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ResearchArea: Environment Group
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Sponsor: |
SPRU (Wellcome Trust) |
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Status: |
Completed |
Summary
Background
Recent advances in biotechnology and the medical sciences raise the possibility of a host of new treatments and cures for disease. At the same time the state of the nation's health services dominates political debate. Furthermore, in the wake of BSE the public is increasingly distrustful of government and scientific expertise. There is a growing climate of concern and unwillingness to accept technological developments seen as threatening deeply held values or potential risks to human health and the natural world. In part this is because established 'scientific' risk assessment techniques have proved incapable of dealing effectively with significant scientific uncertainty or of incorporating the full range of the public's concerns.
One response to the declining authority of government and science has been to seek to increase the legitimacy and democratic accountability of decision-making through new public consultation techniques - emphasising face-to-face deliberation between experts and stakeholders, and the inclusion of a range of social groups. However, many of these new techniques can be criticised for a lack of rigour and transparency, an undue emphasis on consensus and a failure to influence real decisions. More fundamentally, major problems arise for both established risk assessment techniques and new consultative approaches where decisions must be made about complex scientific and technological questions that raise difficult social, economic, cultural and ethical concerns.
Aims:
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To examine how far scientific, expert-driven risk assessment techniques
can be reconciled with deliberative approaches to public consultation
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To develop a new approach to public consultation and technology
assessment, called Deliberative Mapping
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To test this new approach through a full-scale public consultation
exercise - involving a range of experts and four North London based
citizens' panels - in an assessment of the future options for the
treatment of human organ failure
Project Design
The Deliberative Mapping project runs from June 2001 to March 2003. It draws upon previous work, at SPRU - Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex and the Environment and Society Research Unit (ESRU) University College, developing complementary processes for eliciting different factors underlying decisions about contentious environmental and technological risks.
The project will begin by setting up a panel of specialists, representing the range of interests concerned with the transplantation debate. These will be interviewed to provide quantitative and qualitative pictures of their own assessments of the range of transplantation options, and who will later serve as expert witnesses for the lay participants. A public opinion survey will be undertaken in North London to establish a snap shot of popular concerns and also to assist with the recruitment of four lay Citizens Panels. Each panel will then take part in a series of workshops, which will employ both quantitative and qualitative assessment techniques to build up a detailed picture of the participants' knowledge, value judgements and beliefs concerning the range of transplantation options, both before and after structured interaction with the specialist panel. Finally the specialists will also be re-interviewed to establish how their dialogue with the Citizens Panels might have affected their initial views.
Importance of Research
The Deliberative Mapping project seeks to integrate expert and citizen assessments within a new transparent framework for public consultation that emphases diversity and social learning as the basis for more robust, democratic and accountable decision-making.
Further details of this project are available at http://www.deliberative-mapping.org
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Understanding social cohesion during
and following recession
[added 19/01/2010]
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Address: Policy Studies Institute, 50 Hanson Street, London, W1W 6UP
E-mail: 
Telephone: 020 7911 7500 | 
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