Public Science for Public Ends: Rethinking Democracy in a technological age.
Professor Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer professor of Science and Technology Studies,  of the Harvard University:

I thank the organizers, and my colleagues in the STEPS programme, for making this possible. One of the ironies of the situation is that I am an Indian living in America but invited here by a European University. That in and of itself, if one reflects on that, shows  the oddity of the situation. It unpacks a lot of the kind of questions that we might actually absorb ourselves with today. Technically,  I was one of the core authors of the European Commission report, called “Taking European Knowledge Society seriously” which is one of the entry points of today’s debates. That too was an oddity because I was the only non-european member, in the group of fourteen that  authored that report.  I am also an advisor/ on the advisory committee of the STEPS centre.

It is an extreme challenge and honour to be asked to be the first speaker opening today’s debate and I think the only reasonable way to do it, is to put questions on the table. I  would like to re-iterate Brian’s point, that we have come with as much questions as,  if not more questions than,  answers.  

In my case these questions are two fold: One is as somebody who works on international and global issues but is largely in a US based context at an elite American research university.  I am generally curious about the ways in which my pre-occupations get addressed and framed in other academic and non-academic settings that are relevant to my work. I am very interested in the range of view-points, that are represented around this table, especially the viewpoints that are not of my closest colleagues.

There is also a set of questions that is flowing out of the thirty years of work that I have been doing on Science and Society. It is that set of more academic questions that I like to feature in my ten minutes on.

The title of this particular session, is Democracy and Technocracy. It is presented as a binary opposition. Over the years I have learnt to think of it not as a binary opposition, but more in the framework of, what some of my colleagues have called, co-production. It is the understanding that when you invent technical and technological forms of life, you are also inventing normative, moral, ethical forms of life. What is interesting is the ways in which these different forms tie together? How does technocracy have within in it the those forms of democracy and how does democracy operate within this world that are among other things, also technocratic.

One way to put it, which I hope today’s meeting will do, is not only to ask : What is this thing that we call knowledge in democratic societies, knowledge for policy,  and knowledge for power. But to also ask the question: What is this thing called democracy? What do we mean when are trying to articulate something called democracy? How should we understand the special challenge posed by metaphors like “from-below”?
I actually find it increasingly interesting that  a lot of the very powerful discourse coming out of civil society, where this “from-below” idea originates, is essentially saying: that more than 2 thousand 25 years into deliberating about democracy, we are still in a situation where we do not believe that our governments represents very accurately or effectively the views of the people that are being governed.

So a big questions that for me is that the crisis of democracy that various people have talked about. There are terms that are used for it, like democratic deficit. I hope that we will get beyond labels like democratic deficit, and actually start thinking about what is empirical content of this deficit, and what do we mean by all of this.

In my own work which is focused in an important way on regulatory policy, I have come to recognize that  with regard to Science and Technology, there have been at least three major models of governance and each one has  associated with it a certain idea or ideal of democracy.  Broadly speaking these are: 1.  The Market, 2. Regulation, and more recently 3. Ethics as frameworks of governance.

The market,  we are all familiar with. It is a very powerful model especially in a context of scientific and technological development. In most industrial or rapidly industrializing societies, the power to decide how innovation should flow, has largely been delegated to the private secto. The assumption is that a direct relationship the private sector’s policies of innovation and the purchasing publics’ power to decide whether they want the products that come from that innovation, would be adequate to govern the process of innovation itself. It is also assumed that the best thing states can do is to create a open, welcoming playing field, for private sector innovation, and initiative and then let the correspondence between the producers of technological goods, and scientific ideas to some extent, directly link up with the public.  That in a way absolves the  government of responsibility.
The second major model is the model of regulation, which deals with what is felt to be a failure in the first model, and that market failure is largely tied to information. The idea is  that people whose self-interest   dictates innovation, namely the private sector, will not always produce a playing field that is flat in terms of information flow. They will not always self-regulate, to the extent that they should. They will not always take into account its externalities properly. Therefore regulation comes into the picture, in order to represent the legitimate desire that the market mechanism should function perfectly as it is supposed to.
A third way, which largely can be traced to the 1990s and forward, says that neither the market model nor the regulatory model adequately picks up on public values, about very intimate kinds of goods and relationships,  such as, do we want to enhance human capability beyond what nature gives us?. What do we want kinship to be? Is it appropriate for a sixty something year old woman to give birth to a child through artificial means? These are kind of issues and questions that are not handled properly by either the market model or the regulatory model – the market model for the standard kinds of reasons and  the regulatory model, because the regulatory has focused on health safety and physical risks and not on moral hazards in a sense.  We plug in this ethics module, to take care of the failure of other models in dealing with public values.

I would like to insist that we cannot make progress, in the democratization of knowledge discussion unless we recognize that each of these powerful models – market , regulation and ethics, actually does have a theory of democracy built into it. We have to understand which democratization rules are associated with these three major approaches to governing technology. Then we need to to re-ask the question: What is missing?  What is it that we don’t have?

