Abstract
The “Open Air Laboratories” (OPAL) is a large, England-wide environmental public engagement (PE) project based on the “citizen science” model. It is designed to involve people of all backgrounds and abilities in the production of environmental science and in the process to educate and raise awareness and enthusiasm about nature and its importance. This article draws on a series of interviews with scientists and science communicators involved in the project to explore their motivations and aims for the project and what they see as the goals of public engagement generally. We find a varied and nuanced array of motivations and aims that interviewees cite for taking part in the project, pointing toward a reevaluation of traditional ways of understanding the value of public engagement, policy relevance, and dialogue within public engagement. Especially relevant in relation to thinking about the policy relevance of PE is our conclusion that there are many different ways of thinking about the value of PE, characterized in this article as “the neglected middle.”
Keywords
Introduction
Public engagement (PE hereafter) as an activity has received considerable attention from social scientists, with analyses looking at the justifications and evaluations offered by a growing community of participants and communicators. Research on PE has in some ways been hindered by a lack of clear definitions of what it actually is. Attempts to categorize PE (such as that by Rowe & Frewer, 2004) often seem to take a more limited view of PE that may not always be recognizable to those who practice it: Rowe and Frewer follow much contemporary theorizing by seeing the value of PE as one that informs policy, leaving the many PE activities that do not seek to inform policy directly rather undertheorized (S. Davies, McCallie, Simonsson, Lehr, & Duensing, 2009).
Thus, as Powell and Colin (2008) argue, while there is considerable official rhetoric about the importance of PE, there seems to be no clear and coherent idea about what PE is supposed to achieve. Controversial science and public dialogue over decision making is only one aspect of PE and evaluations of how well it is doing its job cannot depart from that assumption alone. Indeed, because of a proliferation of different types of PE,
there is no one simple answer to public engagement, no magic wand that will render all other approaches obsolete [ . . . ] In rejecting the “deficit model” so forcefully, a narrow view of public engagement ignores the clear public appetite for science, the thrill of scientific discovery, as well as the way it can aid people in their lives. (Matterson, 2006, p. 5)
The successful evaluation of science engagement projects, as Gammon and Burch (2006) argue in the same publication, is highly dependent on having clearly defined goals concerning what it is trying to achieve. This is something that unfortunately many PE projects lack, even when science learning outcomes are being looked at in isolation (as suggested in Bell, Lewenstein, Shouse, & Feder’s 2009 comprehensive review of informal science learning).
This article aims to present the views of (environmental) science communication practitioners involved in PE, a group that with limited exceptions (see below) has been largely ignored in the social literature on PE. Where scientists’ and science communication practitioners’ views on PE have been studied, this has often been through a normative lens which categorizes the communicators’ thoughts into the preconceived Public Understanding of Science (PUS) paradigms of science literacy, deficit, engagement, or upstream approaches. It seems however somewhat difficult to define what “upstream” engagement would look like on relatively noncontroversial areas such as paleontology or astronomy, areas where many of the publicly visible engagement projects try to stimulate interest in the public rather than enlist them into public policy dialogue (see, Entradas, 2011, on the difficulties of interpreting astronomy PE in terms of the traditional deficit—dialogue divide in PUS research). This may have contributed to the general disconnect between PUS academic research and PE practitioners: As S. Miller (2008; see also Pitrelli, 2009) reports, few practitioners read journals such as Public Understanding of Science or Science Communication. Therefore, there seems to be a gap that needs filling between our research and the issues that practitioners find important, and through having a nonnormative look at practitioners aims and hopes for PE, we hope to gain some pointers on what issues need looking at further in social science research to enable the conversation between theory and practice to advance.
In this article, we intend to take the scientists’ and science communication professionals’ views on PE at their own merits by situating them within their own aspirations of what good PE means, how this fits into their wider view of scientific research or career progression, and what they regard as the public and wider societal benefit from PE. This will take two forms. First, our interviewees’ perceptions of the value of PE will be presented as falling into areas that are often less discussed in the literature on PE but constitute their own personal motivations and drivers, such as the personal enjoyment they get from interaction with the public, the benefits for their own scientific (or communication) career, and benefits to society at large such as the community-building aspects of PE that foreground construction of social capital in disadvantaged areas often above the value to science education on its own. Second, we will re-examine the issue of policy relevance in PE by moving away from a simple dichotomy and introducing what we will characterize as the “neglected middle,” a domain of involvement in which the policy relevance of PE is more indirectly dependent on traditional science-learning outcomes having been achieved in the first place. We offer this characterization in order to contribute to the development of a more nuanced view of PE offering scope to bridge the gap between the theory and practice elements of science communication that has been identified by Miller and Pitrelli.
