Paper long abstract:

The European Common Fisheries Policy promotes multiannual plans as management instruments to achieve sustainable fisheries. Such plans are typically initiated by EU bureaucrats and are produced with limited involvement by stakeholders. This has generated a sense within the fishing industry that management plans represent "top-down" regulations and they are often met with scepticism by the fishers. This paper reports on a different approach to making management plans. The North Sea Advisory Council and the Pelagic Advisory Council are two EU stakeholder bodies that are currently engaged in producing management plans "bottom up". We use insights from organisation management and science and technology studies to investigate how knowledge is mobilised and shared in interaction between stakeholders, scientists and bureaucrats in these stakeholder-led collaborations aimed at producing fisheries management plans. The informal collaborations established have allowed stakeholders to interact regularly with fisheries scientists on their own terms over several years. Mutual understanding between and within actor groups has evolved. However, the actors have been confronted with the challenge of producing long term management instruments that are adaptive to policy developments and to shifting management priorities. Issues that require negotiations and trade-offs between the stakeholders have been particularly challenging. The findings raises questions around how far it is practically possible to take a non-facilitated "bottom-up" collaborative process aimed at developing management instruments within a setting where there are conflicts of interests between the stakeholders involved.

Paper long abstract:

The BiodivERsA Stakeholder Engagement Handbook is a non-academic practical guide for researchers planning and carrying out research projects. It is designed to assist research teams identify relevant stakeholders to engage with in order to enhance the impact of their work. The Handbook draws upon exiting literature and presents case studies that provide clear, simple guidance, which considers 'why', 'who', 'when' and 'how' to engage.

To ensure a balanced representation of society is effectively engaged with research activities, the Handbook considers a three step stakeholder identification process: identification of relevant stakeholders; assessing and prioritisation; and developing understanding.

The first step proposes inclusive 'ex-ante' and 'ad-hoc' systematic processes to identifying stakeholders based upon multiple factors (e.g. power, influence, conflict, motivation, expertise, interest, impacts) and presents examples of stakeholder categorisation, secondary data, and methodologies used in identification processes.

The second step covers how to assess and analyse stakeholders in order to prioritise them in relation to necessity of engagement. Prioritisation is based upon relative levels of interest, influence and relevance and is used to categorise stakeholders into four levels of engagement requirements. Various methodologies, matrices and visual tools are discussed to assist users with this process.

Step three helps users understand stakeholder motivation, expertise, and capacity to engage via analyses of social networks, mapping perceptions and values, and assessing conflict.

This process ascertains opportunities and risks of engagement and ensures barriers to engagement are recognised and overcome, thus making engagement processes more inclusive and enhancing the legitimacy and societal relevance of scientific research.

Paper long abstract:

The involvement of stakeholders in policy making may be implemented in a diversity of ways, also according to the various conceptions of science-policy-society interaction.

The evolution of the studies on this interaction moved towards a greater complexity, from models as 'linear model' (Logar 2011), 'elitist view' (Mazuzan 1988), 'technocratic vision' or 'modern model', towards the inclusion of more actors and variables (Jasanoff, 2004), considering the different perspectives and values that shape stakeholders' arguments ('framing model') and stressing the dependence on the context (Funtowicz 2006).

We present some results of a Delphi study performed with Italian researchers, politicians, doctors and journalists, in which the panellists' underlying models of science-policy interaction are brought out and discussed. The study has been developed in the framework of the REPOPA European project.

The Delphi panel was composed by 18 people (9 men and 9 women) and was consulted by means of a 2-step semi-structured questionnaire. In the first step the panellists were asked to rule on the issue of the production and use of research knowledge for policy making, the participation of citizens, the minority points of view not gathering the unanimous consensus of the scientific community. Following the 'framing model', different disciplines themselves become competing stakeholders. Although the linear models as the technocratic vision seem to be by no means surpassed in our Delphi we experienced the emergence of different and even contrasting models within the same individual conceptions.

Paper long abstract:

The case study of the establishment of a Knowledge and Information research Center on Non-Ionizing Radiation in Israel offers a fertile ground for exploring the negotiation of boundaries between expert versus Representatives of the public that hold alternative expert knowledge about the health, environmental, security and social risks presented by non-ionizing radiation from cellular phones. I find this case study particularly interesting because while uncertainty is perceived as characterizing alternative knowledge, this issue actually challenges expert knowledge. Accordingly, the question is how to deal with the tensions between the various kinds of knowledge and the uncertainty regarding non-ionizing radiation in particular in the knowledge center's conceptualization. To examine this question, I used qualitative methods, including semi-structured in-depth interviews in the academic and political arena, involving key players from various knowledge areas. I also collected and analyzed documents from Knesset assembly and committee hearings, regulations and proceedings in ministerial protocols and expert committee reports. The findings show that even given the potential for conflict between various types of knowledge, it seems that in practice, those supporting the establishment of the knowledge center use boundary-work to bridge the tension between the various knowledge types. The supporters view the center as representing one health talk. At the same time, they view it as redefining the boundaries of local and universal, cosmopolitan and activist, rational, abstract, elitist and democratic knowledge. The knowledge center is perceived as able to dispel uncertainty and crystallize alternative knowledge, while tearing down the dichotomy between scientists and decision makers.

