Brian Wynne: First of all let me thank you all for attending this discussion. Shiv opened with the reference to the knowledge circus which will constitute him in the role of (town crier). One of my experiences of taking my children to circuses many times, many enjoyable times was that there were always inventifications. When the scripts weren’t followed they were always inventive ways of developing a circus act interesting and often very productive. And I guess moving towards more serious issues in front of us here, the issues that we face are ones that are inventing. Not only inventing, re-inventing an imagination of democracy in a global context and in a context of increasingly intensified economic competition and the subordination of knowledge, including particularly scientific knowledge, to those global economic forces. In that sense we also have to re-invent what we understand by science and scientific knowledge.

As far as I can understand it as an ex-scientist myself, for the Research Lab Bench in Material Science that actually, there is a role for science studies in the field that the four visiting members of the circus of knowledge society are involved in and which actually caused it to be asked to be members of this working group by the European Commission on knowledge society on science and governance in fact its original term as thought of by the Commission.
But I just want to begin by reference to Prof.Balasubramanian’s observations about new and emerging knowledge societies and the reference to new knowledge powers like China, India, Brazil and so on. It seems a bit of irony of a rather strong kind to me coming from Europe which often likes to define itself as the origin of the scientific revolution of the 17th century that actually all societies have been knowledge societies, and in particular India of course has been far older knowledge civilization than Europe in that respect. So, in real thinking the present trajectories of so called knowledge societies then we have things to learn in this inventive process that confronts us and we have a lot to learn from countries like India in actually developing these new trajectories, new experimental forms of social change and scientific policy change too, in order to try to develop things in a better direction than those we see them going in the present.

So to turn to the EU. We were tasked as a working party, and I was asked to Chair it. One of the key members of the main production group of the report we produced in January 2007 wasn’t able to be come on this visit – Professor Ulrike Felt, from the University of Vienn, was the Rapporteur of the working party. The EU was concerned about what it defined as a problem of public unease with science widespread as it said, I think falsely, but nevertheless, it saw it as being right across the board so there was a general problem of public unease with science. It didn’t take very much observation of these processes of science and society relationships to see that. In fact these expressions of unease, opposition and mistrust malcontent with trajectories of scientific innovation were a) often about innovations which were being promoted in the name of science, as if that was somehow equivalent to classical notions of science as being the primary independent republic which speaks truth to power; when actually, lot of that concern was about those innovations and technologies being promoted as if they were neutral, independent, objective, historically given, scientific knowledge simply being revealed by scientists rather than created by scientists operating under particular historical, economic and political pressures.

So we had a job to do to try to understand the European expressions and versions of public unease with science primarily because the powers that be within Europe, the leaders of the scientific and policy institutions and the politicians are looking to them for advice on these issues, primarily because, those leaders were actually defining this public unease as being a function of public ignorance. That the only reason why there were forms of public opposition for example the GMOs issue – the controversy was right at its kind of hottest phases if you like it that time in the early 2000’s when the pressures to generate this kind of  report were building within the European Commission.

The Commission was primarily concerned with the public at large within Europe getting into the way of the commitment of Europe being the most competitive knowledge economy in the world by the year 2010. A commitment made at the European Prime-Ministerial Summit in Lisbon in the year 2000.

So when we were asked when we had our first meeting considering what precisely we should actually include with what kind of focal definition in a report of this kind, we considered well, do we simply question the Lisbon agenda commitment which Europe has made as a big global commitment - the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010? We were already by then half way through that decade. So we were confronted with this as an option and we rejected it for two reasons primarily: first of all it was too easy a target if we wanted to be critical of that kind of claim and that kind of policy commitment with many-many resources being marshaled around it and in support of it. For example, one element of that commitment was that every member state of the Union which wanted two temporary exceptions in a usual European way should actually by that date have 3% of its GDP committed to research and development. We are still no where near that figure by the way and we are near 2009. So it was too easy a target.
 
But more important reason in a way was that actually to criticize the Lisbon agenda in this way would have fallen into the trap potentially of actually reinforcing the very polarization which we think is a completely false and destructive form of conduct of the so-called knowledge society whether in Europe, whether in India, US or whether anywhere else in the world. And this false stereotyping of the relationship between science and society, I have already indicated the amount of it which is the rest of the society outside of the doors of science has no knowledge. It is a vacuous entity – politically, socially and culturally, and that was presenting the leaders that as if this knowledge society, knowledge economy revolution with concerns about the incapacity of the European public to be able to actually support the knowledge society by providing markets for the innovations which were to flow from this research and development investment.

There was a particular report in January 2006 from one of the Prime Ministerial Summits the one in UK(when the UK was President) – a year earlier - the “Aho Report” after the Chair of the report, which made this precise complaint about the lack of innovation friendliness, if you like, of European citizens. So one of our prime objectives in this report was to actually to ask to take European knowledge society seriously; not to reject the Lisbon agenda per say, but to actually point out that innovation, knowledge, is distributed throughout society and that there isn’t an anti science attitude abroad in European lands in the way that the very leaders of our European Union and of the Member States it constituted were actually fearing and complaining about.
So that was where our report started and where we attempted to point out that for example, the interpretation of conflict over innovations like the GMOs issues and many other issues too is not actually a function of public ignorance. Granted, that there is a plenty of public ignorance of science around in the world including in the European world. The reasons for public opposition were not primarily caused by that kind of public ignorance. There is also scientific ignorance of many-many fields of science too – that the issues were actually about public concerns of the denial of contingency, of lack of control, including lack of predictive control of the uncertain futures that science itself is generating.
 
And the institutionally Science and Regulatory Policy mould was actually systematically denied that kind of contingency, that kind of ignorance that scientists in many respects actually generating part of its innovative processes. So that we were attempting to point out that actually there is room and there is ample opportunity for more convergence between ‘science as practiced’, and is funded and is driven by various kinds of imaginaries about commercial value and concentration and control. And imaginaries might be more open to the very knowledge sources and practices which already exist out there in distributed forms in society, including making reference to my prized speaker to farmers in particular if we are talking about bio-technology and so on.
So I am just opening up there some of the issues which the report that we wrote for the European Commission actually was attempting to raise. And I am going to bring myself to a closure because I have had my time but I hope that we will all look forward to a discussion of these issues. Thank you.