The analysis is based on interviews with 42 scientists and science communicators working within the “Open Air Laboratories” (OPAL) citizen science program (see, L. Davies et al., 2011), which as a citizen science project involves members of the public to participate in the gathering of scientific and environmental data, but is by and large conceived as a PE program (the interviewees’ views on the public participation element of OPAL were looked at in a separate article, see Riesch, Potter, & Davies, 2013).
Questions have focused on how they understand PE and what societal goals they think it should aim for, as well as how working in PE fits into their career plans and prospects (as well as questions specifically on OPAL and the concept of citizen science in general, which were analyzed separately in Riesch, Potter, and Davies, 2013, and Riesch & Potter, 2014).
Background: How PE Is Viewed by Scientists and Science Communicators
Research evaluating PE has focused largely on public impacts and reactions, though during the past 10 years a few studies have been published that review the perceptions of scientists themselves.
A report addressing “the factors affecting science communication by scientists and engineers” by the Royal Society (2006), based on a survey and interviews with scientists and engineers found that while there was an increase of PE activities reported by academics compared with a previous study (Wellcome Trust, 2000), it was also noted with concern that most scientists still perceived PE activities to be about educating the public rather than engaging in dialogue. In the interviews, scientists noted that academic reward structures were not encouraging PE activities, in particular the Research Assessment Exercise 1 was pointed out as requiring that scientists concentrate on research and publishing papers: For this reason it was also found that PE activities were more prevalent among senior academics (i.e., those with permanent posts) than with research fellows or associates whose career development depended more heavily on developing a research-based curriculum vitae (see also, Nielsen, Kjaer, & Dahlgaard, 2007, and Porter, Williams, Wainwright, & Cribb, 2012).
Somewhat replicating these results with respect to scientists and PE practitioners’ conceptualizations of PE as education rather than dialogue, Holliman and Jensen (2009) have analyzed participating scientists’ views of PE through open-ended questionnaires and a series of focus groups as part of the ISOTOPE (Informing Science Outreach and Public Engagement) project (see, Jensen & Holliman, 2009). Using Irwin and Michael’s (2003) three modes of PE (roughly comparable to the concepts of deficit, dialogue, and “upstream engagement”), they found that with only few exceptions practitioners did not view dialogue or indeed engagement as the main focus of PE, preferring instead to think of PE as educating and informing a more or less unresponsive public. Similar results that show that scientists and experts think in a “deficit” model about the public as unknowledgeable and in need of education rather than dialogue are reported by Frewer et al. (2003) on public risk perception and Cook, Pieri, and Robbins (2004) on genetically modified (GM) foods.
The Wellcome Trust funded ScoPE (Scientists on Public Engagement) project (Burchell, Franklin, & Holden, 2009) interviewed 30 mostly senior scientists from the biomedical fields with previous experience of PE. Somewhat in contrast to the above studies, they found that scientists viewed the relationship between science, the public, and PE to be “reflective, sophisticated, layered and nuanced” (Burchell et al., 2009, p. 6), though some concerns over the limits to public involvement in decision making were also noted. However, echoing the Royal Society (2006) report, interviewees were also concerned about “the difficulty of accommodating [PE] activities within the already-overstretched job descriptions of most working scientists” (p. 7) and that as a consequence participation in PE activities were often seen as “potentially harmful” for a scientist’s career. Echoing a recommendation arising from the Royal Society report, interviewees felt that one of the positives of PE and a frequent reason for its success is the enthusiasm and goodwill of participating scientists as well as their relative autonomy in conducting and implementing projects. It was felt for that reason that institutional requirements for scientists to engage in PE even when they do not want to would be detrimental. Jacobsen, Butterill, and Goering (2004) report structural barriers that publicly funded research institutions put in the way of scientists communicating their work.
S. Davies (2008a, 2008b) finds that scientists’ talk about PE is not easily categorized as “deficit” or “dialogue,” but instead “is constantly modified, negotiated and switched to create a spectrum of different kinds of depictions” (S. Davies, 2008a, p. 32). Instead she proposes a view of scientists engaging in conflicting discourses: On the one hand they engage in “boundary work” (Gieryn, 1999) where the “deficit discourse” serves as a rhetorical tool to underline science’s authority and to “problematise publics and protect science” (S. Davies, 2008a, p. 33). On the other hand a minority “discourse of identification” acknowledges public knowledge and blurs the distinction between science and society.
Poliakoff and Webb’s (2007) survey on the factors that influence scientists in participating in PE has found that time and money constraints and potential harm to career progression did not affect scientists’ decisions on whether to participate. Likewise, Dudo (2013) did not find that extrinsic rewards influence scientists’ intentions to participate in PE. The positive influences that these studies point to are institutional support, the scientists’ status and autonomy and peer comparison.
