A New Policy-Making Instrument? The First Australian Consensus Conference
Abstract
Consensus conferences evolved as a response to the public's increasing dissatisfaction with technocratic decision-making processes that are judged to have repeatedly failed to serve its interests. The staging of the first Australian consensus conference at Old Parliament House in Canberra in March 1999 therefore presented an ideal opportunity to analyse the evolution of this new kind of policy input from its conception through to its implementation and subsequent evaluation. This thesis set out to provide an analysis of that trajectory using elements of the theoretical approach known as actor-network theory (ANT). Previous analyses of consensus conferences have generally provided only limited evaluations of single aspects of the entire process of setting up, implementing and evaluating such a conference. Furthermore, many of the early evaluations were conducted by reviewers or units which were themselves internal to the consensus conference under scrutiny. My own analysis has tried to offer broader, although inevitably less detailed, coverage, using a perspective from contemporary social theory that offers particular advantages in analysing the creation of short-term networks designed for specific purposes. By describing and analysing the role of this relatively new policy-making instrument, I have explored the different sub-networks that operate within the consensus conference process by focussing on the ways in which the conference was organised and how the relationships between the organisers and the participants helped to shape the outcomes. Thus the entire consensus conference sequence from idea to outcome can be thought of as a construction of a network to achieve at least one immediate goal. That goal was a single potential policy input, a consensus position embodied in the report of the lay panel. To realise that goal, the network needed to be recruited and stabilised and its members made to converge on that collective statement. But how is it that a range of disparate actors, including lay and expert, are mobilised to achieve that particular goal and what are the stabilisation devices which enable, or fail to enable this goal to be reached? In the context of the first Australian consensus conference, three key alignment devices emerged: texts, money and people. Yet it is clear from the evidence that some of these network stabilisation devices functioned poorly or not at all. This thesis has drawn attention to the areas in which they were weak and what importance that weakness had for the kind of policy outcome the consensus conference achieved. The role and extent of these powerful stabilisation devices in networks was therefore a vital issue for analysis. If one of the criteria to evaluate the success of a consensus conference is that it provides the stimulus to hold another, then the Australian conference must be deemed so far a failure. No further Australian consensus conference is planned. However, Australia stands to forfeit a number of advantages if no further consensus conferences or similar occasions are organised. Policy formation in contemporary democracies has had to accommodate an increasing array of new participants in order to track more effectively the diversity of potentially significant opinions on complex policy issues. This process requires new and transparent ways to educate and inform the public on policy issues and to ensure that policy makers are better informed about the needs and concerns of their community. As the evidence presented in thesis for the Australian example and its predecessors overseas suggests, consensus conferences have the potential to play a role in the contemporary policy-making context. But the realisation of that potential will vary according to their institutional contexts and the capacity of the actors to create the temporarily most stable and productive network out of the heterogeneous human and material resources to hand.
... In this sense, the article reads as an exercise in " SSK in action. " 4 The particular justification for adopting an SSK perspective on consensus conferences derives from the novel insights gained into their reliance on lay–expert boundaries, negotiation of knowledge claims and the politics of expertise (Mohr, 2002 ). Within the SSK literature referred to here, scientific knowledge is generally understood as interpretative, mediated and contestable, rather than self-evidently valid and authoritative. ...
... Democratizing expertise is unlikely to be a homogeneous process and we need sensitivity to the specific prospects and limitations of each medium. As for consensus conferences, for all their potential cognitive virtues, they remain singular, short-term events, with no guarantee of lasting impacts (Mohr, 2002). Figuring out how the democratization of expertise may be institutionalized into new forms of regular science–society " contracts " thus remains one of the major challenges ahead. ...
Citizen deliberation on technoscientific developments is regularly regarded as a hallmark of Danish democracy, embodied in particular by the Danish Board of Technology. Few empirically guided questions have been raised, however, as to how the Board's democratic projects actually work. Through a case study of the May 2003 Danish consensus conference on environmental economics as a policy tool, the article reflects on the politics of expert author-ity permeating practices of public participation. Adopting concepts from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the conference is seen as opening up the "black box" of environmental economics, forcing economists into attempted justifications of their shared normative and methodological com-mitments. The failure of environmental economists to reflect on their social value positions is suggested as key to understanding their less-than-success-ful defense in the citizen perspective. Further, consensus conferences are viewed alternatively as "expert dissent conferences," serving to disclose a multiplicity of expert commitments. From this perspective, some challenges for democratizing expertise through future exercises in public participation are suggested.
... Public deliberation has many advantages, such as participant learning, the inclusion of social values, awareness building and stimulation of public debate. The potential disadvantages concern questionable representation, high costs, the readily manipulative agenda setting, and vague conclusions (Mohr, 2002). Controversy about representation and access can be expressed as politicisation, illustrating the level of NGO mobilisation and industry protest (Stokke, 2005). ...
