Research Collection
Journal Article
Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge
Author(s): Nowotny, Helga
Publication Date: 2003
Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000423040
Originally published in: Science and Public Policy 30(3), http://doi.org/10.3152/147154303781780461
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ETH Library Science and Public Policy, volume 30, number 3, June 2003, pages 151–156, Beech Tree Publishing, 10 Watford Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 2EP, England Dilemma of expertise
Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge
Helga Nowotny
This paper presents arguments for the inherent HE DILEMMA OF EXPERTISE has been ‘transgressiveness’ of expertise. First, it must with us for some time. Plato lets Socrates take address issues that can never be reduced to the Tan outrageously (in modern terms) élitist posi- purely scientific and purely technical, and hence tion. He argues in favour of the aristocratic faction must link up with diverse practices, institutions in the Greek polis, for those who understand and and actors. Second, it addresses audiences that possess knowledge about the “immutable laws of geometry”. He lashes out against the distortions and are never solely composed of fellow-experts, the irrationality that characterise the formation of whose expectations and modes of understanding public opinion and the articulation of political will reflect the heterogeneous experience of mixed among the ‘mob’. To overcome the corruption and audiences. Recent demands for greater account- disorder that appear to threaten his native Athens, ability have created a vast site for social experi- Plato’s solution was to find an immutable anchoring mentation, especially on the supra-national level, point outside the cacophony of political, social and which are briefly reviewed. However, the democ- economic interests of his time. ratisation of expertise also creates tensions, es- The lure of such an ‘external’ certainty, whether pecially on the institutional level. Moving from enshrined in the laws of the gods, of geometry or of reliable knowledge towards socially robust Nature, has been with us ever since. The modern knowledge may be one step forward in negotiat- ‘agora’ (meeting place) can hardly be said to be ing and bringing about a regime of pluralistic populated by the ‘mob’. It is inhabited by a highly articulate, and never before so well-educated popula- expertise. tion. Experience of participating, at least in liberal western democracies, should also have taught citi- zens how to express their views and articulate their demands. Today, there is a widespread expectation that science not only ought to listen to these de- mands, but also can satisfy them. The incorporation of science into the modern agora, therefore, is an expression of confidence in its potentiality, not a loss of trust. Nevertheless, recognising the need for expert Professor Dr Helga Nowotny is at Society in Science: The knowledge and to understand the role it plays in Branco Weiss Fellowship, ETH-Zentrum, HAA, CH - 8092 Zurich, Switzerland; Tel: +41 1 632 25 30; Fax: +0041 1 632 10 leading to the right decisions, has not resulted in 11; E-mail: [email protected]; Web page: solving the dilemma of expertise. Expertise has http://www.society-in-science.ethz.ch/index.html. never before been so indispensable, while being
Science and Public Policy June 2003 0302-3427/03/030151-6 US$08.00 Beech Tree Publishing 2003 151 Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge
“we do not know” has been won only recently, as the Helga Nowotny has been Professor of Social Studies of
Science at ETH Zurich and was Director of Collegium consequence of public scandals that have led to a Helveticum until 2002. She is Chair of the European break with ignoble silence or overt lying. Research Advisory Board of the European Commission and Expertise is transgressive in two senses. First, it Director of the post-doctorate Fellowship programme ‘Society in Science. The Branco Weiss Fellowship’. She has must address issues that can never be reduced to the a doctorate in law (University of Vienna) and a PhD in purely scientific and purely technical. The issues sociology (Columbia University, New York). She has held expertise confronts, the practices that are to be ana- teaching and research positions in Vienna, Cambridge, Bielefeld, Berlin and Paris and has been a Fellow at the lysed and assessed as to their consequences, are Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is a member of the characterised by overlaps and interlinkages that bind Scientific or Advisory Board of many scientific and policy- the specialised scientific knowledge to its local and oriented institutions in Europe and Member of the Academia Europaea. She is prizewinner of the “Arthur Burkhardt Preis societal context. To have any predictive value at all, für Wissenschaftsförderung 2002”. She has authored, co- expertise must be able to understand the interlink- authored or edited more than 20 books and published ages that bind diverse practices, institutions and widely on societal development, social studies of science and technology and the relationship between science and networks of diverse actors together. society. The second sense in which expertise is transgres- sive is that it addresses audiences that are never solely composed of fellow-experts. The narratives of simultaneously so hotly contested. The question of expertise have to be sensitive to a wide range