Young and Matthews (2007) find in their analysis of aquaculture experts’ perceptions of the public and the PE process that while the incorporation of local lay knowledge is generally welcomed, it also “tends to be narrowly conceived as a secondary consideration or complement to science-based knowledge and process” (p. 140), thus suggesting, like Davies, that scientists’ discourse about the PE process is somewhat more nuanced and complicated than merely a lack of understanding or enthusiasm of the public dialogue models of PE; see also Burchell’s (2007) earlier work on scientists’ use of “empiricist” and “contingent” interpretative repertoires when talking about the public. A similar conflict of narratives between “one-way” and “two-way” communication was identified by Entradas (2011) in her study of astronomy communication practitioners; however, she also argues that the two should be seen as complementary approaches to science communication.
Elements that are still missing from these studies include having a closer look at how science communicators feel PE is worthwhile for them personally: Through an excessive focus for example on senior and more established scientists in studies such as Burchell et al. (2009), the more precarious positions of the contract researcher or communicator is often overlooked. Another element that is missing in analyses of communicators’ and scientists’ views on PE we feel is specifically addressing their priorities and concerns about the enterprise, how these map or do not map with the current paradigms in PUS research, and whether they can point us toward a more nuanced and practice-relevant way of thinking about the value of PE, especially in the area of how to think about policy relevance.
Scientists and professional science communicators have built up a pool of working knowledge and a considerable amount of critical reflection on science engagement that we feel is still in need of being reported without the conceptual imposition of traditional PUS norms: If we as a discipline want PE practice to learn from experience we need a grounded approach to PE’s pooled experience.
Scientists’ and Science Communicators’ Views on PE
OPAL is a large-scale PE program in the United Kingdom launched in 2007. The program includes national surveys designed by scientists in academic or other institutions associated with environmental issues. Members of the public can obtain from “community scientists,” download, or receive by mail, a “survey pack” that includes instructions on how to carry out simple surveys (e.g., on earthworm abundance for the soil survey) and send the data back to OPAL. Additionally, field trips and other activities are organized with local community organizations (focused especially on deprived and hard to reach demographics) to carry out the national surveys as well as smaller citizen science projects on environmental topics researched by the local team (some regional teams also carry out their own, noncitizen science, research). OPAL also includes other PE activities ranging from a “weather roadshow” to an interactive community-based species identification service (iSPOT 2 ). Next to these direct engagement activities OPAL also supported amateur natural history societies through a grant system and the development of specialist recording software (“indicia” 3 ). For a fuller description of OPAL, its activities and general philosophy, please see L. Davies et al. (2011) and L. Davies, Fradera, Riesch, and Lakeman-Fraser (2016), as well as the project website. 4
Methods
This section will present the results of a series of semistructured interviews with 42 team members of OPAL conducted in a series of 41 interviews (one interview was held with two participants) across its different national and regional centers between October 2011 and May 2012. The interviews took between around half an hour and an hour’s time. Although OPAL is a rather large project for its type it is still small enough for everybody to know each other. In order therefore to ensure anonymity, in the section below, quotes will only be identified by whether the interviewee was an active scientist (30) or a professional science communicator (10) or “other” (2), which includes a few administrative staff and advisors from outside agencies. The boundaries here are somewhat blurred, with most scientists also engaging in communication and several interviewees (9) having specifically been hired in a dual role. The latter are classified as scientists for the purposes of this article. The other distinction we marked was whether they were juniors such as MSc/PhD students and postdocs or contract science communicators (25) or senior members of staff such as principal investigators (PIs) or project leaders (17). The scientific fields covered by the scientists in the study are mostly environmental sciences, natural history, ecology, and geography, but they also work with groups working in a physics department, scientists at the Met Office, and a small group of two human geographers/social scientists. Twenty-four participants were male, 17 female.
The interviews were, with the participants’ permission, recorded and fully transcribed, and subsequently analyzed qualitatively for emerging themes in how they defined and talked about PE and its aims. Repetitions and filler words and phrases have been cleaned out from the quoted extracts. This article will focus particularly on where participants saw the aims or goals of PE in general, though there was a lot of inevitable overlap with how they perceived OPAL’s aims and/or the goals of “citizen science”–style PE.
