In the wake of public controversies involving science, such as the BSE crisis and the MMR debate, the government has started to open up expert advice. How close are we to a new model of knowledge, evidence and expertise? This is the issue posed in a new pamphlet, The Received Wisdom: opening up expert advice.* One of its authors, Alan Irwin, answers the question, while Bill Stow and Sue Mayer comment.

Could do better

The hard work may lie ahead, says Alan Irwin

British policy culture has gone through a remarkable transition since what are now widely seen as the bad old days of BSE. Once, talk was of confidentiality, closed systems and expert judgement. Now, policy makers speak enthusiastically of public engagement; acknowledging uncertainty and the need to build societal confidence in decision-making.

Nor is it just talk. New bodies have been created (including Defra and the Food Standards Agency), a nationwide debate over GM food has been conducted, experiments are taking place across the country with consensus conferences and citizens’ juries, and lay members have been appointed to key advisory committees. Even the best social commentator would have found all this very hard to predict as recently as the mid-1990s.

Tracking change

In sitting down to write The Received Wisdom, we were very conscious of the need to do justice to these changes and the intense efforts that lie behind them. We specifically wanted to track the (admittedly partial) transition from an old model based on closed structures, homogeneous experts and tight managerial control to a new approach which is more open and diverse, trusting of the public and willing to incorporate wider forms of expert knowledge.

This is not a battle with the imagined dark forces of ‘anti-science’ – nor is it helpful to think in such terms. Instead, the new circumstances are enriching our ideas about what counts as relevant expertise and opening our eyes to the varying ways in which socio-technical problems are constructed. The challenge is to embrace the different forms of expertise on offer: to view these as a resource, not a burden.

More progress needed

Nevertheless, in recognising what has changed, it is important to maintain a critical perspective on the progress that has still to be made.

Lay members may now be incorporated on advisory bodies, but their effectiveness depends very much on the status they are given – and especially on how much they are allowed (and enabled) to challenge scientific opinion. Rather than downgrading lay members to a subordinate status, we argue that the term ‘lay’ should be abolished. Instead, committees should contain a range of equal but diverse experts. At the same time, we call for ‘putting the politics back into policy’: widening the space for societal debate rather than hiding it away behind apparently ‘technical’ discussions. Making science more transparent has revealed how opaque many parts of policy remain.

Much has changed, but it may be that the hard work lies ahead. Moving from the rhetoric of greater openness and engagement to long-lasting policy change will require more than transparency and self-conscious efforts to build trust. Instead, we need to take a hard look at our institutional cultures and the narrow notions of expertise on which they depend.

Professor Alan Irwin, Dean of Social and Environmental Studies at the University of Liverpool, is co-author, along with Jack Stilgoe and Kevin Jones, of The Received Wisdom: opening up expert advice

* The full pamphlet can be downloaded from the DEMOS website