Open House
Andy Stirling: Thank you for giving me the chance. My name is Andy Stirling, I come from the STEPS centre, one of the partners involved in this initiative and I wanted actually to intervene anyway in the discussion to make a point that the STEPS centre is working on which follows up from an issue discussed here by several people the panel about getting away from the dichotomies about science. It’s easy, Shiv Vishvanathan spoke about needing a new democratization of science, Brian talked about re-inventing science and these of course are right but they could be misunderstood.

Science was after all, at its inception, a pioneering sub culture of democracy. It was about being more reasoned self critical, communitarian about knowledge. These are basic features of democracy and distinguished itself from more hierarchical, monolithic, doctrinaire forms of knowledge and I think what we are talking about is a discussion with insides about where the science itself becomes something that it would once and quite idealized contrasted with. So really for us in the STEPS centre – Michelle and I know many others were interested in these debates about the directions of science and technology and how different forms of knowledge get involved with science and technology in deciding on the direction. So in just as a quick example in agriculture we have science of ecological agriculture, science of chemically assisted agriculture, science of genomics and other advanced bio-technologies in agriculture. All that science we can’t do all those equally. We have to make decisions about which direction likewise in the medical area mentioned already…in energy we have wind, solar, carbon capture, nuclear…these are choices all backed up by science, all backed up by other forms of knowledges as well. And the moment if we do treat these things as being in a dichotomy when we hear in Europe a lot about being anti-science or anti-technology it’s a little bit about like politicians saying – when one says to a politician one is unhappy with policy in criminal justice or in education, the politician saying “you are being anti-policy”. It is strange that the possibility of skepticism which is central to science is being erased. So it is this kind of debate that we in the STEPS centre want to try to catalyze and service and we are working in countries around the world with partners in Kenya, in China, in India, which we greatly value as well as in Latin America to try to explore what are the pathways that are being missed out in health, in food, in water.
 
What pathways that perhaps are not having a voice because they favor the least powerful – the poorest people, which possible pathways to science as well as other forms of knowledge are being missed out and we are trying to develop tools and we are trying to catalyze debate and we are trying to learn and this is a event and our involvement which we are very pleased and proud to be involved in and thank you for engaging in the part of the process whereby we learn and exchange views on these kinds of issues about the directions of science and knowledge. Thank you for the time.

Walter Mendoza: I have many concerns, many comments but I will just try to focus on one. In a similar panel about a year back, I had voiced the concern of finance and technology gone haywire. Now finance everybody knows about the financial crisis but somehow in the engagement what Balaji was talking about (climate change and agriculture) we do not seem to accept that technology has gone haywire and it’s a big concern of mine because when we talk about climate change and you say “talk truth to power” which Brian and Sheila have been talking about, what power do we talk the truth to? Because the crisis is known but the response to that is not adequate. So I am very glad because the whole panel – there is this politics of knowledge and technology running through the panel but how do we look at this, that the people who have the resources and the knowledge to deal with the problem has always been known in most of the civilizational problems we have faced and the decline of civilizations.

And therefore I asked Shiv for example a few months ago, how is it that we are going to cope with the climate crisis where we have the knowledge, we have the resources but talking truth to power is not enough. So what do we do? When we say agriculture for example, we say, there is the solution for example even to climate change within know ledges that communities have which we are discussing in knowledge and civil societies but how you speak that truth to power – it is a big dilemma for us.

Shiv: Thank you Walter, I have a slight problem. One of the dualisms I find difficult is the distinction between truth and power. Because it pre-supposes that those who protest, those who have something to offer to power are powerless. I think what climate change really creates is a possibility that civil society becomes a source of invention. That civil society becomes a chance for actually combining truth and power. When you look at new kind of livelihood; when you challenge the very economics of an “economist view” of looking at the climate change model I think you are offering new things. And I think that’s the beginning of the networks we are talking about. I think what to a certain extent we are trying to link it to is there are variety of debates going on even within the scientific community which offers a possibility of new ways of looking at these things. Combining these could be a new beginning. And I don’t think it is that difficult to talk to power especially when power is so uncertain about itself. The meltdown showed it. I think the way we are reacting to climate change shows it. I think it requires a tremendous idea of agency from civil society. That is how I look at it. You may say it is romantic, sentimental, and optimistic but that’s one way of constructing the political script.

Balaji: I will be brief because there is a lot of discussion on climate change and agriculture in the scientific community across the world and when you read those documents, the kind of documents you need to carry in a crowded economy class cabin on a long distance flight…it will put you to sleep very well. There is absolutely nothing original in any of them, a lot of them are much-much more of the same… and they are assuming that there is going to be a long lead time available, a minimum of 25 years before action can be taken and that donors are waiting with bags of money. And it is the entire science discussion in relation to climate change and agriculture is premised and proceeds along these lines and there is a lot of interesting stuff that my colleague Peter Cooper has written. Thanks.
 
My name is Giridhar Rao, from the World Esperanto Association. So it is not surprising that I should focus on language. The link between language and knowledge flows seems to me to be not having been discussed as compared to many other aspects. In two domains for example: those of indigenous knowledge and higher education. Considerable amount of knowledge on bio-diversity as you know exists and is coded in indigenous languages.  This cultural diversity is disappearing fast, faster than biological diversity. For this reason it is important to safeguard and promote linguistic human rights especially for indigenous peoples…for this reason too I should say. The most effective manners as research shows is mother tongue medium education and to counter what is called linguistic genocide. The domain of indigenous knowledges is one place where one clearly sees the link between language and knowledge flows. Higher education is another domain. In India, poor over all schooling generally results in poor cognitive skills in English – the language of our higher education.

