Introduction: science, citizenship and globalization

MELISSA LEACH, IAN SCOONES AND BRIAN WYNNE

The need to clarify our understanding of the complex interfaces and intersections between science and citizenship is now more pertinent than ever. There have always been issues and controversies over how people relate to science, and how science reflects its human contexts; but these are now unfolding in a new, more pervasive and complex, and arguably more urgent, context. Globalization is changing the nature of science and technology, as it is being shaped by their developments: altering the intensity of innovation of new technologies, and the resulting constitutions and flows of knowledge and expertise, and the character and scope of risks and uncertainties. Globalization is also implicated in the changing nature and contexts of citizenship: internationalizing governance and the networks through which people might press claims, and forging new solidarities and forms of connection between once more disparate local groups. Moreover, as recent analyses of the molecularization of the life sciences have suggested (Rose 2001), politics and citizenship are themselves ever more intimately connected with the subtle shaping of human subjectivities that form the cultural undergrowth and underpinnings of the forms of politics of late-modern, globalized times.

With these changes, there is now an expanding array of overt engagements between science and citizens. Along with the recognition of the ways in which scientific discourses and notions of human agency and citizenship have for long been tacitly intertwined and mutual, these proliferating encounters force us to break down established analytical categories to recognize new synergies between expert and lay knowledges, new linkages between local and global processes, new relationships between state and non-governmental action, new networks of international activism, and a variety of hybrid forms of public and private control and ownership that frequently transcend national boundaries. Equally, many of the categories that might once have been used to think about these engagements in different parts of the world – North and South, developed and developing countries, indigenous and modern – no longer seem salient.

This changing context suggests a convergence between two loosely defined bodies of work which have, to date, remained rather separate. On the one hand, the field of science and technology studies has since the 1970s examined issues of scientific and technological practice and culture, as well as the specific technological products and risks of modern science, in 'Northern', largely industrial settings. On the other hand, development studies, especially their anthropological contributions, have engaged with similar issues in 'Southern' settings, but with perhaps a greater emphasis on agricultural and rural issues, on the connections between technology and livelihoods, and on the perspectives emerging from so-called 'indigenous' knowledges in relation to modern expert-knowledge interventions. Emerging separately, as they have, each of these fields of work has developed distinct theoretical and analytical traditions, and thus ways of conceiving of the relations between science and citizens. The necessary convergence between these bodies of work in an era of globalization invites a bringing together of these streams of analysis to explore ways in which they might mutually enrich, build on and critique each other. Science studies (the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge – SSK) have for over a decade addressed, and tried to encourage policy actors to recognize, the cultural dimensions of the interactions of 'lay' public knowledge with scientific knowledge over risk and environmental issues, health programmes and the like. The striking correspondences between this and anthropology's long-standing interest in the encounters between modern and indigenous knowledges have only recently been pursued. Moreover, the theoretical realization of these 'cognitive' interactions as much more than this, as encounters between different practical-cultural ways of being as well as ways of knowing – ontologies – has occurred in both disciplinary domains, but its implications have not been jointly addressed. 'Post-colonial science studies', for example (see, e.g., Anderson 2002; Verran 2002), have recently combined SSK and anthropological perspectives on encounters between indigenous cultures and modern environmental science and practice in ways that open up important new issues for modern scientific culture and its self-understandings. This bears upon wider processes of globalization.

This book has emerged from such ongoing conversations between scholars of science and technology studies, especially the more specialist field of SSK, and development studies, conducted through a series of meetings and exchanges over the last few years. By bringing together a group of authors who perhaps would not normally appear together in a single volume, we aim to explore the correspondences, convergences, potentials and – in some cases – divergences between their central intellectual issues and ways of approaching them. Perhaps because all the contributors to this book are engaged in some way in critiquing mainstream approaches to the study and practice of development and science and technology, many commonalities emerged, although often refracted through different terminologies, different empirical concerns and different types of policy engagement. Considering these commonalities, differences and potential new avenues, the book casts new light on the ways we understand the institutions and governance of science in a globalizing world: the ways we understand questions seen as ones of risk and uncertainty; the ways we understand citizenship and public engagement with science; and the ways we understand issues of knowledge, practice, agency and expertise.

