Climate change: between democracy and expertise?

Climate change represents one of society's most challenging environmental concerns and has been a major factor in changes in the way that environmental policies are debated and informed. Climate change policy faces at least three major challenges: (1) what is known – or not known – about climate change, in particular regarding the relative importance of anthropogenic factors; (2) what can and should be done; and (3) who should do something about it?

Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, these challenges have been addressed in several ways: (a) by increasing research and international sharing and integration of expertise on climate change (e.g., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); (b) by developing international agreements on issues such as the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions; and (c) by promoting national/local strategies to fulfil international agreements (e.g., Local Agenda 21 – community defined strategies for sustainable development arising from the first “Earth Summit” held in Rio in 1992). These challenges all include policy and scientific aspects but also raise questions over the interpretation of Local Agenda 21 (Tuxworth 1996; Selman and Parker 1997; Voisey et al. 1996; Young 1996; Young 1997). How local is “local”? What kind of “agenda” is “Agenda 21”? Whose “agenda” is it? Answers to these questions vary according to the perspectives and purposes of those asking the questions in the first place.

One of the most routine observations about modern life concerns the rapid pace of technical change and the consequences of this for every aspect of society. Of course, this is not just a phenomenon of the 1990s. The social impact of ceaselessly changing science and technology has been a classical theme of writers, social scientists and scientists since the Industrial Revolution. Generally, the tone has been deterministic, suggesting that science and technology have their own objective logic to which society must adapt as best it can.

However, the relationship between scientific expertise and the ‘general public’ is currently a matter of renewed attention and social concern. Although the dominant form of this renewed interest is shaped by anxieties about the ‘social assimilation’ of science and technology (i.e. by a concern that the public are insufficiently receptive to science and technology), we will argue that this conceals a more fundamental issue regarding the public identity and organisation of science within contemporary society.

This edited collection focuses on one important aspect of this wider theme; the contemporary issue of what has become known as the ‘public understanding of science’. As the following chapters demonstrate, this has become something of a fulcrum for debates over the social negotiation of power and social order in relation to science and technology. In this Introduction, we will first set the scene for the detailed analyses which follow and then explain the particular approach to this debate which has been adopted here. As this book demonstrates, concern with ‘public understanding’ takes us into many areas of case-study and socio-technical inquiry – it is thus all the more important to establish from the outset the major interlinkages and connections.

This chapter takes as its focus one very specific example of public interaction with science – the case of the hill sheep-farmers of the Lake District of northern England. They experienced radioactive fall-out from the 1986 Chernobyl accident which contaminated their sheep flocks and upland pastures. In an area dominated by a traditional and demanding hill-farming economy, they were restricted from selling their sheep freely (almost 100 farms are still under restriction). They also received intensive expert advice about the environmental hazards from the radiocaesium deposits, and the relationship of these to other such deposits from the nearby Windscale-Sellafield nuclear facilities and 1950s weapons testing fall-out. Fieldwork comprising mainly in-depth interviews with affected farmers and others provided data for analysis of the factors influencing the reception of scientific expertise by this sub-population.

In analysing the farmers' understanding of the science, it was immediately apparent that it would have been meaningless and utterly misleading to treat their response to its cognitive content – for example, the claim that radiocaesium from Chernobyl was clearly distinguishable from Sellafield emissions of the same radio–isotopes – as if separate from its social and institutional form. Examining how the scientific institutions framed the issue and the knowledge they articulated as science, identified certain commitments which were institutionalised and taken for granted, thus not deliberately introduced. They constituted the very culture of science as institutionalised and practised as public knowledge. These assumptions shaped the scientific knowledge, they were not extra to it; and they were built in as social prescriptions in the way the science was institutionalised and deployed.

The fieldwork presented in this volume provides mainly qualitative insights into the ways in which public groups attempt to fashion locally useful knowledges from ‘external’ and ‘indigenous’ sources. Most of the chapters analyse the interactions between identifiable social groups and scientific, technical or medical experts. These groups are defined by different parameters; geopolitical-cultural location (The Isle of Man); shared livelihood, culture, and physical place, but with more cultural permeability (Cumbrian sheep-farmers); physical location but a less-distinct culture (residents around major industrial hazard sites); shared experience of medical treatment – either chronic or episodic (hypercholesterolaemia and antenatal patients). Two further chapters analyse responses of more diffuse collectivities to scientific knowledges as experienced in museum exhibitions (Chapter Seven), and in relation to radiation hazards in the home (Chapter Five). Finally, and consistent with the orientation of the fieldwork chapters, two chapters examine new contexts of the contemporary negotiation of scientific practice (i.e. the norms and ethos of what is meant by ‘science’) – namely in environmental debate and policy-making, and in the commercialisation of scientific research.

In these conclusions, we offer some thoughts on the overall implications of this work by giving further reflection and clarification to some of the key themes of our book. Since two of the key assumptions about science which frame the ‘public understanding’ issue are its intrinsic usefulness and its universality, it is especially important to give attention to two issues at this stage: the connections between ‘useful knowledge’ and hidden models of social agency; and the relationships between the ‘local’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ in the ‘micro social’ research presented here. Following this, we will consider some of the practical lessons which can be drawn from our collective research.