Paper long abstract:

The management of water is a topic of great concern. Inadequate management may lead to water scarcity and ecological destruction, but also to an increase of catastrophic floods. With climate change, both water scarcity and the risk of flooding are likely to increase even further in the coming decades. This makes water management currently a highly dynamic field, in which experiments are made with new forms of policy making.

It is increasingly recognized that an adequate management of water requires that the institutional constraints and juridical context be taken into account. Both in academia and policy circles, the attention has therefore shifted from water management towards water governance, requiring the combined and coordinated effort of both technical and non-technical experts, and (local) stakeholders.

In the current paper, a case study is presented in which different interest groups were invited for developing new water policy, including representatives from agriculture, fisheries, and nature organizations. The case was innovative in that it invited the stakeholders to identify and frame the most urgent water issues, rather than asking them to reflect on possible solutions developed by the water authority itself. After different consultation rounds, the stakeholders converged to a set of 10-15 building blocks for water policy which are currently being worked out in more detail by mixed groups of stakeholders. The case study suggests that stakeholders can participate more effectively if their contribution is focused on the underlying competing values rather than conflicting interests.

Paper long abstract:

Participation (e.g., consultation, stakeholder involvement, citizen participation) has become a central concept within the field of science and technology studies, especially as a tool to produce, integrate, and manage knowledge. It has been claimed that participation increases the legitimacy of decision-making processes in, for instance, environmental management. However, less explicit attention has been given to the methodologies employed to facilitate these knowledge processes - which usually define inclusion and exclusion strategies. Making use of insights from science and technology studies, this paper builds on participatory action research and participatory monitoring in action and focusses on the port sector in the Dutch Wadden Sea - a World Natural Heritage Site. It aims to explicitly address the participatory methodologies used by our research-team, to facilitate the management of knowledge and develop environmental policies and certificates (i.e. environmental management systems) of ports that are appropriate for the social and ecological context of the Wadden Sea area.

Paper long abstract:

There are two areas of development of stakeholder involvement (SI) in recent Japanese science and technology policy. One is the area of regulation, or governance, of science and technology, and the other is that of innovation policy, particularly in the context of promotion of university-industry collaboration. This paper aims to show the achievements so far and problems we face in each area.

While the promotion of SI in innovation policy has just started in the late FY2012, in the realm of governance, various achievements have been made since the late 1990s, especially in the field of participatory technology assessment. Since the first consensus conference in March 1998, more than 30 cases have been done on various topics such as GMOs, BSE and nuclear energy, some of which were convened by national or local government. Along with this, a new funding agency was established in 2001 and has been supporting more than a hundred R&D projects based on SI and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Despite these achievements, however, we face many problems. For example, the societal and political value of SI is still underestimated among policymakers and experts, particularly under the current regime of conservative Liberal Democratic Party. A recent innovation policy document produced by the Council for Science and Technology, the Cabinet Office of Government paid almost no attention to SI. Additionally, the lack of systematic linkage between two contexts of governance and innovation in promoting SI is also a serious problem that could raise the question of inclusiveness.

Paper long abstract:

Following its 2003 biodiesel mission, the Indian national government released its biofuel policy in December 2009. We evaluate if the making of this policy can be considered 'good environmental politics'. Policy is viewed as a set of propositions that have been progressively assembled. This assembling process constitutes 'good environmental politics' if the propositions were well-articulated in their making. By well-articulated, following Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret and Bruno Latour, we do not simply mean that a proposition is clear in its formulation but rather that it has registered the agency of many discursive, material and procedural entities. The process of assembling well-articulated propositions must have, a) invited and accommodated as many different entities as possible without unifying their actions/voices into a repetitive singularity; b) registered the voices of entities that were hitherto mute; c) allowed the registered entities to successively challenge and recompose the propositions; d) maximized the entities' potential to dispute scientific as well as political authority; e) produced a set of propositions that are not easily transferrable between different socio-ecological situations. Attempting to perform 'good science' in this paper by recording widely different perspectives on the policy-making process, we find that the Indian government's policy was an attempt to do 'good environmental politics', which partially responded to many entities' recalcitrance. However, it still failed to register some crucial voices, especially those that were hitherto mute. We conclude that our normative evaluation framework needs to discriminate better between more and less crucial voices to register in specific socio-ecological situations.