of de- whose knowledge is to be recognised, translated and mands and expectations and relate to the heteroge- incorporated into action has been exacerbated under neous experience of mixed audiences. Speaking only the pressure for democratisation. It has received ad- to decision-makers, like ‘speaking truth to power’, ditional exposure under the constant scrutiny of the has become a risky strategy in itself in an age in mass media. It is highlighted and challenged by hav- which transparency, public access to deliberations ing to manage uncertainty about such diverse issues and assessment procedures, are the order of the day. and public concerns as climate change, BSE (bovine The inherent transgressiveness of expertise in- spongiform encephalopathy or ‘mad cow disease’), creases its vulnerability to contestation. By defini- GMOs (genetically modified organisms) or stem cell tion, experts speak about matters that transcend their research. competence as defined in purely scientific–technical Yet the dilemma of expertise and its vulnerability terms. Even the protection provided by speaking in a is not the result of any risk society. Rather, in the collective voice, to give advice as a committee and provocative verdict of Niklas Luhmann (1996), “so- to generate authority in a self-authorising way, does ciety is shocked by its risks because there is no solu- not confer immunity against contestation. Nor are tion to this problem”. This is not a denial of the need recurrent, but futile attempts helpful, that seek to to assess, manage and contain risks, but the assertion tighten the boundaries of scientific–technical exper- that in modern societies there can be no safe way of tise to prevent them trespassing. The complexities of making decisions. Decisions are events to distin- the social and political world demand the contrary: a guish between our observations of the past and an- widening of scientific–technical expertise, exercises ticipations of the future. To the extent that the future in comparative judgement and the ability to move depends on the decisions taken by others, it becomes back and forth, that is, to transgress the boundaries even more uncertain. Systems and individuals attrib- between specialised knowledge and its multiple, ute risks, turning risk therefore into a problem of many-layered (and often unforeseeable) context of attribution which remains inherent to modern society implication. (Luhmann, 1996). Expertise has always been pragmatic as well as transgressive. Its pragmatism results from being de- Accountability and international regulations fined in particular contexts. When acting as experts, scientists do not respond to questions that they have Undoubtedly, the recent demands for greater ac- chosen — in contrast to their research. Conse- countability have created in many European coun- quently, they are forced to transgress the limits of tries a vast new site for experimentation, seeking to their competence. There are situations in which they extend the notion of expertise beyond the traditional are under instant and intense pressure to respond to a definition of knowledge coming from certified sci- crisis in decision-making, when neither all necessary entific and technical experts (de Jong and Mentzel, knowledge nor sufficient information is available, 2001). In a recent EU (European Union) working uncertainties abound and yet action must be taken. document, experts are declared to have become “key Experts have to synthesise all available knowledge actors of governance: either as proactive agenda- and of necessity transgress the boundaries of their setters in their own right or, more often, as resources discipline as well as the constraints of their own limits for actors in government, business and civil soci- of knowledge. Frequently, they feel under pressure of ety”(EC, 2001). having to act as if they knew the answers and the con- Such a widened role and public acknowledgement ditions under which the answers will unlock an un- of the importance of expertise for enriching the pol- known future. The right of experts to say in public icy process is, however, only part of the story. Less
152 Science and Public Policy June 2003 Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge
The trend towards greater accountability may take different forms. Perhaps the most visible one is to Democratising expertise has not only extend the notion of who is an expert and to stipulate an internal political market, but an from the beginning that there are different kinds of external, global one: the scarce expertise that may become relevant in the policy process or — an even wider goal — are to be re- resources are legitimacy and trust and, garded as an integral part of ‘good governance’. The if they can be mobilised internally, now highly fragmented and often localised experi- transnational regulatory expansion mentation with public participatory models, such as consensus conferences, ‘publi-fora’ and other prac- will be more credible tices in deliberative democracy, may obtain a more stable, although more removed, form by becoming institutionalised on the supranational level. By bringing in those previously excluded — at least symbolically (Shove and Rip, 2000) — the social noticed, but at least as important, is the extension of distribution of expertise is recognised as instrumen- expertise beyond the confines of the nation-state in tal in achieving good governance. which it originally arose and was certified. The re- Greater accountability can, however, also