The Interviews
The participants were asked their view of the meaning of PE and what aims or purposes they felt it should ideally achieve. Fairly often an initial reaction to that question was that PE was difficult to define and/or that there are many different ways of doing it and different aims for what it should achieve:
It’s difficult because [public engagement] is such a, I think it’s such a massive field really, and so many people work in lots of different areas of it, that it’s, it’s quite difficult to narrow down. (Science communicator, Junior 15)
The project strove to ensure that the terminology was explained to everyone and used consistently; however, there was also some remaining uncertainty over it, with many participants using PE synonymously with “outreach.” One interviewee did distinguish between PE and outreach, but was not entirely sure what it was:
Somebody has defined it for me in the past, and I can’t even remember what they said, because I was struggling with these terms when I started, public engagement and outreach, and somebody told me what the difference was and I can’t remember . . . (Scientist, Junior 20)
We can broadly group participants’ views on the aims of PE into three categories; that is, what the public participants get out of it, what they themselves, or science more broadly, get out of it, and finally what society at large gets out of it. There was of course considerable individual overlap here, as many participants saw several beneficiaries to PE. These aims of PE can be mapped onto Thomas and Durant’s (1987) influential list of nine aims for PUS: benefits for science, benefits to national economies, benefits to national power and influence, benefits to individuals, benefits to democratic government, benefits to society as a whole, intellectual benefits, aesthetic benefits, and moral benefits. It is interesting then that a few of these, such as national economic and prestige benefits were not mentioned at all in the interviews, while other very prominent themes from the interviews, such as PE benefitting environmental quality are absent in Thomas and Durant’s list. The aims or goals discussed in the next sections can also be divided between ultimate and intermediate goals, with an example of an ultimate goal being the benefits that the project brings to the environment and an intermediate goal being increasing the science knowledge of the participants. While the questions we asked concentrated only on what they saw as the main goals of PE without differentiating the types of goals, a picture started to emerge that saw the intermediate, often educational, goals as enabling the ultimate goals. This will be developed further in the discussion.
Benefits for Science/Scientists
There are two strands in this theme relating to the personal benefits of the individual interviewee and to science as a whole. To start with the first, just as was the case with the public, the interviewees very often stressed that fun was a major motivating factor for them:
So that’s been fun, trying to think of things on the hoof, because most people don’t want to ask questions about aquatic science, they want to know about . . . invasive species, (inaudible), certain types of plant, what’s all this climate change stuff then, do you think it’s happening, so you think my god these are massive scientific issues here, these are big things here to be discussing. So it’s been fun to have to remember broad general science. (Scientist, Junior 32)
Two interviewees, both scientists, by contrast reported that they were not particularly interested in PE (“that doesn’t mean to say that we don’t make a good job of it,” Scientist, Senior 22), demonstrating that not every scientist will get enjoyment out of it.
Other benefits of participating in PE that some interviewees mentioned included the transferable skills and experiences it provided them. Participating in PE, they thought, can give you good communication skills, project managing skills, and generally enhance a curriculum vitae:
The skills that we’ve learned from this job that are transferrable, you know, engaging with people and be able to talk to people about something that they don’t know about in an interesting way is a fantastic skill to have in any career. (Science communicator, Junior 41)
These curriculum vitae–enhancing properties of PE however need to be seen in conjunction with career aspirations, and whether the transferable skills acquired through PE counter the negative aspects (for career researchers at least) of not having spent the time writing papers and research proposals; unfortunately, on balance PE was also seen by some participants as a potential disbenefit for their careers.
Somewhat less seriously, some scientist interviewees referred to the “box ticking” benefit of outreach, that is, as something that helps them satisfying the impact criterion for their research and thus enhance the prospects of getting grant money:
If we are going to be quite selfish about it, there’s increasing relevance, well increasing reliance on scientists showing that they’re making their research accessible to the public, relevant to the public, if we look at the research framework and the grant system at the moment emphasis on the impact of what you’re doing, it’s not just the science impact, it’s the public impact so at a selfish level there’s that purpose. (Scientist, Senior 16)
Beyond personal benefits, PE was also seen to benefit science as a whole. A few interviewees spoke of the duty of scientists to make their work publicly accessible through PE, since they after all are funding it—science relies on the goodwill of the taxpayers and therefore needs to show them that it’s worth the money they spend on it: “I’m a public servant and [ . . . ] there should be a duty for me to go out and be more visible” (Scientist, Senior 3).
It was often perceived by the interviewees that there is a barrier between science and the public that PE can help break down. This barrier could be that scientists are not trusted (“just the need to explain what it is we as scientists are doing so that the public isn’t scared of scientists or the work that scientists do,” Scientist, Senior 1), or that scientists are perceived to be “very socially inept people” (Scientist, Junior 21). PE in that sense could then be thought of as public relations for science. It was frequently thought that PE can break barriers by taking the “mystique” out of science:
Trying to open up, take away the mystique of what scientists do every day, you know we don’t, I don’t sit there with frothing test tubes and you know bubbly liquids and things. (Scientist, Junior 29)
and that it can help the public realize that science isn’t so hard or alien and that it’s all around them and relevant to their lives:
We come away with an impression that science is difficult or is boring and that scientists are boring people, and if you can break down the barriers and make them see that actually science can be fun, and anybody can get involved in science you don’t have to be a brain box, everybody can learn something new about science then that, then that is very useful, and I think OPAL has done that very effectively. (Scientist, Senior 14)
As one of the stated goals of OPAL was to “create a new generation of environmentalists,” several interviewees also alluded to the hoped-for effect of creating enough interest in science or the environment in young people that they will want to become scientists themselves. While almost universally recognized as a desirable outcome, there was however a lot of uncertainty, and sometimes even cynicism, over the motives of university management in pushing outreach: “[Public engagement] is to recruit undergraduates isn’t it? No it’s not [laughs]” (Scientist, Junior 32). A few interviewees argued that it is almost impossible to find out what role PE plays in people’s desire to become scientists or environmentalists, because there are so many other factors in an individual’s decision.