Paper long abstract:

The Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often used as a prime example of new and hybrid forms of governance operating at the public-private frontier. The practical enactment of this arrangement involves a wide array of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governing where agents are invited as 'stakeholders' in the process of rule-setting and implementation. In this paper we depart from the liberal norm of consensus and instead examine its political effects. We do so by employing the post-political critique to interrogate what it entails for civil society actors to be stakeholders that raise their concerns on specific CDM projects. Based on analyses of documentation of the project validation and direct communication with the CDM Executive Board, as well as interviews with key actors in the CDM process, we ask what kinds of politicizing and/or de-politicizing effects that the stakeholder framework fosters and what spaces for social critique and resistance it produces. The analysis suggests that stakeholding in the CDM constitutes a form of simulative governance that holds a promise of activated civil society participation but, simultaneously, employs tactics that aim at avoiding politicization of local communities and de-politicizing voices of critique from global civic actors. The paper contributes to the post-political critique by lifting it beyond the Western-centric focus on advanced modern societies and opening up to spaces where de-politicization practices can take the form of non-activating potentially political actors.

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Paper long abstract:

In the UK, the government department responsible for animal research is the Home Office (HO). In 2011 the HO launched a 3-month consultation on options for transposing into law, EU Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. Although classified as a 'public' consultation, what is clear is that submissions from stakeholder groups, as opposed to 'individual citizens' played a central role in the transposition process. This paper will present findings from a documentary analysis of the 2011 Home Office consultation, based on publicly available submissions and policy documents, along with a thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with key stakeholders. Through our analysis we address the following questions: a) What is the meaning of 'public' in this public Consultation? b) What is the rationale behind the inclusion (or exclusion) of the public and other stakeholders in this process? c) To what extent does the consultation process help legitimise the governance of science and technology? This paper contributes to STS discussions about stakeholder involvement by analysing an important empirical case study where governance of science is particularly controversial, and where the legitimacy of established policy relating to animal research is both challenged and supported by different stakeholders.

Paper long abstract:

The BloodPharma project is a multi-partner research project seeing to culture red blood cells (RBCs) in the laboratory. Such stem cell derived RBCs have the potential to reduce or eliminate the future need for blood donors. My paper draws on interviews and focus groups which have been carried out with the general public, patients, and interest groups, regarding the future introduction of laboratory grown RBCs. One in three people will receive a transfusion during their lifetime, meaning concepts of the 'stakeholder' are broadened in this case study.

The use of embryo and adult stem cells focused these public discussions on tissue use and responsible innovation. I will summarise findings from data collection as they relate to STIS concepts of 'cleanliness' (Douglas, Ball), and a distrust of the commercialisation of blood transfusion (Wynne).

The main focus of the paper will be on the difficulty of recruiting and engaging general publics in discussions around the development of this new technology, drawing on work by Harmon et al, Parry, and Pickersgill. In this case study such discussions can be seen as paradoxically too early in the research process, and too late. The difficulty of engaging the lay public in consultation requiring a level of scientific knowledge is pertinent to this case study, and to the wider discussion of stakeholder involvement in socio technological innovation. In this sense I will also reflect on my own role as a social scientist within an interdisciplinary team of scientific researchers.

Paper long abstract:

Policy makers and researchers engage with stakeholders to increase legitimacy of research and innovation governance and to address societal challenges. It is expected that involving stakeholders, end-users, consumers or citizens at large makes research and innovation governance more democratic by making it more inclusive. It is hoped that such procedures improve the probability of arriving at more "real" solutions to societal problems. There are open questions as to whether stakeholder involvement lives up to its promise, either in a policy or research context, because the engagement processes could - and, deliberately or not, sometimes do - result in serving particular interests.

In the framework of the INPROFOOD project the authors coordinated an international stakeholder involvement on research programming on food and health in connection with environmental and social sustainability. In 13 countries stakeholder consultations have been held. It was one of the objectives to address some weaknesses of stakeholder involvement at all stages, from the setting up to the implementation through to documentation as much transparency as possible was maintained. The authors will present lessons learned and show what has been done to make stakeholder involvement more transparent, initiatives that have worked out well and others that failed. The presentation will conclude with suggestions for improving such engagement activities, naming research needs on stakeholder involvement, and reflections on how the status quo of stakeholder involvement influences democratic European research and innovation governance.

