Politics in Practice

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How Does Government Listen to Scientists?

Claire Craig CBE is Chief Science Policy Officer at the Royal Society, the independent scientific academy of the UK and the Commonwealth, dedicated to promoting excellence in science. She previously led the Government Office for Science on behalf of two UK Government Chief Scientific Advisors. She established the UK’s Foresight programme of science-based strategic futures projects, covering topics from flood risk to cognitive enhancement and was a Faculty member of the World Economic Forum. Claire has worked extensively on strategy and science in decision-making. 

She is the author of How Does Government Listen to Scientists?

When the Royal Society published a sober and authoritative report on Machine Learning, the principal technology behind what is commonly referred to as AI, even a broadsheet newspaper juxtaposed its coverage of the report with a photo of the Terminator.

Several decades of working in government meant that the inevitable pairing caused me extreme frustration. But with the frustration was curiosity, and the combination drove this book.

From advising the UK Prime Minister in the civil emergencies associated with tsunamis, earthquakes and potential nuclear meltdown; to finding ways to ensure the countryside – including its charismatic badgers – is well managed in the face of diseases such as bovine TB; or determining whether Blockchain is sufficiently robust to underpin financial or government services, scientists are constantly working with and in government.

Much of the thinking about the practice and theory of science in government comes from consideration of the natural sciences: sciences in the restricted Anglo-Saxon sense of the word. Somehow economics, the humanities, much of the social sciences, are typically expected to be sufficiently part of the fabric of policy that they require less special treatment. It is also the case that, regardless of discipline, successive generations of policymakers and scientists are having to learn afresh each time some of the basics about how to talk and listen to each other.

In practice – and there is now much practice, and much to observe and learn from, from the decades-long arcs of public, scientific and creative debates about the impacts of climate change, to the big questions of public health such as obesity and mental wellbeing, and to the lessons from the 2014 Ebola outbreaks – in practice, two things stand out and the book tries to tackle them both.

The first thing is that the conduct of government sometimes importantly comes down to moments when a single human being is making a defined decision. They may be doing this in the most plural, complex, contingent, subjective, constrained and yet simultaneously unbounded context imaginable, but that is what they are doing, or think they are doing.

This aspect of embodiment is core to the continuing challenge of working out ways better for government and scientists to listen to each other. Listening requires both cognition and sentiment.

In the moment, it is not just the power of the scientist’s argument or the aptness of the decision maker's question or framing that determines the quality of the exchange, the expectations on both sides matter too. While developing ideas for this book I heard Jane Lubchenco, give an inspirational talk about her four years’ on President Obama’s science team, and the trials and triumphs of working inside bureaucracies and politics to make a difference to – in her case – marine environments. In the middle, she described an encounter in which Deputy President Joe Biden said to her in surprise: “Hey, I thought you were a scientist”…… “But…. I just understood everything you said!”

So a key aim was to write a book which would help create political and academic cultures which in turn would create the conditions for it to be impossible for the politician to be surprised. And, in which it would be equally impossible for the scientist to be surprised that, contrary to their very common expectations at the start, when they actually meet a Minister and have any degree of conversation, they find the Minister to be well-intentioned, smart and interested.

When it comes to human beings making decisions – what they notice, who they listen to, what they anticipate as a result of their decisions and how they defend those decisions – many academic and practical insights apply at once and they are rarely brought together.

The second thing the book tries to tackle is the need to draw together insights from multiple fields of research, scholarship and reflective practice. Science policy studies, strategy and futures work, decision-making, public engagement with science, science communication, the uses of models and of narratives – all are areas where there are insights that can help improve the quality of the systems of science in government and the conversations within them. And, of course, at a time of anxiety about the quality of public reasoning and public debate, knowing what we know and how to apply it becomes an important bedrock to the kinds of experiments in new ways of knowing and of debating that we must develop collectively over the coming years.

Finally, of course, there is the Terminator; representative here of the challenges of finding ways for societies to talk about the big, future, distributed issues, and the knowledge we do or don’t have about them while accommodating the need for narratives of charismatic embodiment with humans at their centre. When the scientist and the politician are together in the room, knowing whether the Terminator is “merely” an icon to attract attention to the issue, whether it brings with it a tinge of fear and loathing about future technologies that influences public opinion and hence policy-making, or whether it’s actually a populist metaphor for unstoppable global forces of one kind or another, and knowing when it is which, that’s thoughtful listening too.


This year, Palgrave Macmillan is proud to present a new format of short, accessible books written by influential academics with direct policymaking experience. The books are designed to appeal to a wide audience, with clear summaries on policy implications and recommendations for action. Explore our Policy Essentials titles today!
 
Interested in publishing? Contact Senior Editor Jemima Warren.

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