In turn, there arises a set of challenges for prevailing attempts to orchestrate deliberative and participatory processes around issues of science and technology. Thus, although it has been recognized sporadically over the years, the emerging correspondence between the concerns and perspectives of science and technology studies about the 'democratization of science' in developed societies on the one hand, and the focus of development studies on citizen participation in expert-led development programmes and policies on the other, remains to be developed and exploited. By far the most dominant way of describing the confrontations and issues between modern discourses and interventions and 'indigenous' actors has been as if these were purely cognitive processes. A liberal enlightened perspective has thus been to talk of overdue recognition of the saliency and validity of hitherto marginalized and disparaged forms of knowledge, often local in distribution and practical in focus. More recently, however, both anthropological and SSK insight have come to understand knowledge as cultural practice that sustains and is sustained by these cognitive idioms, but which crucially stretches beyond them alone. This has led scholars such as Latour and Stengers to advocate an understanding of the countless typical – and almost definitive of our times – conflicts between scientific and 'lay' knowledges as not just epistemic conflicts between ways of knowing, but as reflections of different ways of being, of practising and relating – of ontologies. Moreover, the 'reflexive turn' in social science and humanities cultivated the insight that what we see as representational knowledge is not simply that, but is also subtly performative, in that it inevitably reflects and tacitly projects models of the human subject into the public world. This is true of representations of nature as well as of social worlds.

Thus, whereas dominant understandings of the chronic latter-day crisis of public (lack of) legitimacy or mistrust of science see these as cognitive defaults, either on the part of the publics of science or modern rationality (the 'deficit model'), or on the part of science when it neglects valid nonscientific knowledge (Collins and Evans 2002), others see them as unrecognized ontological conflicts between incompatible ways of life. Thus, these problems, whether in developed, developing-world or global settings, are a cultural challenge to dominant modernity and its hegemonist scientific culture. This implies a demand for self-reflexive humility, awareness and debate. This could be described as the main point of this book – to argue that this self-problematization and reflexivity of scientific institutions, and this recognizing of alterity in a respectful way in the face of proliferating local and global public alienation, is an essential move. It is of course an issue of scientific knowledge's mutual construction with global and local forms of power; but clarification here is key to generating the possible conditions of sustainable cultural, as well as technical, robustness through exploring different visions of globalization.

This book is divided into four sections. Following this brief introduction is an overview chapter that traces the varied contributions of science and technology studies and development studies to understanding science and public engagements with it. It examines the connections between strands of debate in these fields, and different theories of citizenship; connections that have rarely been made explicit before, but which help us move towards fruitful ways of understanding citizenship practice in today's globalizing world. Part Two offers a series of perspectives on science and citizenship from different standpoints. Part Three picks up the emergent themes in a series of case studies, covering issues ranging from medical genetics, agricultural biotechnology, occupational health and HIV/AIDS to transport technology and food security, in settings including rural Sierra Leone, urban Britain, China, South Africa, India and Brazil, as well as in international scientific, policy and activist networks. Part Four engages critically with the move to participation and democratization of science in both North and South, and illustrates some of the dilemmas involved through a series of short examples where citizens have been invited to deliberate on 'science and technology issues'. To convey the sense of conversation and ongoing debate between these fields of work, Parts Two to Four are preceded by a short editorial commentary, which both highlights some of the key issues raised by the chapters in each section and points to unresolved issues, further questions and new avenues of inquiry.

In the remainder of this introduction, we first highlight a series of emergent themes linking science, knowledge and governance which resonate in the book. In different ways, as we go on to show, these each suggest challenges for the ways in which we understand the relationships between citizenship and knowledge in a changing global context. A key issue raised in this intellectual context is also the relationship between the subtle dynamics of the formation of human subjectivities through 'representational' knowledges, and our ideas of citizenship in public contexts.