Paper long abstract:

The involvement of stakeholders, and especially citizens, is heralded as a 'responsible' action for addressing S&T governance and policy challenges. Emerging ICTs are increasingly used in bottom-up or DIY initiatives where citizens collect, interpret and share data, and in this process create knowledge. These forms of citizens-led or peer-production of knowledge are questioning the directions of public engagement toward what is called citizen science, DIY or grassroots science and technology development. In this context, it is vital to discuss the issues of transparency, reliability and impact of citizen inputs to complement, and in some cases, change or redirect predominant practices. In this paper we will focus on wearable sensors as an integral part of mobile health for diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of patients, more particularly on analysis of online communities' activities of "fitbit" (a commercial wearable device) and the "quantified self" movement. The use of sensors not only potentially changes one's relationship with one's body and mind, but also the role and responsibilities of patients and healthcare professionals. Citizen initiatives like the "quantified self" movement claim the right to "own" the sensor's generated data. But how these data can be used through traditional healthcare systems is an open question. We argue that the current publics' visions about the use of these devices for health monitoring are often disconnected from those of policy makers and healthcare professionals, and that there is a need to create spaces for articulation of DIY movements arising from the pervasiveness of ICTs in all life spheres.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation will discuss the concept and practice of knowledge co-production and integration in a co-operative research process by reflecting on the experiences gained in a project, which involved researchers from academic institutions and members from civil society organisations in research on 'Alternative Agro-Food Networks'. The goal was to produce knowledge which goes beyond the narrow designation of being called 'scientific' and embraces different kinds of knowledge, represented by different actors participating in the research process. Moreover, the project aimed at becoming conscious about the 'framing of knowledge (production)', which refers to the process of giving knowledge a certain form or shape, prioritising its most important elements, stressing some dimensions versus marginalising others, referring to other concepts and parts of knowledge and interlinking it with certain social problems, interests and needs.

The presentation will highlight the relevance of differentiation and integration in the context of knowledge co-production and explain how these concepts have been implemented in practice in the course of a transdisciplinary research activity. Our experiences illustrate that the implementation of differentiation and integration steps is complex. We identified certain conditions and some key aspects influencing the process of knowledge co-production and integration. Finally the presentation will conclude with basic rules and some good practice tips for a meaningful engagement of CSOs in research.

The presentation builds on an interpretative analysis of diverse material collected in situ over the course of reflexive project steering, combined with retrospective in-depth interviews.

Paper long abstract:

In the society of knowledge, the figure of the expert has stood as one of the most important and influent elements for the understanding and construction of a common world (Collins & Evans, 2002). Thus, we can find a large number of cases in which the governments use experts and his knowledge to participate in public policy development (Rip, 2003). In fact, the expert is often seen as a scientist who is able to work maintaining a neutral point of view that allows him to talk in name of thirts to provide relevant information about an issue (Brown, 2009). Nevertheless, today many stakeholder's voices, like, for example, those coming from emergent concerned groups (Callon & Raberahisoa, 2008), are claiming to be included in public controversies that affect them.

This incising demand of participation, the stablishment, in recent years, of a participatory turn (Jassanof, 1999), and the fact that economic crisis is changing the mode in witch governments, in special local governments, are including this new actors in policy making (Parés, 2014), moves us to consider the co-expertise (Stengers, 1997) as a central point for new models of governance.

This work, based on a case study in the local administration of a northern region of Spain, Catalonia, we present the elements and relations that take part in the role played by some of these co-experts included in the development and application of public policies.

Paper short abstract:

The findings about online debate processes facilitated by Science Shops are derived by the PERARES EU project ´Public Engagement with Research And Research Engagement with Society´ (FP7 n° 244264 to 2014) and experiences by the autor. Keywords: CBR, CSO, PER, online debate, policy advise

Paper long abstract:

The International Science Shop Network ´living knowledge´ provides several tool kids for efficient interaction between Science and Society. Thus Science Shops in their workface diversity try to effect on education, science and society, to broaden local knowledge and empowerment and to give policy advise by means of Community Based Research - CBR activities.

Science Shops as intermediaries in the CBR processes mostly take over the role as facilitator, free actor in networks, transfer organisation and so forth. While doing so they further co-develop and adapt the tools used in the chosen CBR contexts. Policy advise together with civil society organisations - CSO, researchers and a variety of multi-stakeholder groups mainly is derived by project findings on local up to international level.

Topical examples will be highlighted focussing on the last years´ multi-stakeholder experiences in online debating:

* The Participation at the Global Entrepreneurship week 2012 will be analysed as a f2f and national online-level debate in Germany.

* At international level the PERARES´ (FP7 project 2010 -2014) online debates will be analysed, which aimed to allow multi-stakeholder groups to create research topics and result new CBR projects.

The comparable debate process run in different PERARES partner countries will be exemplified as well as the challenges to include researchers into the debates.

Outlooks will be given on the impact of participated stakeholder groups and individuals into the governance of Science & Technology via online debates facilitated by intermediaries.