Two interviewees however, both junior scientists, had some reservations because of their disillusionment about being a scientist and wondered whether it would be ethical to push young people into a career with low salaries, long hours, and little job security (Scientist, Junior 29).
Benefits for the Public and Scientific Literacy
Opinions were often expressed about PE being an opportunity for the public to learn about science and the environment, reflecting perhaps a traditionally deficit way of thinking: “raising the general public’s scientific literacy in any way I think is really important” (Science communicator, Junior 15). This was coupled with a fairly frequently expressed opinion about the general state of public knowledge of science/environment in need of improvement: “It’s amazing how many people out there are really ignorant of anything around them, you know . . .” (Scientist, Junior 25). Blame on this state of affairs was often laid on the media, which it was argued misrepresents science: “There are some parts of the media that either deliberately or by accident either misrepresent or trivialise our science to the detriment of what we are trying to achieve” (Scientist, Senior 1), though this interviewee also thought that scientists themselves were to blame: “Scientists need to engage more effectively with the public and not be seen as dogmatic. And if the public doesn’t understand, that’s our fault because we’re not pitching it properly” (Scientist, Senior 1). The way in which this communication of knowledge to the public should work however was almost always seen as a two-way dialogue, as the previous quote suggests. Scientists and science communicators, many argued, need to be attentive to their audience, answer questions, and engage with their educational needs. It was also argued frequently that in order to be responsive to public needs, PE needs to build strong and reciprocal links with the local community. There was a strong sense in which the interviewees saw deficit reduction as a goal and dialogue as a way of achieving that goal (as suggested by van der Sanden & Meijman, 2008).
While there was a clear strand of opinion that held the public to be in need of more scientific knowledge/literacy which is addressed through a two-way dialogue, it was also frequently recognized that quite often individual members of the public are very knowledgeable in certain areas:
There are some amazingly talented amateurs out there, you know, they run rings around many of the scientists when it comes to sort of specifics of what they’re interested in. (Scientist, Junior 31)
One interviewee, referring to the lay expertise paradigm within PUS as embodied by Wynne’s (1992) famous case study (of which he was very much aware) recognized local and community lay expertise more broadly and saw PE as an opportunity to look into this:
The reason I was interested in the community engagement was just to see that comparison of local knowledge and understanding of wildlife and habitats and environment, vs. the official expert understanding. [ . . . ]. [I]n this case . . . wasn’t so much that the community probably got better knowledge than the experts but it was understanding the difference between those knowledges, that’s where I’m coming from . . . (Scientist, Senior 39)
Rather than just scientific/environmental knowledge, it was often seen as just as important that PE teaches the public about scientific ways of thinking, echoing the arguments within PUS surrounding teaching scientific thinking (J. D. Miller, 1987) and the “science for citizenship” research in science education. This was undoubtedly influenced by the nature of the PE program under investigation here, that is, a “citizen science” type program which seeks to involve members of the public directly in some aspects of performing science. It was however also recognized by many that this is something that all good PE should strive for (and conversely, one interviewee thought that OPAL-type citizen science was not particularly suited to this aim, Scientist, Senior 3). The reason cited for this was that being more knowledgeable about science and scientific ways of thinking, enables members of the public to better make sense of what they read in the news and therefore help them make better decisions affecting their own personal lives (e.g., in being better able to evaluate health claims/advice):
If I said the scientific method that would make it sound terribly serious, but they ought to understand how to deal with evidence, you know, what it’s about, I think that that’s really ultimately the only . . . you know, understanding that is, is . . . is important defence against people tricking you basically. (Scientist, Senior 23)
Thus, it was thought that participatory PE can teach an appreciation to the public about the uncertainties inherent in scientific research; it teaches new skills as well as giving people a “hands-on” experience of science and how it works.
