Science and Public policy

(abstracted from Luján, J.L. and Todt,O. (2007) "Precaution in public: the social perception of the role of science and values in policy making" Public Understanding of Science; 16; 97)

Science and policy interact in two ways; Science for policy e.g. (scientific knowledge as basis for regulation and decision making) and Policy for science (governance of science, how to promote science and technology). Whilst primarily the focus of scholarly interest, more recently the interactions between science and policy have given rise to public debate and conflict.

Central to the conflict is the role of science in informing decision-making. Science has become ubiquitous in modern society and its impact is widely felt. As a knowledge broker, it failed in its attempt to appease the public during the recent BSE health scare. Equally events such as Chernobyl lead to increased mistrust of Science's impact on the environment and society in general. Both situations lead us to conclude that social concerns must be incorporated into decision making relating to Science and Technology. The importance of this has already been recognized at the policy level (National Research Council, 1996; OECD, 2001).

Public concerns about undesired effects of scientific-technological development are particularly pronounced in the European Union (EU). This is one of the reasons why the EU executive branch, the European Commission, has been especially active in this area, trying to start a dialogue with society on issues related to science and technology. One of the first results is the Science and Society Action Plan (European Commission, 2001a), which aims at increasing understanding of science among Europeans, as well as more clearly regulating the use of expert knowledge in science and technology policy making. The stated goal is to guarantee public scrutiny, transparency and opening up of decision making to a wide range of social actors, as laid down in the Commission’s own guidelines on the use of expert knowledge (European Commission, 2002).

The European White Paper on governance (European Commission, 2001b) raises the issue of “democratizing expertise,” by making it respond more directly to social demands and preoccupations. The Commission, in fact, expresses the need for more citizen participation in policy making in order to increase public trust. In fact, the citizens’ trust in decision-making processes is now regarded as one of the fundamental pillars of technology development (Slovic, 1997; Todt, 2003). The most recent EU regulatory law-making is already taking account of this. The completely revamped European food safety system, for instance, now based on a new EU food law (European Parliament and Council, 2002), includes systematic actor involvement in decision making, transparency in operation and wide-reaching public access to information, with the explicit goal of regaining citizens’ trust in the food system (see the EC White Paper on Food Safety, European Commission, 1999).

Despite those policy changes and the importance given to the analysis of the relationship between science and public policy, this topic has been given relatively little explicit attention in studies of public perception. So far, few surveys have posed questions directly related to policy making or precaution. One of the most recent perception studies to include questions on the relationship between science and policy was a 1999 Norwegian survey (Kallerund and Ramberg, 2002). It included two questions related to public trust in science, two on the precautionary principle, as well as two on the role of scientific knowledge in the elaboration of laws and regulations related to science and technology.

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