This paper argues that it is time for public understanding of science to develop a critical inventory of the forms, formats and methods of public participation and their respective implications and ambiguities. It highlights the need for analysing not only the limitations and deficiencies of participatory arrangements but also their constructive dimension, in particular the construction of the subject of participation. Looking into participatory governance arrangements in the issue area of genetic testing in Germany and the UK the paper presents a typology of formats according to the way the respective public is constructed and identifies four major constructions of publics: the general public, the pure public, the affected public and the partisan public. Each of these enables certain speaking positions while foreclosing others. The study shows that the main purposes of participatory arrangements in this issue area are knowledge production and education rather than political deliberation and decision-making.

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“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0162243919850885

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Neuroscience is viewed by a range of actors and institutions as a powerful means of creating new knowledge about our selves and societies. This article documents the shifts in expertise and identities potentially being propelled by neuroscientific research. It details the framing and effects of neuroscience within several social domains, including education and mental health, discussing some of the intellectual and professional projects it has animated therein (such as neuroethics). The analysis attends to the cultural logics by which the brain is sometimes made salient in society; simultaneously, it points towards some of parameters of the territory within which the social life of the brain plays out. Instances of societal resistance and agnosticism are discussed, which may render problematic sociological research on neuroscience in society that assumes the universal import of neuroscientific knowledge (as either an object of celebration or critique). This article concludes with reflections on how sociotechnical novelty is produced and ascribed, and the implications of this.

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The social life of the brain: Neuroscience in society

1. Rationalizing Politics The Rise of Social Regulation Science and Policymaking Expertise and Trust The Contingency of Knowledge The Reform Debate An Alternative Approach 2. Flawed Decisions Nitrites 2,4,5-T Love Canal Estimates of Occupational Cancer The Technocratic Response A Critical Counterpoint 3. Science for the People The Rationale for Public Science The "New" Expert Agency Scientific Advice and Open Government Judicial Review of Science Policy The Weakening of the Paradigm 4. Peer Review and Regulatory Science The Traditions of Peer Review Peer Review in Practice Instructive Failures Regulatory Science: Content and Context Implications for Regulatory Peer Review 5. EPA and the Science Advisory Board Early Political Challenges A New Cooperation Boundary Exercises SAB's Impact on Policy Conclusion 6. The Science and Policy of Clean Air CASAC and the NAAQS Process Science and Standards Redefining CASAC's Role The Carbon Monoxide Controversy CASAC's Effectiveness: Bridging Science and Policy 7. Advisers as Adversaries The Scientific Advisory Panel Implementing the Impossible Ethylene Dibromide Dicofol Alar A Fragmentation of Authority 8. FDA's Advisory Network The Scientific Evaluation of Drugs Expertise and Food Safety Advice and Decision 9. Coping with New Knowledge The Quest for Principled Risk Assessment Formaldehyde: An Uncertain Carcinogen Conclusion 10. Technocracy Revisited A Public-Private Partnership for Science Risk Assessment without Politics The Public Board of Inquiry Wider Applications 11. The Political Function of Good Science From Advice to Policy Acceptable Risk Scientific Advice as Legitimation: Negotiation and Boundary Work Defining "Good Science" Normative Implications Conclusion Notes Index

The fifth branch. Science advisers as policymakers

health administration and legislation between 1770 and 1870, drawing attention simultaneously to the interests of both the state and the nascent medical profession in this area. As for the state, he sees an interest in health care and control with the aim of increasing economic, political, and military power in the tradition of Enlightenment cameralism. As for the doctors, he develops the thesis that their involvement in sanitary reform was a strategy to acquire state-sanctioned professional autonomy and the status of sole experts in questions of health. Accordingly, several issues relevant to medical professionalization are highlighted: the competition by non-academic healers (so-called Kurpffuscherei); the problem of fraudulent advertising; the striving for abolition of the dual educational system for surgeons and medical doctors, and the creation of a unified profession, which was eventually achieved with a ministerial decree in 1872 (twenty years later than in Prussia). A link between this so-called \"surgeons question\" (Chirurgenfrage) and Austrian sanitary reform is documented by efforts of organized doctors in the late 1860s to exclude surgeons from admission to public health and forensic services. Burg's central thesis of a co-operation between the state and the medical profession each to its own benefit-is substantiated from relevant primary sources, such as manuals for public health and medical administration, publications on sanitary reform and policies of doctors' societies, and articles from the early medical periodicals in Austria. His study also provides valuable insights into the responsibilities of Austrian public health officers and sanitary committees at different administrative levels, which extended to general hygiene, action in epidemic and epizootic diseases, and control of health personnel and hospitals. It is therefore a useful contribution both to the historiography of medical professionalization and of public health.

