Tentative Stages of Progression for an Address at Geneva (Unpublished Manuscript) by Kenneth Burke: with Introduction and Bibliographic Discussion by S. Scott Graham

Introduction and Bibliographic Note

Climate change, the obesity epidemic, plastic pollution, the opioid crisis—for the last several decades, there has been a growing awareness of the challenges posed by what are sometimes called "wicked problems" (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These problems—marked by complex intersecting socioeconomic and/or biogeophysical causes—constitute real and immediate threats to humans, nonhumans, societies, and ecologies. What's more—given their scale and multicausal nature, so-called wicked problems resist most of the options available in our standard repertoires of tech fixes and social programs. The very nature of wicked problems requires the development of mitigation strategies that integrate human and nonhuman agencies. Identifying effective strategies is, of course, no easy task. As a bare minimum first step, doing so requires bringing together the kinds of experts, policymakers, stakeholders, and citizens who are well-suited to address the particulars of the wicked problem at hand. This itself is extraordinarily difficult. Subsequently, the drive to address wicked problems has catalyzed the creation of an entire cottage industry devoted to developing novel protocols and procedures designed to foster effective deliberation and decision-making among technical experts, stakeholders, and citizens.

In 2005, science and technology policy researchers Gene Rowe and Lynn Frewer identified more than 100 different proposed mechanism for science-policy deliberation and decision-making at local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Through analyzing these proposals, they develop a complex typology of public engagement mechanisms and variables. Specifically, they identify the scale of public involvement (communication, consultation, engagement) as well as the primary design variables in public involvement mechanisms (such as participant selection criteria, information dissemination, response modes, medium, etc.). The citation history for scholarship addressing public inclusion and participation tends to converge on urban planning initiatives during the late 1960s as the origin point. Indeed, Sherry Arnstein's (1969) "A Ladder of Citizen Participation" is widely cited. Furthermore, Arnstein's article identifies an essay from the previous year as the source for her inspiration: "Citizen Participation Strategies" by Edmund Burke (1968) (not that Edmund Burke). While many literature reviews recognize this longer pedigree in urban planning, most contemporary scholarship on public involvement in science-policy decision-making focuses on the Danish consensus conference (circa 1993) and subsequent innovations.¹

Among the most widely-cited approaches to citizen involvement in science-policy deliberation is Michel Callon, Pierre Barthe, and Yannick Lascoumes (2009)'s hybrid forum. Per the authors, hybrid forums are:

[O]pen spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous, including experts, politicians, technicians, and laypersons who consider themselves involved . . . the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety of domains.

(p. 18)

True hybrid forums—following Callon, Barthe, and Lascoumes' definition—must be doubly hybrid. They include both an appropriate diversity of participants and a broad distribution of decision-making authority. As such, hybrid forums contrast with other popular mechanisms like science courts or citizen advisory boards. In fully hybrid forms, the citizen participants have equal voting rights to the technical experts.

Regardless of the preferred mechanism, the idea of creating special deliberative spaces to support science policy decision-making is widely understood as a relatively new initiative in U.S. and European contexts. When discussed historically, the focus tends to be on the late 1960s or the early 1990s. However, as it turns out, proposals for hybrid citizen-expert deliberative mechanisms date back, at least, to a 1927 proposal by Kenneth Burke (Actually—yes—that Kenneth Burke.)

"Tentative Stages of Progression for an Address at Geneva"

Below readers can find the first broadly available publication of "Tentative Stages of a Progression for an Address at Geneva" (Burke, 1927). This draft address, collected from the Penn State University Libraries Burke Papers,² arose out of a lesser-discussed period in Burke's life—his brief flirtation with a non-academic career between dropping out of college and winning...