In Applied Sciences like Agriculture which Dr.Balaji mentioned this disjunct sets up its own barriers between the farmer in the field and the farmer in university. The home language and English - the language of education and at the level of international conferences participation by non- English speaking people or non-dominant language people there is plenty of anecdotal evidence anyway of exclusion of various sorts. Even where school teaching is very good as in the EU for example, and for most of its citizens the medium of instruction is the home language, even then, language plays an important role in knowledge flows. The Swiss Economist Fransua Grim in his 2005 report “The Teaching of Foreign Languages as Public Policy” estimates that every year the EU transfers as much as 25 Billion (109) Euros to the UK for language related reasons. These include the sale of language learning materials, the 700,000 or so EU citizens who go to UK to learn English and of course the cost saved by the UK in not having to teach foreign languages. Thus in vastly different domains of human experience, in the education of indigenous peoples as well as in the EU we need to manage multilingualism much better for more efficient, equitable and democratic knowledge flows. This is where the experience of the 120-year-old Esperanto community comes in. But that is the topic of another seminar. Thank you.

G. Haragopal:I think the question you raised is related to what we were trying to argue - the process of globalization. I think language also is either victim or a part of that process. For example in India if you look at medium of instruction question in 60s when there was an unrest all around, when there were very powerful social movements, suddenly mother tongue became very important. That’s how mother tongue became medium of instruction in late 60s. But now after the process of globalization, again there is a massive shift and now they say that everybody has to learn English if one has to survive in the market economy, forgetting that language is a part of cultural richness and identity and meaning to life…the whole communication. I think these questions are linked to what is happening to the very model of development, so as long as you think that knowledge is for society then language will have an important place but once you say knowledge is for market then you have to … I mean Kothari Commission therefore said education should respond to social needs and not wants. But now knowledge has started to respond to wants and not to needs. And I think in the process, the type of question that you have raised becomes very important.

Participant(from the audience): My question is probably to all of you. You know a scientist is very keen today to develop what is called an ideal model where they would be able to dialogue with persons, who are ‘man in the street’, not particularly known to the world of science. May be that is the final objective of the center.  However any policy without an ethical debate probably becomes incomplete. I’d like to know, is there a portion given to that area which is probably non-scientific but not essentially nonsensical.
 
Sheila Jasanoff: You raised an extremely important point and the short answer is yes, that in most of the settings that we are all aware of, where people are discussing science and society...there has been a rise across the board in attention given to ethics. I think that is just the beginning of a new set of problems because it follows from some of the things we have been saying that it is not that easy to figure out what, the kinds of values that are associated with scientific and technological developments when one says that “technology is running wild” for instance. What does that mean, which values is it pumping up against and whose values anyway.

There’s a secondary debate developing about who has the right to articulate the ethical positions of different members of society; and actually transcending different members of the society because let’s not forget that when we are talking about climate change, we are also living in the era of something called sustainability when the world has taken on a kind of commitment to pass on the limited resources of the Earth in something like the same condition that we found it in, to next generations and next generations after that. So in that context many people are increasingly thinking that ethical obligations are not only the obligations of human beings toward each other and toward each other’s societies but also involve other species and other beings and systems on the planet itself. So a troubling development that has happened in the political world - the global political world lately is that ethics itself is in danger of becoming a separate form of expert knowledge raising some of the same difficulties of access and representation that we’ve all been talking about.
So I think that your question is extremely important, not in the least frivolous or meaningless but what we need in addition to a debate about science and technology, is a debate about the “science of ethics”. So the attempt to turn ethics itself into a science. I think if your question is about how do we in the political arena go about articulating better the values that are latent in many technological developments and what kinds of institutions would allow us to do this and how good are our own institutions speaking of nation state or even a city like Hyderabad. I mean how did Hyderabad become an IT city and what did that mean and whose values were built into that kind of system. If Hyderabad is producing 40% of the childhood vaccines, you know how did that come about? Was the pearl infrastructure the same infrastructure that became the childhood vaccine infrastructures…you know there are very interesting questions there about how people choose their values and build them into institutions. So if you are referring to all of that and the need for a wider debate on that, I think that’s exactly what this panel is urging and asking for. But if you are talking about ethics becoming another specialist discourse which only moral philosophers control, then of course that is a very big problem.
 
Participant(from the audience): What about a regulatory body, which has some “ought” infused in it…. Somebody in any policy has to have some regulatory body…you know science cannot work in tandem.

Sheila Jasanoff: I think we have sort of advanced into a second generation of the problem. So back a 100 years ago, regulatory bodies did not recognize that they were actually dealing with values in addition to knowledge. I think, certainly in America by the middle of the previous century it had become quite clear that knowledge was never sufficient by itself to dictate outcomes, that values necessarily were implicated and then it became a problem for politics. How do you ascertain those values, how do you build into it? So I think regulation itself is a matter of developing an “ought” from a set of “is’s”. So the “ought” is already there but I think today we are confronting a second-generation set of problems. I mean just saying is there any ought in it doesn’t answer the question whose “ought”. You know Bill Gates and Bin Laden have different “oughts” even if they are dealing with the same technology. So I think we are confronting a second generation of problems that include the right to say this should be the “ought” for the world. So I think for us when we are talking about democratization there’s a big problem about whose “ought” and “ought” to govern the day.