Risk Deliberation

(Work Package 3)

There are three rationales for the desirability of public involvement in risk governance. The first rationale is ethical and means that the public should be involved because they are the ultimate source of values in society, and these values should be expressed in decision-making.  In other words, we should respect our citizens' right for self-determination and autonomy. The second rationale is political. This means that public involvement strengthens the legitimacy of decisions and provides a broader responsibility for them, which also increases their stability over time. The third rationale concerns knowledge. The public should be involved because citizens have knowledge, which is different from the knowledge of experts and politicians.

In many European countries, seeking lay views to inform complex technical and scientific decisions has become political orthodoxy, and it is to increase 'public participation' in science and technology policies that the most innovative instruments of consultations are being devised today. This new centrality of "the public" has been accompanied by the growth of a of a new type of expertise, one that employs different techniques of elicitation - the opinion poll, the focus group, the citizen jury, etc - to generate and process the views and opinions of different publics and feed them into the policy-making process. In this work package we will investigate the conduct of the conduct of public consultations. By this we mean the organization of the communication of models used for deliberation and transparency and how legitimate constituencies of the public are constructed through the use of such models.

In the UK, there has been a nationwide public discussion around GM issues (the "GM Nation"). Meetings were organized across the country by local authorities and network groups. To help inform policy-making on GM, findings from meetings - together with views submitted by the public through a web site - were fed back to the Government. This will be a major source of information for this part of the project.  

The objective of this work package is to clarify the impact of the emphasis of public participation, the new type of expertise employed to organise participation and the changing views of the citizen on risk governance.

Contacts:
Linda Soneryd  linda.soneryd@score.su.se
Bronislaw Szerszynski bron@lancaster.ac.uk