History of the Sciencewise Expert Resource Centre for Public Dialogue in Science and Innovation

In 2000, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee published a report on ‘Science and Society’ which called for much more meaningful engagement between scientists, policy makers and the public on emerging scientific issues.

Until then, engagement between the Government and citizens on scientific issues had focused mainly on promoting the ‘public understanding of science.’ This involved the so-called ‘deficit model’, a one-way flow of information from experts to a largely passive public, which did not give people any real voice in decision-making.

The momentum for making real, two-way public dialogue an integral part of science policy development was increased by the failure of a number of public engagement exercises early this decade. These included the GM Nation debate in 2003 on the potential to develop genetically-modified crops, which caused a public furore and threw Government policy into disarray.

The Government’s ten-year Science and Innovation Investment Framework, published in 2004, made specific recommendations on a systematic approach to public dialogue, in order to address concerns over the rapid developments in science and technology and their impact on society. Later that year, the Sciencewise programme was established to help policy makers find out the public’s views before major policy decisions are made, a process known as ‘upstream’ engagement.

In 2006, following a number of successful projects supported by Sciencewise, the high-level Council for Science and Technology recommended that public dialogue should be firmly embedded into Government policy-making processes.

As a result, in its pre-Budget Report to Parliament in December 2006, the Government announced that a new Expert Resource Centre for Public Dialogue in Science and Innovation would be set up to help policy makers. This announcement led directly to the establishment of the current Sciencewise-ERC early in May 2007.