What is ‘public dialogue’?

There are many ways of engaging with the public to find out what their views are on topics, which may require legislation. Traditionally, governments have relied on statutory White Paper consultations to find out both public and stakeholder views on policy proposals. Alongside these, policy makers have gained public views through activities such as surveys and opinion polls, focus groups, and public meetings.

Over recent years, a number of new ways of eliciting public opinion has evolved, including citizen’s juries and online forums. In addition, public engagement - as opposed to consultation - has come to include a whole array of activities aimed at informing and educating the public, for example the activities of science centres and public lectures and seminars on particular subjects.

Public dialogue is one form of public engagement. It is a comparatively new method, which sits alongside all these other activities and has a specific role to play in the science and technology policy-making process.

Depending on what questions the policy maker needs to find out people’s opinions on, public dialogue can either sit alone or, more usually, is carried out in conjunction with other engagement methods. Each adds its own perspective and value to the evidence being gathered.

Public dialogue is defined by Sciencewise-ERC as a ‘two-way’ conversation between policy makers and scientists on the one hand, and the public on the other. It does not seek to find out people’s views on a range of policy options that have already been developed. Rather, it aims to find out people’s hopes, fears and aspirations about potential new areas of science and technology.

It does this by taking place ‘upstream’, in other words before key policy decisions are made, to ensure that the outcomes are able to have some influence and make a difference.  

Crucially, it needs a number of other key ingredients – the involvement of scientists and the space to allow people to discuss and debate the issues, deliberate over time, and come back together again for further discussion.

And most importantly, public dialogue needs to have a policy ‘home’ and be linked to a clear policy issue so that it can make a difference to real decisions.

In order to help policy makers identify whether or not to carry out public dialogue and how to do it, the Sciencewise-ERC programme has developed a set of guidelines which provide a framework for public dialogue to be carried out and can act as a ‘checklist’ to make sure the activity is robust and its outcomes defensible.