Prof. Sheila Jasnoff: I think one doesn’t usually ask of a travelling circus as why they are in town. But if it is a travelling circus of academics one might well ask especially if they are speaking of something so arcane as democracy and science - why this performance? and why now?

So Prof. Balaji has already spoken about one aspect of the answer referring in particular to climate change and a sense of crisis and Brian Wynne has continued that theme with the alleged uneasiness that the European publics feel about science and technology. I think those comments begin to get a part of the answer but I want to come at this from a somewhat different angle as the one participant here who is representing willy-nilly US point of view.
 
I want to pick up on three points that Shiv Vishvanathan made in his introduction. The first one is about “learning to read the West”. One of the points I’d like to make is that there is no such thing as “the West” and Shiv’s second major point that there is a sort of battle of the enlightenment going on underscores that very observation that whatever the monolith called “the West” was seems to be falling apart in this present climate of global uncertainty and crisis in which we find ourselves. And then lastly the question about so where does the global imagination come from and what are the levers with which we can possibly go back creating or reinventing something that is an imagination for the world as it is.

Brian Wynne used the phrase “speaking truth to power” that has become a sort of tag phrase for the role of science in relation to politics. But in the condition of uncertainty in which we find ourselves its not so much that experts are speaking truth to power as that claiming the truth gives one access to power in a certain sense. So the very right to imagine futures for other people within the circumstances of uncertainty in which we find ourselves, can be claimed most authoritatively by those who claim to see that future the most clearly. If you can have access to speaking the truth in some sense then you also have the power to represent the future and act on it and often for global publics constituting very large numbers.

I will give you an anecdote which illustrates how this right to claim the truth position carries with it the democracy right - the right to speak. It happened in the Kennedy School which is in a sense Harvard’s Diplomatic Station. Harvard as a University until a couple of months ago was endowed much more generously than many small countries. Even now I think it can claim something like a 2/3rd of the resources it had before the financial meltdown but in any case the Kennedy School in some ways functions almost as a diplomatic station for this ‘world power’ of a certain sort.

So one day there was a debate there between Jeffrey Sachs and George Soros and the two of them were sitting on high stools, very much the performers in the kind mood that Shiv is talking about and I don’t remember any more of what it was the George Soros said that provoked the comment – it’s the comment that has stayed with me – Jeffrey Sachs turned around to Soros and said “But George, I speak for the three billions of the world’s poorest of the poor”. So one may ask what gives Jeffrey Sachs the right to speak for three billions of the world’s poorest of the poor and I think one short answer would be ‘expertise’. So where does that expertise come from? We know we don’t know the future, we also know that nevertheless we have to act and certainly all of the world leaders that are getting elected now and about to take office soon are facing that predicament of how to act. When Barack Obama reappoints most of Robert Rubin’s (former Treasury Secretary) followers in order to address the financial meltdown one is suddenly confronted with the questions about where the imaginations of the rulers comes from as they confront uncertainties of the future and decide how to act. So for me as a lawyer, a lot of the questioning in this area is about how we decide whom we should trust to act for us in these uncertain futures that we are confronting. And I want to just put before you three kinds of problems that the world I believe is confronting and then in the discussion it will be very interesting to think about how the Indian imagination is dealing with all of these problems.

So one of these problems has been referred to as the ‘democratic deficit’ and that is conventionally understood as not knowing all the stuff that experts know and have in their heads. So we don’t as publics have specialist knowledge enough. As a legally trained scholar of science and technology I prefer to think not in terms of democratic deficits but more in terms of a decline of delegation that is we seem to have lost track of “how it is” or “why it is” that we delegate our uncertain futures to particular kinds of experts and particular kinds of expert bodies and arguably what Bush administration has problematized better than almost anything else is this very decline of delegation. Its principles of delegation that have fallen into disrepair the consequences are rather severe because it has become uncertain who speaks for America or who speaks for Europe in relation to problems like climate change.

The second point is very much related to this question of “learning to read the West” because I would submit that one of the further problems in this sort of delegation deficit world that we find ourselves in, is that countries and cultures differ greatly – political cultures in particular with regard to their understanding of the uncertainties that confront us. We live in societies with different civic epistemologies, different public ways of understanding and making a sense of the world and as a result, operating - confronting allegedly the same futures – climate change is confronting everybody but we are confronting those futures with very different national and local and regional understandings of what counts as evidence, what counts as reason, what counts as risk itself, what counts as sustainability and what counts as adequate action to be taken in these kinds of circumstances.

And lastly we are in a world in which there is kind of stratum of power making that has been under-theorized and not at all understood thus far and that is the “global level”. We don’t understand how Nation-States operate but at least we have some procedures whereby we go about working within nation states. We have very little understanding of how the global level operates.

And again, I will close this time with another anecdote. This is an anecdote which is very personal in which Brian Wynne and I played a part and this was an attempt to intervene in a conflict between the US and Europe on the issue of GMOs and the importation of the GMOs or the non-importation because Europe was blocking this technology from coming into Europe in a massive way. So we felt strongly, as students and scholars of risk of a many years, that the American case (America began the case against Europe on this particular issue) was founded on a misrepresentation of what the state of knowledge was about GMOs. We thought that it misrepresented social science knowledge and we thought the Nation-to-Nation controversy or the nation-state-to-region controversy didn’t actually bring social science knowledge that was relevant to the issue to the table.
 
So we decided that we would file a “friend of the court brief” in this proceeding and there is not enough time to talk in detail about this, but as we tried to do this we discovered – first, that there was no formal procedure for doing the kind of thing we wanted to do, so in a sense we were legally out of bounds from the start. Second that nevertheless it was possible to maneuver our way into this rather ‘unregulated’ space; but third, that once we did put our knowledge on the table there was no way of holding the decision makers accountable for listening to that knowledge. So some of those problems occured in all national contexts, some of them have protections against them in some national contexts. But our attempt to do this I think put on the table very squarely for us and for those people who walked along that road with us that we have this layer of global governance that is allegedly dealing with global problems such as climate change. But for us as citizens to come before those points of power making bodies and to say that how do you presume to speak for us? How do you presume to speak without taking into account of our knowledge – that turned out to be a very difficult undertaking indeed! So that is something I’d be very interested in hearing us or reflect on - it was an experiment in representation and it worked in a very…shall we say…ambiguous way. Thank you.