Science, knowledge and governance: emergent themes

Challenging modernist development A recurrent theme in the book is the recognition of the unacknowledged cultural contingencies of scientific knowledge as deployed in the framing, definition and attempted resolution of public policy issues. Depending on the setting and the institutions involved, these may be defined in terms of risk and regulation, or more broadly in terms of trajectories of modernist, technology-led development. By making explicit these cultural, institutional and power-laden processes underpinning science and technology agendas, and the forms of subjectivity and citizenship which they normatively embody, the book challenges any assumption that science is independent of society and politics, or that these ways of thinking about public policy issues are universal or inevitable. Indeed, the book brings to light a variety of ways in which modernist development and its policy trappings are challenged, both discursively and practically, along with the meanings of issues involving new technologies. In some settings, these challenges take the form of 'alternative development' or anti-globalization, or counter-hegemonist globalization movements of the kind highlighted by Escobar (1995), Sachs (1992) and others. Others emphasize a form of reflexive modernization and sub-politics as part of an emergent global 'risk society' (Beck 1992, 1995, 1998).

Increasingly, science and technology agendas and networks are being pursued on a global scale, whether through international public policy and agreements, or trade and commerce. Particular views of science, technology and policy are embedded in these new global networks. North-world authored globalization and commodification cultures are developing new kinds of global knowledge-culture and epistemic politics, as reflected, for example, in the proliferating attempts to enrol indigenous people in global scientific and commercial systems of research, with intellectual property rights to exploit these indigenous knowledges for profit. Yet as the book shows, science and technology issues are subject to a variety of alternative and sometimes incompatible meanings. Those that emerge from specific, localized cultural contexts have, in some circumstances, been linked and mobilized in new global networks – a case in point being the mobilization of 'indigenousness' and its knowledges themselves as part of the anti-globalization movement, and the objectification and standardization of such knowledges in global databases in order to 'protect' them as a global cultural resource.

Reframing dominant expertise Thus, science has been recognized as needing to accept its own cultural boundaries, frames and blinkers that obscure and patronize the intellectual and moral substance of other ways of knowing. Whether in 'Southern' development contexts (e.g., Leach and Mearns 1996; Scoones and Thompson 1994) or 'Northern' settings (e.g., Irwin and Wynne 1996), work has challenged the dominant assumptions of scientific and other powerful institutions, and extensively documented the independent intellectual capacities and substantively grounded epistemic cultures of multifarious lay publics. Thus, the institutions of scientific knowledge have been invited – whether or not they have responded is a different matter – to recognize other kinds of knowledge framed within other practical cultural assumptions, meanings and life-worlds. Publics, whether rural farmers in Africa or users of health services in the UK, have been acknowledged as having not just other bodies of knowledge, but also other ways of knowing – different systems of meaning, saliency and value – that need to be taken into account. This cultural understanding of the globally multifarious eruptions of the public mistrust of modern science places a fundamentally different perspective on the issue from those that inform most public policy and private corporate culture across the world.

It has increasingly been recognized, however, in both the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., Verran 2002) and anthropology (e.g., Strathern 1999) that this is a matter of incommensurable practical human-cultural ways of being (ontologies), not only of different human epistemologies or preferred ways of knowing. Major, internationally reverberating social conflicts, in which public unwillingness to defer to presumptive scientific authority has been interpreted as public unwillingness or inability to 'understand' scientific knowledge or method, have been recognized instead to be cultural confrontations between different, incompatible ontologies. The projections of modern policy and scientific institutions of the 'public' as typically vacuous in epistemic terms can be understood instead as the projections of insecure institutions unable to adopt more self-reflexive orientations towards their own social relations and cultural parochialism. Such lack of open self-reflexivity can, of course, be seen as a means of power. From this view, those conflicts between powerful institutions acting in the name of scientific rationality and publics have thus been recognized as less a reflection of public ignorance and irrationality and more a reflection of different frameworks of meaning within which salient observations and propositional beliefs are defined and given standing.