the production of “public objects.” By this, we mean the extent to which technoscientific policy choices such as R&D and innovation trajectories embody tacit values established by democratic collective action (see also Jasanoff, chapter 1, this volume, and for a liberal democratic history of the concept, see Ezrahi 1990). [52.14.8.34] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 08:40...

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