Evidence-based policy and the problem of non-knowledge

Following on from my post a few weeks back on the curious British-ness of the evidence-based policy debate, it occurred to me that recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the sociology of knowledge might be able to give useful insights on the challenges for those advocating evidence-based policy. The value-ladenness and political nature of policy decisions is usually acknowledged by many of those calling for the more systematic use of evidence in policy, often stating that they accept that ultimate policy decisions are rarely made on the basis of evidence alone. The disagreement of different experts and forms of evidence is also a commonly acknowledged problem with the process. What is often left out of the discussion are the problems associated with ambiguity, ignorance and even non-knowledge, as well as the obstinate impossibility of accurately predicting the future.

'Evidence-based policy': a very British debate

Yesterday, the writer and academic Jon Agar invited his twitter followers to guess the source of the following quote, calling for evidence-based policy:

"At government by knowledge, with the nature of things the only social force"

Rather surprisingly (for me anyway) it turned out that the writer of this sentence was none other than the nineteenth century French writer Victor Hugo, in his celebrated work 'Les Miserables'. However, whilst this quote shows that there is nothing very new or peculiar about calls for government policy to be rigorously based on evidence; I think it is nonetheless important to recognise that there is a very particular historical and cultural context within which current debates about evidence-based policy in the UK are situated.

The slippery concept of 'climate'

Reproduction of Johannes de Sacrobosco's zonal world map of 1230 

Warren Pearce has an interesting post over at the Making Science Public blog (see here) in which he explores the debate over the attribution of specific extreme weather events to climate change. He argues that when it comes to events like Hurricane Sandy, public and media discourse about links to climate change can quickly depart from the scientific line. While climate scientists prefer to say 'we can't attribute it directly to climate change, but it is consistent with the patterns we expect', some media outlets opt for the Bloomberg approach: 'it's global warming, stupid!'

Experimenting beyond science

Joseph Wright's 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air pump' 1768

I gave a talk to the other STS fellows here at Harvard last Tuesday on the topic of experimentation. My presentation covered emerging approaches in STS and related disciplines which use the metaphor of experimentation to study social processes, rather than the term's more common association with the scientific method. This blog post will cover some of the basic points from the review work I carried out - what are the different disciplinary approaches to such a study? why might the metaphor of experimentation be a useful one? and where are the conflicts, disagreements and problems? Over the next few weeks I'm planning to explore the potential for linking approaches to experimentation with my work on public engagement practices in the UK, so watch this space for further developments with this project.

How to See a Glacier

Gangotri glacier in India, source of the Ganges.
Wikimedia Commons

On the day before presenting my work on Indian climate science and politics at the Harvard STS Circle, Helen and I headed over to the MIT Museum where they are holding an exhibition entitled 'Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya'. The exhibition features photography by mountaineer, film-maker and founder of GlacierWorks David Breashears. As I was preparing to spend a couple of hours the next day in part discussing the impact of the IPCC's erroneous statement about Himalayan glaciers melting away by 2035, it seemed like a good place to go and generate some further reflections.

David Harvey on Capitalism and the Urban Form

One of the many advantages of living among Boston and Cambridge's vast collection of respected higher education institutions is that there is no shortage of talks to attend given by celebrated intellectuals. We were able to attend one such event last week when the prominent Marxist and critic of neoliberalism David Harvey came to talk at Boston University. David Harvey is particularly special to Martin and I due to his position as the most cited academic geographer of all time, and indeed as one of the few geographers whose renown extends well beyond the confines of his home discipline. I am pretty sure that Harvey's 'Condition of Postmodernity' was the first academic geography book that I was ever charged with reading, which gives you some idea of how significant his oeuvre is in undergraduate geography courses. I came to the talk with some trepidation: whilst I have much sympathy politically and intellectually for Marxian analyses of the world economy and the urban form, I am also concerned to distance myself from what I consider to be deterministic or overly structural accounts of social processes, a flaw I see in much Marxist thought. I was concerned that this encounter with an early academic hero would clash against the backdrop of my more recently acquired commitments to constructivist and post-structuralist approaches in geography and STS. I needn't have worried.