Another way in which the public can benefit from PE is through providing opportunities to get involved—it was often emphasized that there is a great demand from the public for more PE, and that “it’s important not in a sense to ram the science down their throats” (Scientist, Junior 37). Therefore, some participants argued that PE can be a benefit for those who are interested but have little opportunity to learn more:
And, so that for me was a . . . a part of the big attraction in terms of the public engagement side of things, the fact that the public in this country know there are so few opportunities for the public to be engaged in nature and in the local environment and certainly in terms of taxonomy and things like that. (Other, Senior 5)
PE was also seen by some as a way of “opening eyes” or providing people with new experiences or ways of thinking. Here the benefit was not so much about the science learning aspect of PE but more about the way it provided enjoyable experiences to people. “Experiencing something new” was often seen as a benefit for people in its own right:
The use of the term [public engagement] implies getting the public interested or involved in something they’ve either not done before, not considered before, or have had no previous experience before. (Science communicator, Junior 19)
Similarly, a small number of interviewees thought that good PE makes people look at the environment in a new way:
And if someone now looks at a worm differently I’m all for it. The fact that they can’t call it the right thing is incidental to that, they’re looking at the thing differently, that’s great. (Scientist, Senior 3)
Parallel to that, there was a very frequently expressed opinion that one of the aims of PE should be that the participants enjoy themselves, especially if targeted at young people or hard-to-reach communities:
We have physically engaged with tens of thousands of people up and down the country and [ . . . ] from my experience most of them have had a really positive experience. And they’ve enjoyed it and they’ve learned something and they’ve often been inspired by it. (Scientist, Senior 1)
As shown by the above quote these last two points are conjoined with other benefits of PE, that is, if people are enjoying themselves doing it, they will be more likely to regard science as a worthwhile activity or learn new things about it. Nevertheless, just like the “new experiences,” the fun aspect of PE was often mentioned in isolation as a valuable goal on its own.
Finally, interviewees mentioned other non–science-related benefits for the public in taking part; these relate specifically to OPAL’s focuses on direct participation as well as one of its stated aims of getting people outdoors and encouraging a healthy lifestyle:
I think it is to inspire, an it’s the overall thing I suppose, is to get involved and do something and just, you know get out there don’t just watch it on television, but you know, be active. (Other, Senior 13)
It was also suggested that participating in PE and getting involved in nature conservation is good for mental health, for which OPAL has collected evidence in the form of participant feedback (L. Davies et al., 2013). Other ideas mentioned were that participating in PE can cut reoffending rates (when targeted at young offenders), improving people’s quality of life, and giving them confidence and raise aspirations.
Benefits for Society and the Environment at Large
The benefits of PE for society in general overlap with the other two benefits for scientists and members of the public of course, since it can be argued that what is good for science and for people individually is also a general good for all. A lot of the benefits that interviewees identified for PE however were wider in scope than that; these relate, for example, to the policy dialogue aspects of PE that PUS scholars have identified as important for the democratic governance of science.
Some interviewees made explicit mention of the importance of public participation in science and environmental policy decision making:
[PE is] I think any dialogue or outreach activities between . . . policy makers or academics and members of the public, so it could be from lectures to them or talks or going to schools, to taking them out and undertaking sampling activities and things like, and showing them, and getting them to collect data in a more citizen science way. Or . . . well it could be even, well public engagement in policy making, so making sure people’s views are expressed in planning meetings and things like this, environmental impact assessments and things. Which is definitely a move forward that policy is taking. (Scientist, Junior 2)
Usually when PE’s relevance to environmental policy was mentioned, it was to make the point that the public needs to be aware of and have an interest in the issue in order to contribute; PE builds “a constituency” for environmental policy:
if you look at OPAL in that light, that people have learned about the wildlife of Britain, and have been actively involved in gathering information about that wildlife, that builds a political constituency which is actually very important. To allow the public agencies that are charged with conserving our countryside, it gives them a constituency within they can work. (Other, Senior 13)
This intuitive point that knowledge influences the propensity of the public to participate in science policy echoes the research by Dijkstra et al. (2012) who found interest to be a factor predicting participation in genomics, though knowledge was an even stronger factor. Regarding knowledge however, the argument was more often made not so much that it gets people involved, but that it makes their involvement more meaningful:
For many issues, the level of public understanding is very poor, or certainly not sufficient for them to make an informed decision as to where they stand on a particular issue. And just giving people an opportunity to have their say when it is, when it’s not contributing an enlightened view is, you know . . . well it’s nice for them to have the opportunity, but it may not take the argument much further because they’re not adding anything to the debate. And if you base your choices on ill informed judgements then you’re not going to improve the world are you? (Scientist, Senior 1)
Another societal benefit of PE that was alluded to, increasing social capital among underprivileged groups (“social capital” was explicitly mentioned by one interviewee), is an outcome of the particular set up of OPAL, since it aimed at these goals from the beginning. This was mostly discussed however in terms of individual benefits (see, e.g., the point on cutting reoffending rates mentioned above).
Most frequently PE was seen as a means to the end of creating a more environmentally aware public—not so much for their personal benefit, but rather as an active contribution to a better environment: It is hoped that by participating, members of the public will not only develop an interest in nature and the environment, but actively get involved in improving the environment: “In an ideal world I would love for every person I’ve been talking to, to be inspired to go and do something sort of . . . good in their local environment” (Scientist, Junior 31).