be cent interest on the part of national governments and sought by changing the ‘institutionalised habits of policy-makers, especially at EU level, to ensure thought’, by altering the ‘how’ of expertise and not greater accountability has a double edge. It repre- only the ‘who’ or the ‘what’. Sheila Jasanoff (2002), sents a reaction towards current debates around is- in her recent call for “technologies of humility”, sues of great public concern. It seeks to become pleads for us to turn away from the technologies of proactive by widening access, by creating greater predictive policy analysis, grounded in over- transparency and, more generally, by seeking to de- confidence in their own accuracy and certainty. She mocratise expertise. wants them replaced by methods that try to come to In order to succeed, new sources of legitimacy grips with the fringes of human understanding — the must be generated. Gaining legitimacy on the do- unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous and the un- mestic (EU) front, will also help to push forward the controllable. agenda of moving into international regulatory ter- The four focal points are framing, vulnerability, rain. Prompt policy responses can only succeed in- distribution and learning. They encompass questions ternationally, if there is sufficient regulatory density such as: what is at issue?; who will be hurt?; who and transnational co-ordination or harmonisation of benefits?; and how can we know?. Under such a re- efforts. Where international agreements or scientific gime of humility, the existing predictive approaches reference systems do not exist, they must be set up. would be complemented or replaced by an approach Democratising expertise has not only an internal that makes apparent the possibility of unforeseen political market, but an external, global one. The consequences, to make explicit the normative within scarce resources are legitimacy and trust. If they can the technical and to acknowledge from the start the be mobilised internally, transnational regulatory ex- need for plural viewpoints and collective learning. pansion will be more credible. Thus, expertise would be opened up, not primarily It is probably too early to seriously assess these by extending membership in advisory committees to approaches and their longer-term impact. However, the public or by securing public access to the delib- it is no coincidence that trying to build up new forms erations of expert committees, but by changing the of engagement between policy-makers, experts, the latter’s epistemological approach and their basic media and the public at large is so pronounced on political attitude. It remains to be seen how such the supra-national level. The need, and opportuni- a transformation can be brought about without ties, to mobilise new sources of legitimacy for gov- transforming the institutional framework and the ernance structures operating at this level is as recruitment procedure of experts professing such evident as is the demand for regulatory frameworks humility and how far these technologies will alter that surpass, complement or harmonise national the conduct of their deliberations and the nature of regulatory regimes. their predictions. In regulatory fields, expert advisory committees The tendency on the part of all concerned — be are often confronted with the need to study concepts they national governments or the European Com- or set standards whose existence either has not been mission, scientists, regulators, professional reflex- an issue before or which necessitate addressing issues ologists or representatives of patients organisations that are technical, social, scientific, normative or — to come to terms with a bewildering complexity regulatory (Jasanoff, 1990). At EU level, this opens of how knowledge and decision-making, expertise the possibility for developing a kind of expertise that and action can be linked, creates entanglements of a can more easily integrate criteria that fell traditionally kind that surpass the regulatory sciences. The “regu- into established competencies within national regula- latory worlds” (Hagendijk, 2002) we increasingly tory bureaucracies or have yet to be set up. inhabit, are spreading faster than any risk society,
Science and Public Policy June 2003 153 Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge although we are overwhelmed at times by the per- risks of genetically modified crops are predomi- ception of new risks and uncertainty. It is especially nantly carried out by the industry that generates with regard to uncertainty that scientific and techni- transgenic plants or food. The job of government cal expertise continues to play an indispensable part regulators is little respected and highly pressured; in attempts to manage it. simple in concept and complex in practice: to medi- This cannot occur in isolation, separate and sepa- ate between the corporate drive for profit and the rable from the social, economic, political and cul- public’s need to be protected from damaging effects. tural contingencies, nor from the heterogeneous sites Industry’s position on regulatory control is where the need to cope with uncertainty arises. The equally predictable: the corporations favour de- challenges posed by the social distribution of exper- creased oversight, arguing that stakeholders are the tise and its ongoing societal contextualisation, lies in best arbitrators of safety, and regulation is too ex- the nature and robustness of links it can build with pensive or