“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

Braun, Kathrin; Schultz, Susanne

doi:10.1177/0963662509347814

Cited by 116 publications

(122 citation statements)

References 42 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

119

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Emergent collectives of participation produce publics as well (Braun & Schultz, 2010;Michael, 2009;Pallett & Chilvers, 2013) through constructing particular identities of the actors involved, such as: 'innocent citizens' or 'pure publics' that are assumed to have limited prior knowledge of the issue in question or deemed to be 'representative' of a wider public; 'interested' or 'affected' publics who have a personal attachment to the object of participation, including through exposure to risk or illness; or more 'active' or 'innovative citizens' who are constructed as bringing about various forms of distributed action. From this perspective it is evident that TM produces participants as 'frontrunners' and SNM produces 'niche actors'.…”

Section: Participation As Emergent Relational and Co-producedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Participation in Transition(s): Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

Chilvers

Longhurst

2016

Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning

250

213

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time.In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and 'the public'. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected 'ecologies of participation', and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions.

show abstract

Section: Participation As Emergent Relational and Co-producedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Participation in Transition(s): Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

Chilvers

Longhurst

2016

Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning

250

213

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In their study of public engagement in research on new genetic technologies, Braun and Schultz (2010) found that researchers appreciate some types of public and particular subject positions more strongly than others, endowing special significance mainly to citizens [pure publics] and consumers [affected publics] while depreciating contributions from advocates and partisan organized stakeholder groups. Contra to Braun and Schultz, we found that public health and health policy researchers frequently involve advocates from stakeholder and interest groups as deliberators, especially when research is most strongly connected to policy making.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To answer research question four, we draw on critical social science scholarship (Braun & Schultz, 2010;Evans & Plows, 2007;Felt & Fochler, 2010), and recent discussion in health policy literature (Barnes et al, 2007;Litva et al, 2009;Martin, 2012), to examine how subjects of participation are conceptualized as 'the public' in deliberative public health and health policy research. It has been proposed that the conception of citizens in health policy research is ontologically shallow (Lehoux et al, 2012).…”

Section: Figure 1 Types Of Deliberative Forummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Public involvement in decision making in matters related to health has been an area of focus in science and technology studies (Evans & Plows, 2007;Felt & Fochler, 2010;Marres, 2011) and health policy research (Abelson et al, 2003;Evans & Plows, 2007;Felt & Fochler, 2010;Litva et al, 2002;Marres, 2011;Tenbensel, 2010). While much of this literature focuses on public consultation per se, rather than specifically on deliberation, three basic constructions of the public are commonly employed (Braun & Schultz, 2010;Charles & DeMaio, 1993;Litva et al, 2009;Martin, 2012). They are: citizens (lay people, the pure public), consumers (patients, service users, the affected public), and advocates (experts and interest groups, acting as the partisan public).…”

Section: Conceptual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Which public and why deliberate? – A scoping review of public deliberation in public health and health policy research

Degeling

Carter

Rychetnik

2015

Social Science & Medicine

168

176

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Deliberative methods are of increasing interest to public health researchers and policymakers. We systematically searched the peer-reviewed literature to identify public health and health policy research involving deliberative methods and report how deliberative methods have been used. We applied a taxonomy developed with reference to health policy and science and technology studies literatures to distinguish how deliberative methods engage different publics: citizens (ordinary people who are unfamiliar with the issues), consumers (those with relevant personal experience e.g. of illness) and advocates (those with technical expertise or partisan interests). We searched four databases for empirical studies in English published 1996-2013. This identified 78 articles reporting on 62 distinct events from the UK, USA, Canada, Australasia, Europe, Israel, Asia and Africa. Ten different types of deliberative techniques were used to represent and capture the interests and preferences of different types of public. Citizens were typically directed to consider community interests and were treated as a resource to increase democratic legitimacy. Citizens were preferred in methodological studies (those focused on understanding the techniques). Consumers were directed to focus on personal preferences; thus convened not as a source of policy decisions, but of knowledge about what those affected by the issue would accept. Advocates-who are most commonly used as expert witnesses in jurieswere sometimes engaged to deliberate with consumers or citizens. This almost always occurred in projects directly linked to policy processes. This suggests health policymakers may value deliberative methods as a way of understanding disagreement between perspectives. Overall however, the 'type' of public sought was often not explicit, and their role not specified. This review provides new insight into the heterogeneity and rising popularity of deliberative methods, and indicates a need for greater clarity regarding both the constitution of publics and the relative usefulness of different deliberative techniques.

show abstract

“…Engagement activities thus are framed in particular ways: they reproduce the institutional culture of those designing or implementing them (e.g. Bickerstaff et al, 2010;Braun and Schultz, 2010).…”

Section: Introduction: Engagement and Scientific Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech acts and performances of scientific citizenship: Examining how scientists talk about therapeutic cloning

Marks

2012

Public Underst Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scientists play an important role in framing public engagement with science. Their language can facilitate or impede particular interactions taking place with particular citizens: scientists' "speech acts" can "perform" different types of "scientific citizenship". This paper examines how scientists in Australia talked about therapeutic cloning during interviews and during the 2006 parliamentary debates on stem cell research. Some avoided complex labels, thereby facilitating public examination of this field. Others drew on language that only opens a space for publics to become educated, not to participate in a more meaningful way. Importantly, public utterances made by scientists here contrast with common international utterances: they did not focus on the therapeutic but the research promises of therapeutic cloning. Social scientists need to pay attention to the performative aspects of language in order to promote genuine citizen involvement in techno-science. Speech Act Theory is a useful analytical tool for this. Author bioNicola is a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, in Science and Technology Studies Programme. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Some of her research interests include public engagement in science, the sociology of scientific knowledge and social aspects of stem cell research, reproductive technologies, and medicine more broadly.

show abstract

“… a certain amount of engineering involved”: Constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

Cited by 116 publications

References 42 publications

Participation in Transition(s): Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

Participation in Transition(s): Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

Which public and why deliberate? – A scoping review of public deliberation in public health and health policy research

Speech acts and performances of scientific citizenship: Examining how scientists talk about therapeutic cloning

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About