It was frequently argued that through raising awareness about the environment and environmental problems such as biodiversity loss or climate change, the PE program “raises awareness” or “gets the message across”—the hoped for effect here is not so much that participating members of the public will become active environmentalists (as many interviewees have interpreted the OPAL goal of creating a new generation of environmentalists, see above), but rather that public knowledge and concern about these issues is raised so that environmental concerns are being taken more seriously at a societal level:
I think it’s mainly raising awareness . . . and possibly then . . . in terms of impact yes I think that is, and therefore that you may need to protect the environment or . . . do something to . . . to . . . yea, but in terms of protecting your local environment. (Scientist, Senior 8)
And therefore PE has a direct positive impact on environmental quality:
So the role for OPAL was appealing to me because it is a lot more about trying to build people’s knowledge and make people more aware and through that, I think that’s a more direct way of having an impact on environment quality biodiversity than one person you know going out and being a ranger for a kind of park. (Science communicator, Junior 19)
Discussion: The Neglected Middle in Policy Relevance for PE and Future Research and Theory Directions
Several themes in the interviewees’ perceptions of the value of PE are worth picking up on for further analysis: For example, the fairly frequently expressed ideas surrounding non–science-related benefits of PE seem to be very undertheorized in PUS research, which understandably has focused on science. Some have examined the positive benefits of face-to-face deliberation in strengthening skills, habits, and deliberative beliefs (Burkhalter, Gastil, & Kelshaw, 2002); however, it may be fruitful to ask further around how or whether PE in science or the environment can enhance social capital among underprivileged groups, how and whether it has positive impacts on mental health and general well-being, or how to assess its societal value when the main aim is just for the public to have a good time rather than learning about science? These questions would be worth looking at in more detail.
A particular strand worth discussing further in this article, given the previous frames in which PE was discussed in the literature is the interviewees’ attitudes toward science literacy, two-way communication, and policy relevance of environmental PE, which seems to point toward new ways of looking at the importance of PE, what it should aim for, and how it should do it. While there was a clear strand within the interviews of PE being seen as an exercise that aims at imparting knowledge on a more or less ignorant public, it seems equally clear that equating this with an outdated deficit model way of thinking is overly simplistic. Interviewees were also attuned to the fact that science communication should be a dialogue, involve the public in scientific decision making both on a practical scientific as well as on a broader policy level. They reported a lot of appetite from the public to be taught about science and the environment. Instead of a clash of narratives or a switch between “interpretative repertoires” (Burchell, 2007), there seemed to be a clear and cohesive framework about PE and its role in society that emerged from the interviews.
While direct public participation in science and environmental policy was mentioned by a few interviewees, this was always accompanied by the proviso that to participate meaningfully to these debates, the public has to be both motivated to participate (i.e., they need to have enough awareness that these issues matter enough for them to get engaged) and that they have to have a certain level of scientific/environmental knowledge and understanding of the issues in order for their contributions to be worthwhile. It is on the formation of this awareness and understanding that traditional “deficit” type PE work was thought to help—filling a knowledge and awareness gap within the general public that is perceived not to know or care enough about science and the environment to actively engage with the important policy debates is an important prerequisite for meaningful dialogic engagement in the policy sphere at a later stage. The two need not be in competition. This was expressed explicitly by one interviewee who argued that policy participation, science education, and the direct participation that is part of the citizen science aspect of OPAL form a cohesive whole that cannot and should not be separated (Scientist, Senior 11). In terms of Michael’s (2009) distinction between the “Public in General” (PiG) and the “Public in Particular” (PiP), this is about stoking the environmental interest in members of the PiG that transforms them into members of the PiP.
In the majority of interviews that did not touch upon direct policy relevance of PE, there was a very programmatic feeling toward the role it plays in improving the environment, such as “getting the message across” that it is important to protect biodiversity or to act on climate change. In this sense the direct goal of PE was often “raising awareness” with the public, or to provide opportunities to get involved in protecting the environment to those who are already aware, and finally to fill the knowledge gap of a large sector of society that simply does not know how their everyday actions influence environmental quality. This programmatic aim of PE is tied to the particular science it tries to communicate, and it has been remarked by a few interviewees that PE in the environment is different from other sciences because of its importance to society:
I think that scientists should always be engaged in some sort of outreach, particularly when you’re talking about the conservation side and ecology because it affects people much more than some other aspects of science might. (Scientist, Junior 21)
This way of seeing environmental PE therefore stands outside any trichotomy of deficit versus dialogue versus “upstream” engagement: PE is conducted as a self-conscious deficit reduction program in order to enable future meaningful environmental policy participation through a learning program structured around a two-way dialogue. This view is similar to conceptions of PE at work in consensus conferences (Einsiedel & Eastlick, 2000), or even Miller’s (1987) civic science literacy. Thus, there seems to be a need for acknowledging this conception of PE and policy relevance as one of those envisaged by practitioners. While it could be complained that scientists and communicators have taken up the language of dialogue and engagement even if at heart they find it difficult to give up deficit thinking, as Irwin (2014) does with regard to science policy discourse, we feel instead that the interviews showed a consistent and sophisticated understanding of PE. For that reason, PUS studies may need to revisit concepts such as science literacy or find better arguments that are relevant in the context within which science communication takes place. Lack of awareness of the PUS literature, it was evident in some of the interviews, was not the problem.
