ABSTRACT

Public participation and engagement in decision-making regarding science and technology (‘PP&E’) is an increasingly common practice. But what is known of whether PP&E achieves its goals? Surprisingly, little research evaluates PP&E. We put forth three reasons why PP&E advocates and practitioners should take evaluation seriously: the absence of evaluation causes PP&E's advocacy to fail a minimal burden-of-proof standard; PP&E's costs are greater than they appear; and these costs may be disproportionately borne by the already-disadvantaged. Evaluating PP&E would require identifying PP&E's objectives and assessing its success in meeting them. To this end we survey scholarship advocating PP&E and identify three sets of objectives: substantively improving decision-making, deontologically fulfilling widely-held norms, and politically redistributing power away from techno-scientific elites. While there is some ad hoc evidence of progress toward these goals, we find no robust evaluation of PP&E. We offer four recommendations that might assist in evaluating PP&E more thoroughly.

摘要

公众参与科学技术决策（“PP&E”）已成为越来越普遍的做法。但 PP&E 是否实现了其目标，我们知道多少呢？令人惊讶的是，很少有研究评估 PP&E。我们提出了 PP&E 倡导者和实践者应认真对待评估的三个原因：缺乏评估导致 PP&E 的倡导达不到最低举证责任标准；PP&E 的成本比看上去要高；而这些成本可能过多地由已经处于不利地位的人承担。评估 PP&E 需要确定 PP&E 的目标并评估其在实现这些目标方面是否成功。为此，我们调查了倡导 PP&E 的学术界，并确定了三组目标：实质性改进决策、义务论上履行广泛持有的规范，并在政治上重新分配技术精英的权力。虽然有一些临时证据表明这些目标取得了进展，但我们发现没有对 PP&E 进行强有力的评估。我们提供四项建议，可能有助于更彻底地评估 PP&E。