hampering to economic growth and com- other types of knowledge, other kinds of experience petitiveness (Winston, 2002). ‘Democratising and expertise. expertise’ in the ‘genetically modified zone’ would Expertise, of whatever kind, is based on experi- mean to move resolutely towards the middle ground ence of some kind, even though experience tends to and to accord greater weight to more ‘neutral’ public be eclipsed by or subsumed under certified expertise research institutions, that have the capability of car- The reductionistic–analytic model of science (which rying out more accurate, unbiased and comprehen- has served science well in other respects) reaches its sive research concerning the risks of transgenic limits here. Mode 1 science needs to be comple- crops and food. mented by Mode 2 science and its respective model Another approach taken at the institutional level of expertise (Nowotny et al, 2001). consists of the systematisation and routinisation of experience. Expertise thus becomes a result of evi- dence-based experience. The systematic uptake of Tensions generated review processes, the spread of auditing and assess- ment procedures, the introduction of performance Democratising expertise can be pursued in different indicators and bench-marking exercises, and the ways and achieved in different degrees. Yet tensions widespread introduction of evidence-based medicine are likely to arise, regardless of the route taken. and, more recently, evidence-based policy, are re- They arise on the epistemological, the political and sponses pointing in the direction of greater account- the institutional level. On the epistemological level, ability, but they do so in a specific way. for instance, the tension between rights that accrue ‘Democratising expertise’ takes the form of de- from professional expertise (be it ‘contributory’, personalising and standardising other forms of ‘interactional’ or ‘referred’ expertise) and those knowledge, experience and expertise. They are nec- originating from more diffuse political rights, has essarily abstracted from the local contexts in which not been thoroughly addressed. While not denying they originally arose. Verification procedures and the stakeholders’ rights, the argument goes, they practices are objectified by setting up systematic cannot have the same weight as those of professional scientific reference systems and similar procedures. experts (Collins and Evans, 2002). In principle, the experience of participants and of On the political level, a strong tension manifests relevant social groups, their attitudes, perceptions itself with regard to moral expertise. The boom in and even specific vulnerabilities can all be acknowl- ethics committees, ethics courses and a new brand of edged, incorporated and taken into account. bio-ethics specialists who advise pharmaceutical However, to make the systematisation and routi- corporations, testifies to the importance and popular- nisation of experience and expertise operational, ity of the ethical dimension. The moral vernacular of knowledge has to be codified, experience has to be- the ethics discourse appeals against an overriding come standardised. Relevant knowledge and exper- market culture. With the voice of its post-modern tise now no longer fall outside the remit of universalism, the moral expertise of ethics can pre- scientific–technical expertise, but the result is sent itself as protector of things, species and of a unlikely to be a ‘technology of humility’. It is closer concept of human dignity above history (for in- to becoming another ‘technology of certainty’, as- stance, Fukuyama, 2002). sured of its in-built power to predict and control. It This is not to deny the need for regulation and aims to be ‘robust’ on the institutional level, but its safeguards in research and clinical settings, but the ‘social robustness’ will only come about when it all-embracing, universalistic claims of moral exper- remains open to continuous social monitoring, test- tise often make it difficult to link up with other kinds ing and adaptations. of knowledge and expertise. Sometimes belittled as It is reminiscent of the various moves towards ‘ob- merely providing an alibi function for political deci- jectification’ that occurred towards the end of the 19th sions, moral expertise runs the risk of serving as an century. ‘Mechanical objectivity’ was introduced at alibi against the democratisation of expertise. the time when face-to-face interaction among scien- Other tensions arise on the institutional level. In tists and their mutual trust no longer seemed guaran- the USA, for instance, studies to ‘prove’ the low teed because of the expansion of the science system
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(Daston and Galison, 1992). Mechanical objectivity, based on standardised and internationalised meas- urements and techniques did restore the essential ele- Socially robust knowledge has three, ment of trust by transferring it from persons and their interrelated aspects: it is tested for subjective judgement to mechanical, impersonal and validity outside as well as inside the hence ‘objective’ devices. The push towards expert systems, benchmarking laboratory; it is most likely to be and evidence-based policy pursues a direction dif- achieved by involving an extended ferent from that exemplified by efforts to ‘democra- group of experts; it results from tise expertise’ through participatory models or by developing ‘technologies of humility’. At best, these having been repeatedly