It seems therefore that there are different ways of conceiving policy relevance in PE practice and PUS literature has so far either focused on direct public deliberative processes while tending to dismiss science education aims as unresponsive to the democratic needs of scientific citizenship or on the direct learning experience without bothering too much about the policy aims. Discussing the former, Irwin (2001) is disappointed with the “lingering retention of the deficit theory” within his case study, where “the need to “inform” public debate was implicitly premised on public ignorance about the wider issues” (p. 15). In the interviews for this study, that attitude was not so much implicit, but rather a clear framework within which the activity was conceived; a feature, not a bug. Within the framework of S. Davies et al. (2009) who distinguish between policy-relevant and non–policy-relevant PE, we would highlight that there is a third way of thinking about PE which focuses on policy relevance and enhanced public deliberative processes through deficit-style science education, and that this is how the OPAL project’s practitioners tended to view their activity. This way of thinking about PE solves the clash of narratives between deficit and engagement as being actually two sides of the same coin. This may be a particular feature of environmental science, and therefore we would suggest that there is no “one size fits all” characterization of PE, which treats all the different science through the same models; this is clearly problematic when different sciences require different policy processes. Entradas (2011) for example noted that astronomy may need to be analyzed separately, since policy issues there may not be on the same level in terms of public importance than they would be in GM foods or other risky new technologies. Environmental science of the type communicated by OPAL, we would argue, also needs to be looked at from its own angles.
S. Davies et al. (2009) distinguish between policy-relevant and non–policy-relevant public dialogue events. Based on our interviews, we suggest there is also something in the middle:
Policy-relevant PE: New and emerging science and technologies with large uncertainties and therefore requiring an active deliberative process, which have been the focus of much current PUS research. Examples are GM foods, new energy technologies, nanoscience, or synthetic biology.
Non–policy-relevant PE: Science that is either already well known (by the scientists that is) or so uncontroversial that it does not really require active citizen participation in the policy process because there barely is a policy process beyond possibly whether they should be done at all. This would be the science that is the focus of traditional (school) science education research; where arguably the “deficit model” is still a very legitimate approach because filling a knowledge gap is the whole point. Examples would be astronomy, paleontology, and thermodynamics. It is interesting to note that PUS researchers such as Lewenstein (2011) and S. Davies et al. (2009) consciously refer back to the science education literature when analyzing non–policy-relevant dialogue processes aimed at adults.
The neglected middle: Science that is not controversial (in scientific circles at least) nor particularly new or revolutionary, but which needs active public knowledge, awareness, and engagement with it if policy is to be driven forward. In our OPAL case study, the opinion is that climate science and other environmental issues need public awareness and knowledge if we want public input into environmental policy; this is not meant as a dogmatic approach that posits the expert in a position of power with respect to an unresponsive public in need of education, rather it aims at policy participation further down the line through equipping the public with knowledge about science (as well as the process of science, which is where the importance of OPAL’s “citizen science” aspect comes in). Unlike “policy-relevant PE,” there remains a strong normative element here, in that the experts have decided what the good science and desirable public outcomes are—we would struggle to find an environmental PE program where the importance of biodiversity or climate change are up for discussion; instead the policy relevance is about how do we get people to act on it. This type of PE activity is therefore predialogue, in that it paves the way for informing policy dialogue further down the line by providing science education.
Conclusions
Our brief survey of the OPAL scientists’ and science communication practitioners’ views has shown not only that there are many different ideas on what PE should aim for but also that there were some clear strands that emerged. One is that participants saw little conflict in any purported deficit versus dialogue dichotomy, and that instead the two were seen as complementary. This practitioners’ perspective adds to a growing discontent within PUS studies about whether this distinction has still any real value (Lewenstein, 2011). More interestingly, the interviewees have pointed toward a probably more coal-face relevant model of PE, namely one that combines traditional science learning outcomes with policy relevance effecting actual environmental quality; it provides a vision that it is desirable to simultaneously educate and fill knowledge gaps through a two-way dialogue process as well as empower a democratic decision-making process and thus ultimately lead to a more desirable state of the environment. Whether on closer examination that view of PE is coherent and feasible is of course up for debate, but it at least points toward a conception of PE that practitioners, at least in this particular field, can recognize and interact with meaningfully.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Roger Fradera, Laura Gosling, and the participants in the study for giving us their time and opinions about public engagement.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study was funded by the Big Lottery Fund through the Changing Spaces Program and the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) project.