Conversations between Geography and STS

I've been thinking about the relationship between geography and Science and Technology Studies (STS) a lot recently, and this post is an attempt to record some reflections on this topic. In part my thinking has been influenced by our new institutional setting as fellows in the STS Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge Massachusetts, where I have been submerged, for the first time, in an STS-infused environment, and have been prompted to consider broader differences between the US and UK university systems. This relationship or conversation between STS and geography has also emerged as a key focus in a review paper on approaches to organisational learning which I am preparing for submission.

50 years of Silent Spring

A couple of weeks ago environmental activists and academics celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release of 'Silent Spring', Rachel Carson's classic study of the risks posed to human, animal and plant life by agricultural pesticides. I've written a couple of blog posts with various reflections on the anniversary and what it means for how we think about the communication of scientific uncertainty and about the dynamics of social movement formation. The two posts are reproduced below:

Landscapes of change

‘Gathering Weather’ by Alfred Horsley Hinton.

Following on from the post below - 'Reading Waterland' - I've written a piece over at the Merton Stone blog on some recent work by cultural geographers on the relationships between landscape and climate change (link here). This is a topic I've been thinking about a lot recently, and I've been plotting some ways of researching it in some local places, particularly the Norfolk Broads.

To that end, I was excited recently to come across the work of David Matless - a geographer at Nottingham University - particularly given that he has a forthcoming book on the cultural geography of the Norfolk Broads (see here). It looks like his work will be pretty central to any research plans I end up formulating!

Reading Waterland

It's been a bit quiet in my corner of Topograph recently, mainly due to Helen and I retreating to the Norfolk coast for a week's holiday. During our frequently rainy sojourn I had the pleasure of reading Graham Swift's 1983 novel Waterland, selected on Helen's recommendation of its brilliant evocation of Norfolkian landscapes.

Presenting the decade of learning

Presenting at SDN June 26th 2012

Over the last two months I have been preparing and giving conference presentations based on my Masters research. Though the experience of giving my first two conference papers was more than a little daunting, it was also a largely enjoyable one which definitely helped me to refine my ideas, meet interesting people and think of new ways to take my research forward. This blog post will include links to the presentations I gave, a few reflections on the process and what I might do differently in future, and how the conferences have shaped my future research plans.

Mission:Explore Food - Book Review

Last week I completed a review of Mission:Explore's new book for young geographers on food. You can find my review here and more information about the book here.

(Re)publics of Science: a new 3S working paper

My working paper (Re)publics of Science: Changing Policy and Participation has been published on the 3S (Science, Society & Sustainability research group) website. This paper emerged out of my reading during the first year of my PhD; in particular, I was trying to make sense of where my own work on public participation in science policy sits in the contexts of decades of academic work and real world developments concerning science policy and its publics. The paper represents an attempt to give an account of developments in the field of public participation (mostly in Western Europe) over the last 50 years, considering the diverse visions of science, scientific expertise and 'the public' which they have brought about and been sustained by. 3S working papers are open access to all and free to download so have a look.

Invasion! Playing and learning on the streets of Norwich

http://www.facebook.com/NNFestival

I've never been exposed to much street theatre, let alone given it much thought. But that changed this weekend when I attended the opening weekend of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. Two events in particular got me thinking about the nature of public space and public art... 

Lessons from controversy: organisational learning and GM

After a considerable period on the back burner, the GM debate in the UK hotted up last week as Sense about Science released their 'Don't destroy research' appeal in response to the threatened 'Take the flour back' mass action to destroy a field of genetically modified wheat being trialled by Rothamsted Research. 'Don't destroy research' issued an appeal from scientists emphasising the importance of retaining the integrity of scientific research, implicitly casting the protesters as irrational and 'anti-science'. So far so predictable. What is unusual and perhaps novel about the 'Don't destroy research' appeal is that they also invited the protesters into dialogue with them, in the hope of averting the action planned for 27th May.