tested, expert systems might become technologies of plural- expanded and modified ising expertise. They will contain a strong element of evidence-based experience and the expertise that goes with it. This is a far cry from bringing in lay participants and their knowledge as being as valuable as, al- function, undergo changes in meaning (Nowotny, though different from, that of scientific and technical 2000). Put briefly, expertise spreads throughout so- experts. To function efficiently, however, evidence- ciety and becomes socially distributed expertise. based pluralistic expert systems will need to be con- Experts must now extend their knowledge, not sim- tinuously updated and reassessed themselves. Socie- ply to be an extension of what they know in their tal monitoring in one form or another will continue specialised field, but to consist of building links and to challenge the pluralisation of expertise, in the trying to integrate what they know with what others name of ‘democratising’ it. want to, or should, know and do. Bringing together the many different knowledge dimensions involved constitutes specific mixes with other kinds of From reliable to socially robust knowledge knowledge, experience and expertise. Third, since society is no longer only an addressee In Re-Thinking Science (Nowotny et al, 2001) I have of science, but an active partner participating in the argued, together with my colleagues Michael Gib- production of social knowledge, the robustness of bons and Peter Scott, for moving beyond merely such knowledge results from having been repeatedly reliable knowledge towards socially more robust tested, expanded and modified. knowledge. This does not mean that the basic condi- Obviously, social robustness is a relational term. tions and processes that have been underpinning the It describes a process, and not a product. What can production of reliable knowledge are necessarily and will contribute to knowledge becoming socially compromised. Reliable knowledge remains the in- robust is itself the result of an iterative process. It dispensable conditio sine qua non of the fact that differs from the systematised pluralism of expertise ‘science works’. in two respects. First, it remains contextual in the However, if reliable knowledge, produced within sense that it will take on different forms on the epis- the relevant peer group of scientists (Ziman, 1978), temological, institutional and political level. has been found wanting, it is not because of any de- Second, it pushes the epistemological and institu- ficiency in its reliability. Rather, reliable knowledge, tional initiative ‘up-stream’, into the research proc- as validated in its disciplinary context, is no longer ess and to the research sites where new knowledge is self-sufficient or self-referential once its ‘deliver- generated. Scientists do remember that a public ables’ are contested or refused. It is being challenged judgement about the acceptance or rejection of the by a larger community that insists its voice should ‘deliverables’ they produce is a valid judgement, be heard and that some of its claims are as valid, on although based on non-scientific criteria. They are democratic grounds, as those of more circumscribed aware of the societal context for their work, in which scientific communities. they encounter real and imaginary ‘interlocutors’. In Socially robust knowledge has three, closely in- these situations, language, and therefore terrelated aspects. First, robustness is tested for va- communication, matters. So does history, which may lidity not only inside the laboratory. The test resurface in unexpected places and at unexpected typically occurs outside the laboratory, in a world in moments, framing in terms of previous events or which social, economic, cultural and political factors memories that Nature has no need to frame. Socially shape the products and processes resulting from sci- robust knowledge can extend to expertise one of its entific and technological innovation. main characteristics: the ability to resist in a social Second, social robustness is most likely to be world through continued testing of the sources of achieved through involving an extended group of resistance and strengthening or modifying the experts, of real or symbolic users and of real or knowledge accordingly. ‘imagined’ lay persons. In this process of extension, Between unconditioned acceptance and hostile re- the notion of what constitutes expertise, its role and jection, there remains space for negotiation. We
Science and Public Policy June 2003 155 Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge have called it the ‘agora’. This archaism was delib- De Jong, Martin, and Maarten Mentzel (2001), “Policy and sci- ence: options for democratisation in European countries”, Sci- erately chosen to embrace the political arena and the ence and Public Policy, 28(6), December, pages 403–412. market place, and to go beyond both. The ‘agora’ is EC, European Commission (2001), “Democratising expertise and the problem-generating and problem-solving envi- establishing scientific reference systems”, report to the White Paper on Governance; pilot: R Gerold; rapporteur: A Libera- ronment in which the contextualisation of knowl- tore, in European Governance-Preparatory work for the White edge production takes place. It is populated not only Paper, Office for Official Publications of the EC, Luxembourg, by arrays of competing ‘experts’ and the organisa- available at
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