Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; pp. x + 307. $55.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. The academic study of environmental ethics, particularly of "deep ecology," has generated extensive scholarly discussion in recent years. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, by French author Bruno Latour, brings a fascinating and bold new twist to contemporary discussions about the nature of "nature." Latour proposes a radical shift in current conceptions of "political ecology," arguing that mainstream environmental movements are doomed to fail so long as they envision political ecology as inextricably tied to the protection and management of nature through political methodologies and policies. Instead, political ecology should abandon socially constructed representations of nature as an uncontrollable monolith. The former perspective is dangerous, Latour argues, because it enables science to silence public deliberation about ecological issues and close off options to prevent pending environmental crises. The rhetoric of science, whose credibility emanates from the dual sources of indisputable expertise and dire warnings, paralyzes the polis. Unable to contest scientific fact, and faced with pending environmental cataclysm, public and political discussion centered on the inevitable question of "What next?" becomes stagnant and devoid of solutions. In the first chapter, Latour argues that "nature is the chief obstacle that has hampered the development of public discourse" (9). Nature, or at least the agreed-upon external reality that is often represented as nature, allows science to render the public sphere voiceless. Unqualified to objectively test and observe natural facts, the polis is relegated to the sidelines, and engages in endless quibbling about matters of value which are a rung lower on the hierarchy of social concerns. The hegemony of science and the god-like status of the scientist, who is the only legitimate liaison between the natural world and the public, render meaningful political discourse impotent. "[T]he Scientist can go back and forth from one world to the other no matter what: the passageway closed to all others is open to him alone" (11). Latour concludes this chapter by examining how Western societies, particularly the United States, use nature to order and organize political life. Uncontestable facts of nature, and rhetoric that represents nature as something to be controlled, protected, or managed, permeate everyday political discourse and decision-making to a degree not seen in other cultures. Having thrown off the yoke of nature, Latour sketches one precondition for a more communal and sustainable political ecology in chapter 2. Here, a critique of anthropocentrism is used to cast off false, socially constructed distinctions between human and nonhuman, including animals and inanimate objects like rocks and trees. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Latour also criticizes at length the modernist belief that speech and the capacity for rational thought distinguish humans from nonhumans. Instead, he posits that political ecology must be recast as a collective of beings both human and nonhuman, both capable of speech and mute: "a slight displacement of our attention suffices to show that nonhumans, too, are implicated in a great number of speech impedimenta" (62-63). This rethinking of the public collective is necessary to prevent scientists from imposing the idea that they definitively represent and speak for nature (the mute objects that they seek so earnestly to protect). …

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States.BySheila Jasanoff. Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press. $35.00 (hardcover); $18.95 (paper). xv + 374 p.; ill.; index. 0‐691‐11811‐6 (hc); 0‐691‐13042‐6 (pb). 2005.

This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in `risk societies'.

Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice@@@Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective@@@Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology

Big changes to the way in which research funding is allocated to UK universities were brought about in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), overseen by the Higher Education Funding Council, England. Replacing the earlier Research Assessment Exercise, the purpose of the REF was to assess the quality and reach of research in UK universities–and allocate funding accordingly. For the first time, this included an assessment of research ‘impact’, accounting for 20% of the funding allocation. In this article we use a text mining technique to investigate the interpretations of impact put forward via impact case studies in the REF process. We find that institutions have developed a diverse interpretation of impact, ranging from commercial applications to public and cultural engagement activities. These interpretations of impact vary from discipline to discipline and between institutions, with more broad-based institutions depicting a greater variety of impacts. Comparing the interpretations with the score given by REF, we found no evidence of one particular interpretation being more highly rewarded than another. Importantly, we also found a positive correlation between impact score and [overall research] quality score, suggesting that impact is not being achieved at the expense of research excellence.

/pdf/beyond-academia-interrogating-research-impact-in-the-2f9e6gkhot.pdf

Beyond Academia - Interrogating Research Impact in the Research Excellence Framework.

As part of the 20th Anniversary of the Public Understanding of Science journal, the journal has been reflecting on how the field and journal have developed. This research note takes a closer look a...

Public Understanding of Science in turbulent times III: Deficit to dialogue, champions to critics

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1417990/1/1-s2.0-S0301421513011312-main.pdf

“Nuclear energy sounded wonderful 40 years ago”: UK citizen views on CCS

That policymakers adopt technoscientific viewpoints and lack reflexivity is a common criticism of scientific decision-making, particularly in response to moves to democratize science. Drawing on in...

/pdf/nothing-to-do-with-the-science-how-an-elite-sociotechnical-4e0lgrri01.pdf

'Nothing to do with the science': How an elite sociotechnical imaginary cements policy resistance to public perspectives on science and technology through the machinery of government.

Over the past 10 years, numerous public debates on new and emerging science and technologies have taken place in the United Kingdom. In this article, we characterise the discourses emerging from these debates and compare them to the discourses in analogous expert scientific and policy reports. We find that while the public is broadly supportive of new scientific developments, they see the risks and social and ethical issues associated with them as unpredictable but inherent parts of the developments. In contrast, the scientific experts and policymakers see risks and social and ethical issues as manageable and quantifiable with more research and knowledge. We argue that these differences amount to two different sociotechnical imaginaries or views of science and how it shapes our world - an elite imaginary of 'science to the rescue' shared by scientists and policymakers and public counter-imaginary of 'contingent progress'. We argue that these two imaginaries indicate that, but also help explain why, public dialogue has had limited impact on public policy.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963662517706452

Science to the rescue or contingent progress? Comparing 10 years of public, expert and policy discourses on new and emerging science and technology in the United Kingdom.

Melanie Smallman

Papers

Beyond Academia - Interrogating Research Impact in the Research Excellence Framework.

Public Understanding of Science in turbulent times III: Deficit to dialogue, champions to critics

“Nuclear energy sounded wonderful 40 years ago”: UK citizen views on CCS

'Nothing to do with the science': How an elite sociotechnical imaginary cements policy resistance to public perspectives on science and technology through the machinery of government.

Science to the rescue or contingent progress? Comparing 10 years of public, expert and policy discourses on new and emerging science and technology in the United Kingdom.