Molecular politics: developing American and British regulatory policy for genetic engineering, 1972–1982.

The article discusses a recent systemic turn in public participation in science studies. It reviews the main lines of criticism brought forward in science, technology and society towards public participation in science discourse and argues that much of it refers to the field's preoccupation with isolated, stage-managed minipublics. It then discusses a series of efforts in science, technology and society, and other fields to study public participation in a more systemic or holistic perspective. The article advances the argument that there are different ways of conceptualizing such a perspective, not all of which are well equipped to account for contestation, conflict and power. We distinguish between an aggregative approach, deliberative systems theory, an eco-systemic and a decentred governance approach and argue that the latter allows us to study the complexities of public participation without relying on a normative concept of system and account for power relations that may structure the field of public participation.

From experiments to ecosystems? Reviewing public participation, scientific governance and the systemic turn.

The article examines the emergence of governmental bioethics in Great Britain, France and Germany, i.e. bodies, discourses and procedures meant to guide policy-making in terms of ethical considerations. It argues that governmental bioethics, marked by openness, transparency and participation, can be understood as a form of reflexive government in the realm of science governance. It grew out of the problematization of older forms of science governance based on ideas of effectiveness, scientific expertise and system stability, and operates through structuring and managing proper talk rather than intervening in processes of techno-scientific development. Yet, rather than challenging the commitment to techno-scientific ‘progress’, it stabilizes it through mechanisms of inclusion, involvement and mobilization: within the framework of proper ethical talk, participation can be employed to pursue rather than oppose system stability.

Science governance and the politics of proper talk: governmental bioethics as a new technology of reflexive government

The article analyses what we term governmental ethics regimes as forms of scientific governance. Drawing from empirical research on governmental ethics regimes in Germany, Franceand the UK since the early 1980s, it argues that these governmental ethics regimes grew out of the technical model of scientific governance, but have departed from it in crucial ways. It asks whether ethics regimes can be understood as new ‘‘technologies of humility’’ (Jasanoff) and answers the question with a ‘‘yes, but’’. Yes, governmental ethics regimes have incorporated features that go beyond technologies of prediction and control, but the overcoming of the technical model also bears some ambivalence that needs to be understood. The article argues that governmental ethics regimes can be understood as a form of ‘‘reflexive government’’ (Dean) in that the commitment to techno-scientific innovation is stabilized not through an elitist, technocratic exclusion of non-scientific

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Ethical Reflection Must Always be Measured

NIPT has become a matter of controversy in Germany over the past years, there is now a widespread concern that it raises fundamental social and ethical questions Starting from the assumption that responsible governance requires governance actors to address these questions, the article examines how the main governance actors realized their responsibility in the sense of conceiving and performing it Building on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we study how actors are doing responsibility within a given institutional and political context We show that critical interventions disrupted institutional routines and caused governance actors to struggle with conflicting commitments of complying with institutional rules and exercising responsibility by taking social and ethical considerations into account Whereas these conflicting commitments posed a predicament for political decision-makers, who solved it through shifting responsibility for social and ethical issues elsewhere, there was no such predicament 

Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines, critical intervention, and the “big” questions in the controversy over non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

Sabine Könninger

Papers

From experiments to ecosystems? Reviewing public participation, scientific governance and the systemic turn.

Science governance and the politics of proper talk: governmental bioethics as a new technology of reflexive government

Ethical Reflection Must Always be Measured

Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines, critical intervention, and the “big” questions in the controversy over non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

Die Sprache der Ethik und die Politik des richtigen Sprechens. Ethikregime in Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien