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First published November 12, 2007

Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: Historical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective

Abstract

Recent science and technology studies have analyzed questions of nonexpert participation in science, technology, and science policy from an empirically grounded perspective. The introduction to this special issue offers a double contribution to this debate. First, it presents a summary of the state of the art and an outline of the historical emergence of the participatory question. The argument distinguishes four periods since the late nineteenth century, each with a specific relationship between expert and nonexpert knowledge ranging from a hybrid, to a politicized, to an autonomous, to a participatory relationship. Second, the introduction summarizes the contributions to this issue. Their common concern is to take the debate one step further by critically reflecting the problems and limitations of participatory practices. The contributions point out the need for contextualizing the participatory question within the wider social, economic, and political circumstances in which participatory science and technology is set.

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1.
1. The articles go back to papers presented at an international conference on “Shifting Boundaries between Science and Politics: New Research Perspectives in Science Studies” held in June 2004 at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, WZB). This introduction profited considerably from the collaboration with Sheila Jasanoff in preparing the congress and from helpful comments by Christophe Bonneuil.
2.
2. To conceptualize such planning policies, sociologists Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer (1994) spoke of an emerging “experimental society,” in which modern science is recognized as crucial for social process and therefore granted big institutional spaces for its knowledge production (i.e., big science institutions). For a detailed discussion of Krohn and Weyer's argument, see Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris [this issue].
3.
3. For a recent survey based on the American case, see Guston 2000; for OECD countries, including Western Europe, see Elzinga and Jamison 1995; Braun 1997; Braun 2003; and Jasanoff 2003.
4.
4. For recent accounts, see Joss 1999 and Jasanoff 2003. See also the contributions to Kleinman 2000a and Irwin and Wynne 1995.

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Article first published: November 12, 2007
Issue published: March 2008

Keywords

  1. participation
  2. democracy
  3. lay knowledge
  4. science and technology policy
  5. autonomy

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Authors

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Martin Lengwiler
University of Zurich and Social Science Research Center Berlin

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