The theory of deliberative democracy calls for decision making through public deliberation. Different types of public deliberation, also termed mini-publics, have been organised, such as citizens’ juries, deliberative polls or consensus conferences. In order to determine what institutional conditions are favourable to an open and inclusive debate, in this chapter a double comparative analysis is made of two consensus conferences in two different countries: the first is about cloning in the Netherlands and the second is about transgenic food in Australia. The central question is: to what extent can consensus conferences deal with intractable disagreement regarding novel technologies? The hypothesis is that while biotechnology ethics committees would perform better if they acknowledge uncertainty regarding values, consensus conferences would perform better if they allowed for more discussion on scientific uncertainty, besides discussion on values. This includes calling into question the status of expert knowledge. The Dutch debate allowed more discussion on scientific uncertainty as well as normative uncertainty. It included several philosophers and ethicists who raised questions about the normativity of expert knowledge and allowed more freedom in the selection of and discussion with experts. However, the lay panel in the Australian case also acknowledged that expert knowledge was value-laden, and in both countries a strict expert-lay distinction was maintained. Nevertheless, the Australian organisers tried to contain the debate more and created more polarisation between experts. Also, the Dutch debate was open-ended, while in the Australian one there was a strong sense of closure. All in all the Dutch debate dealt better with intractable disagreement than the Australian one, although both could be improved. The stakes were higher in the Australian consensus conference, which led to more external control. These differences can be explained, in part, by the political culture of each country, and only to a lesser extent by their specific model of democracy. The Netherlands with its corporatist tradition and more active state is more used to having input from different groups in society, but deliberations do tend to be elitist. Australia, with its antagonistic political climate and its passive state, is less used to involving social groups in an equal debate, and more used to a struggle for influence by different lobby groups. In light of these differences, it is remarkable that the deliberative exercises did show some important similarities as well, such as the lack of power differences within lay panel deliberations, educative effect of the deliberations, interest and dedication from panel members, and minimal input from the wider public. It can be concluded that in the organization of deliberative mini-publics more attention has to be given to their aims and their status within their specific political context.
The idea of conducting upstream public engagement over emerging technologies has been gaining popularity in Europe and North
America, with nanotechnologies seen as a test case for this. For many of its advocates, upstream engagement is about a re-conceptualisation
of the science–society relationship in which a variety of ‘publics’ are brought together with stakeholders and scientists
early in the Research and Development process to co-develop technological trajectories. However, the concept, aims and processes
of upstream engagement remain ill-defined, are often misunderstood, and have undergone little critical analysis. This special
issue of NanoEthics, entitled ‘Engaging with Nanotechnologies–Engaging Differently?’ takes a multi-nation, multi-case approach to explore this
idea, drawing on work represented by four articles from the US and Europe, from ethnographic work in the nanotechnology lab
through to analysis of a Citizens’ Jury and other attempts to move public debate ‘upstream’. An overall message from the papers
is that without adequate critique ‘upstream engagement’ might end up re-producing out-dated forms of science communication
or being rejected as a failed concept before it has even matured.
The potential for public engagement to democratise science has come under increasing scrutiny amid concerns that conflicting motivations have led to confusion about what engagement means to those who mediate science and publics. This raises important yet relatively unexplored questions regarding how publics are constituted by different forms of engagement used by intermediary scholars and other actors. It is possible to identify at least two possible 'rationalities of mediation' that mobilise different versions of the public and the roles they are assumed to play, as 'citizens' or 'users', in discussions around technology. However, combinations of rationalities are found in practice and these have significant implications for the 'new' scientific democracy.
Research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) tends to presume that intellectual and political radicalism go hand in hand. One would therefore expect that the most intellectually radical movement in the field relates critically to its social conditions. However, this is not the case, as demonstrated by the trajectory of the Parisian School of STS spearheaded by Michel Gallon and Bruno Latour. Their position, "actor-network theory," turns out to be little more than a strategic adaptation to the democratization of expertise and the decline of the strong nation-state in France over the past 25 years. This article provides a prehistory of this client-driven, contract-based research culture in U.S, sociology of the 1960s, followed by specific features of French philosophical and political culture that have bred the distinctive tenets of actor-network theory Insofar as actor-network theory has become the main paradigm for contemporary STS research, it reflects a field that dodges normative commitments in order to maintain a user-friendly presence.
Consensus conferences, also known as citizens' panels-a collection of lay citizens akin to a jury but charged with deliberating on policy issues with a high technical content-are a potentially important way to conduct technology assessments, inform policy makers about public views of new technologies, and improve public understanding of Md participation in technological decision making. The first citizens' panel in the United States occurred in April 1997 on the issue of "Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy" This article evaluates the impact of this citizens' panel. The standard criteria to evaluate the impact of analyses focus an the "actual impact" and on the "impact on general thinking" To these standard criteria, this article introduces the evaluation of two impacts related to learning: impact on the training of knowledgeable personnel and the interaction with lay knowledge. The impact evaluation is based on a nearly comprehensive set of semistructured telephone interviews with the participants in the panel.