I can only use shorthand in the very limited time that I have to describe the theory of democracy built into the different model. In the market model the operative word for democracy is preference. In the regulatory model, it is delegation( that is people that are in power are  making the decisions for us, because we have delegated the authority to them). And Something like “public values” might be taken as the code word for how democracy articulates itself, in the third model.

In the remainder of our discussion today,  it would be well to keep in mind ( And this is the essential/main point which the chair has asked us to conclude our presentations with) that we really need to think about:  What are the interests of democracy? Which kind of democracy we need, that are not being served by the formalised ideas of democracy that are already lurking in our various governance models.

I will finish up by saying a few words of where my own research and  interests are tending these days. Over thirty years, which is a generation of living in an academic realm, contributing to it and rethinking it over and over again, there is a persistence persistence of certain kinds of things. My particular take on power these days,  is not so muchon  how we should divide it, or how we should we understand it, but really onquestions about why do things persist. In the words of one of my favourite English poets.. :”Why do sinners ways prosper?” That is a recurrent question. .We have not solved the problem of evil. What is it that makes these things persist.

The terms that I have been using along with some of my colleagues, is  “imaginaries”. It is a term that makes its apperance in our report that Brian chaired.  What is it that makes the imaginary  of a powerful , so powerful? Why do they not yield?
And I will state a few questions that  are very specific that are sub-questions under that heading.
One is: How is Progress imagined in particular ways that rules out other ways? Why is it that certain narratives or imaginaries of progress continue to prove to be so dominant?
In my own work, I  am extremely struck at the simplicity of the narratives of progress that you hear from people who are in power. You continually you hear the same canonical examples like.. ‘Because of technological progress, we  now have longer life-spans than we ever used to’, or ‘because of technological progress, fifty percent of humanity lives better than they could possibly have imagined a century ago’. It is almost like children learning ABC.  Why is it that the discourse of progress and power is it so impoverished? Why is it that it is baby talk? This is the place where STS (- Science and Technology Studies, or Science, Technology and Society ) as a field has to engage, because STS as a field,  there is an attempt to get people beyond ABCs . Yet our people in power, prove to be children when it comes to using discourses of progress that go beyond the ABCs.

A second sub-heading is what I would generally call ‘blocking techniques’. How is it that imaginaries that are powerful, rule out the imaginaries that are not? Why are certain imaginations allowed at the door, and others not? The point about civil society and its knowledges and how they are not documented is obviously one of those kind of questions. I would link them to our very impoverished understandings of how to analyse failure like the current enormous upheaval of the global system, with these markets having failed in radical ways. It is actually very interesting to ask the question what are the early take-home lessons that people are drawing from this kind of situation. I think that the social, discursive, and material ways which block out certain stories, and certain kinds of issues, deserve analysis. These erasure and blocking techniques need much more attention if we want to understand the persistence of the global simplified narratives of progress.

Lastly the way in which the competitiveness rhetoric plays out in a very powerful way, to even out the possibilities of what even can be imagined.  We take on board, the exceptional ethical concerns that Europeans public have about GM agriculture followed by the plea that we will loose out to America or Japan or to Argentina or to Canada or to  Brazil. And therefore we cannot afford to take on these ideas.  These are luxuries. Only rich peole can afford themselves the luxury of worrying about the ethical nature of technological improvement etc. . I am stating a line that must be familiar to you all. But I think it is the power of that story that we need to understand better and critique.

I think that in our questioning we should talk about alternatives to the dominant stories, and spent a lot of time about studying up:  We study the institutions of power and put it on the table as deserving a lot of thought. But equally we need to consider how to be really studying down, in a way that produces results.  Every body around this table has studied civil society. But there is some reason why all of our studies in civil society which do stress innovations and all those things, do not make   their way back up the ladder. So the question is: How to get studying down, to have result back up. This is thebig challenge for all of us.

I also think that the word representation should be put on the table early on. How in these these different models of democracy that are attached to market, regulation, and ethics, is the problem of representation handled. As STS scholars,  we are also  interested in how is nature represented?  How is society represented?  As scholars of democracy, we are also interested in how people and their view points are represented . How these different ideas of representation tie up together? --  is another those areas which I hope you will focus on.

All of that brings me to the salient point that we need to think very hard, about how to build on the masses of stuff that we already know, about power and powerlessness as institutions -- not as things just flowing around in the world but as things that have stabilized into particular formations of knowledge. What are the capacity for  and opportunities for action. I think we should take the STS mandate to be symmetrical seriously and devote as much attention to understanding powerlessness as is being devoted to understanding power.

 I hope that at some point, during the day we will have a chance not only to have the Indian and the European perspectives but also a little bit of the American scene, because I think it is not  independent or irrelevant to the way in which the Indo-European discussion conduct themselves.