What Future for Upstream Stakeholder Engagement on the Ethics of Technology?

1. What Future forUpstream Stakeholder Engagement on the Ethics of Technology? Gerald Midgley & Karen Cronin Paper Presented to the Annual Conference of the Centre for the Philosophy of Technology and Social Systems (CPTS), Amsterdam, Netherlands, 20-24 April 2009.

2. This Talk will Cover… • The reasons for promoting stakeholder dialogue on the ethics of technologies • Problems with earlier approaches to stakeholder dialogue • What is ‘upstream engagement’? • The views of its critics • A practical example: exploring the ethics of future forensic DNA technologies • Problematising the ‘stream’ metaphor • Towards a new approach

3. The ‘moral imperative’ for stakeholder engagement around new technologies Sclove (1995) argues that: • Citizens ought to be empowered to participate in shaping their society’s circumstances • Technologies profoundly affect and partly constitute those circumstances, so it follows that • Technological design and practice should be democratized.

4. An alternative ‘instrumental’ perspective… • The institutions of science and industry invest millions of dollars into new technologies • Investments are wasted when • There is a significant, unexpected backlash that pushes government into applying the brakes, or • The market for products is not there due to citizen mistrust • It is risky to assume that these reactions will not happen, so anticipatory dialogue is useful • There is therefore an uneasy alliance between the democratic and instrumental perspectives

5. Three Phases of Research on Dialogue about the Ethics of Technology • One-way ‘science communication’ about the benefits of an already-developed technology • Problem: framed as risk management; assumes a deficit model of the public; and engenders mistrust and frustration. • Two-way communication, but again focusing on an already developed technology • Problem: science organisations and companies can be resistant to hearing other perspectives which, if taken seriously, could threaten the investment of millions of dollars. Dialogue therefore usually fails to influence decision making. The result can be entrenched mistrust, making future dialogue less likely. • ‘Upstream’ engagement in dialogue • Is this the answer?

6. A Working Definition of Upstream Engagement: • “Dialogue and deliberation, that includes the publics and related interest groups, relevant science communities and policy makers, about potentially disruptive/controversial technologies at an early stage of the research and development process and in advance of significant application, or widespread public knowledges, in a way that has the potential to influence technology trajectories” • Rogers-Hayden et al (2007)

7. Science Innovation and Society Downstream effects of science and technology Science policy and investment decisions Upstream Public Engagement Science Innovation Pipeline: Theory Lab Applied Technology Products Market Economy Society Physical Environment

8. Putative Benefits of Upstream Engagement • Dialogue on ethics should be more genuinely ‘deliberative’ if applications of the technology have not yet been defined. Upstream engagement therefore embodies the spirit of participative democracy more fully than downstream engagement. • Companies will be more open minded if dialogue takes place before the investment of millions of dollars, so it should influence decision making • Upstream dialogue heads off the possibility of entrenched ‘downstream’ conflict, which can be costly in both social and economic terms.

9. Issues and Concerns Raised in the Literature: • The ‘public engagement paradox’: public awareness of issues, and hence willingness to engage, is lowest at precisely that point in time when the opportunity to influence decision making is highest (Collingridge, 1980) • When there is low public awareness, those who do engage may need to rely on accounts from scientists, which frame the dialogue too narrowly • Motivations to engage may still be instrumental in the worst sense: merely smoothing the pathway to implementation of a technology by shaping the thoughts of a naïve public (Rogers Hayden and Pidgeon, 2007) • If this is the case, then all the benefits of upstream engagement (deliberative democracy, a strong connection between dialogue and decision making, and reduction of downstream conflict) may disappear

10. An Example of Upstream Engagement: The Ethics of Future Forensic DNA Technologies • Baker, Gregory, Midgley and Veth (2006) worked with scientists to identify possible new forensic DNA applications • For each one, we captured initial stakeholder perspectives on the balance between the pros and cons of implementation • We then facilitated small group dialogue on the reasons for people’s views • We shared the learning and looked collectively at implications for the governance of forensic DNA technologies

11. How Far is Upstream?

12. How Far is ‘Upstream’ Now?

13. Problematising the ‘Stream’ Metaphor • Whether we are ‘upstream’ or ‘downstream’ is a matter of perspective, not objective fact. • Failure to recognise this can lead to the unexpected rejection of supposedly upstream dialogue by decision makers who view a proposed new idea as a downstream development of an existing technology • Alternatively, decision makers may believe that they are engaging in ‘upstream’ dialogue, but others may see the new technology as just another ‘downstream’ application of an older, unacceptable technology

14. One Way Forward… • Move from dialogical technology assessment to collaborative technology design, starting with the problem situation rather than any particular technological solution (Sclove, 1995). This goes right up the mountain to the source of the river. • Problem: while there are examples of successful collaborative design in the literature, in our experience science organisations often resist ideas that bypass the use of their existing capabilities. • Therefore, while collaborative design might grow in popularity, science-driven design is unlikely to disappear.

15. Towards a New Approach • In a recently started project on future food technologies, we therefore propose to develop a new systems approach to stakeholder engagement based on: • Moving from research on end users and their relationships with stakeholders to research with them. • Moving from a frame of ‘ethics as resistance to a given technology’ to one of ‘ethical preferences for a technology’ • Moving from one-off workshops (whether upstream or downstream) to on-going engagement with stakeholders over time (four years) to build mutual understanding and learning. • Moving from a focus on business and policy decision making to one where personal learning is valued as well. • Moving from written reports of stakeholder engagements handed over to decision makers, to facilitated strategic planning with science and industry on how to respond to what they’ve learned.