Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research

Introduction

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a survey of the science and technology policy landscape in the United States would have revealed not only an arena of energetic discussion and institutional innovation but also justifiable hopes for a future where theoreticians, empiricists, policy analysts , and policy practitioners would be working together to help shape the nation’s research and development enterprise. Yet such hopes have, at best, been partially fulfilled. While science and technology policy research continues to yield important new insights in such areas as the relation between democracy and scientific advance, the role of technological innovation in economic development, and the design of institutions at the interface of science and policy, the quality of public discourse about science policy has changed little over the decades and retains its monomaniacal focus on marginal budgetary increments. While science and technology studies curricula have become regular features of the academic portfolio, few of the university science policy programs initiated in the 1960s and 1970s retain their original energy and scope. The death of the Office of Technology Assessment, the evisceration of the power of the president’s science advisor, the “science wars” and the 3 Introduction Sokal hoax, and the transformation of Technology Review from provocateur to cheerleader are but a few of the tangible indicators of ambitions unfulfilled. Science and technology have meanwhile become, if at all possible, even more powerful agents of change, increasingly challenging society’s capacity to respond. The obviousness of this fact is rendered only more conspicuous by the very limited influence that conceptual advances in science policy have had on real-world practice. More than fifty years ago, the debate between Vannevar Bush and Harley Kilgore forged the shape of the nation’s R&D enterprise, while in subsequent decades the formative voices of Harvey Brooks, Alvin Weinberg, Michael Polanyi, and others helped to set the terms of both the public and intellectual science policy agenda. If those terms now seem outdated or insufficient, we must nevertheless ask: Where are the voices who will guide science and technology policy in this new century? This book is our effort to answer the question. With somewhat modest hopes—hopes that were bolstered by a grant from the National Science Foundation—we issued a solicitation for abstracts from young scholars and practitioners in science policy, and were rewarded with ninety proposals from a gratifyingly broad range of disciplines and institutions (and even a few countries). With the assistance of a review committee of established and respected voices in science policy, we reduced this field to twenty-five. We invited these people to participate in a conference in Washington, DC, where they presented their ideas and subjected them to the critique of both academic experts and practitioners in their specific areas of interest. From those twenty-five, we then chose sixteen papers, the cream of a select crop, to publish. It is rare that the individual contributions to a multiauthored volume are subject to so thorough a review. These sixteen papers thus sample the thinking of some of the best young minds in science policy—academicians and practitioners both. The papers are unified by a small number of cross-cutting themes: Who is making the choices about science and technology policy, and who stands to win or lose from these choices? What criteria of choice are being used, and by whom? What standards of governance are being employed, and by whom? Issues of globalization, of the protean boundary between public and private, of the factors that control how benefits are distributed, all loom large. More fundamental still, these perspectives are unified by the common recognition that science policy is not so   much about science per se as about the explicit shaping of our world. This shaping occurs in the settings where science itself is administered and governed (Section 1: Shaping Policy); in the processes of knowledge production (Section 2: Shaping Science); in the forces behind innovation (Section 3: Shaping Technology); and, ever more conspicuously, in the drive to manipulate and transform the human species itself (Section 4: Shaping Life). Yet this coherence of theme and purpose is presented through a refreshing diversity of analytical lenses: historical perspectives on communications technologies and intellectual property; philosophical inquiry into the relation between environmental science and political discourse; case-based illustrations of how the forces of globalization collide with the power of local politics and preferences. From game theory to constructivist studies to...