This introductory essay looks back on the two decades since the journal Public Understanding of Science was launched. Drawing on the invited commentaries in this special issue, we can see narratives of continuity and change around the practice and politics of public engagement with science. Public engagement would seem to be a necessary but insufficient part of opening up science and its governance. Those of us who have been involved in advocating, conducting and evaluating public engagement practice could be accused of over-promising. If we, as social scientists, are going to continue a normative commitment to the idea of public engagement, we should therefore develop new lines of argument and analysis. Our support for the idea of public engagement needs qualifying, as part of a broader, more ambitious interest in the idea of publicly engaged science.

This historical review surveys the evolution of the science–society relationship in post‐war Britain. It observes the transformation since the 1980s of the idea of ‘public understanding of science’, in which scientists and laypeople differ by virtue of the scientific knowledge they have, into the idea of ‘public engagement which science’, in which scientists, laypeople and policy makers negotiate policy for future science and technology. We survey recent critiques of public engagement which draw attention to the ways in which it constructs particular publics, and which question its capacity to contribute to policy‐making.

Big changes to the way in which research funding is allocated to UK universities were brought about in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), overseen by the Higher Education Funding Council, England. Replacing the earlier Research Assessment Exercise, the purpose of the REF was to assess the quality and reach of research in UK universities–and allocate funding accordingly. For the first time, this included an assessment of research ‘impact’, accounting for 20% of the funding allocation. In this article we use a text mining technique to investigate the interpretations of impact put forward via impact case studies in the REF process. We find that institutions have developed a diverse interpretation of impact, ranging from commercial applications to public and cultural engagement activities. These interpretations of impact vary from discipline to discipline and between institutions, with more broad-based institutions depicting a greater variety of impacts. Comparing the interpretations with the score given by REF, we found no evidence of one particular interpretation being more highly rewarded than another. Importantly, we also found a positive correlation between impact score and [overall research] quality score, suggesting that impact is not being achieved at the expense of research excellence.

This article explores the space for public participation during the consenting process for a nationally significant wind energy or carbon capture and storage infrastructure project. Legal obligations to provide opportunities for public involvement in these processes can be found in national, EU and international law. However, an examination of strategic planning policy suggests that in practice, very little will be up for discussion at this stage. This is consistent with a certain mistrust of the public in high-level policy discourse on the technological change thought necessary for climate change mitigation. Legally entrenched rights to participate, coupled with limited opportunities to influence, create the danger that participation becomes a simple bureaucratic hurdle, frustrating for all concerned.

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