If you can’t control or predict the future, how can you prepare for it? In his new book, Prof Ian Scoones suggests that in an increasingly unpredictable world conventional risk management – in finance and banking, critical infrastructures, pandemics, disasters and climate change and technology – is no longer working.
Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. Uncertainties are everywhere. But how can we navigate them successfully?
In my new book – Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World – I argue that we should put uncertainty at the centre of thinking and practices, which means a fundamental rethinking of society, economy and politics as we know it. For a variety of reasons, we are stuck in a linear, mechanistic, technocratic risk-based paradigm that fails to address the dynamic complexity of today’s turbulent world. This is problematic, and sometimes dangerous.
The book looks at a range of technologies – AI, driverless cars, energy systems and so on, but focuses especially on the debate about GM crops in the late 90s/early 2000s, something I worked on at the time.
In relation to this it explores how attempts to close down risk through a so-called ‘science-based’ approach acted to exclude a whole array of public concerns, more centred on uncertainties (about impacts on health, biodiversity, as well as wider questions of ownership and control in the food system).
Biotechnology battles
While the narrative of agricultural genetic engineering is one of relentlessly looking forward, looking back is also instructive.
In the late 1990s a huge debate erupted around GM crops. As the book explains, “In the UK it was especially tense. The new Labour government seemed divided on which way to go: follow the Americans and encourage the commercialisation of the new crops or take the more precautionary stance of the rest of the European Union. Prime Minister Tony Blair with his science minister Lord Sainsbury were gung-ho. Science showed that these new technologies were the way forward, they argued. Others were more sceptical, reflecting a wider public disquiet about the potential risks of such crops. There was a big divide, reflecting deep uncertainties around how such technologies would affect people’s health, the environment, trade relations and wider food security”.
In October 1999 we released a report – The Politics of GM Food: Risk, Science and Public Trust – which was based on extensive research by the Global Environmental Change programme of the UK’s Economic and Research Council, which I was co-director of at the time. The then environment minister, Michael Meacher, was dragged into the media studios to debate the findings on the BBC Today Programme among others. Unlike some of his colleagues in government, he was remarkably balanced. Along with the minister in the Cabinet Office, Mo Mowlam, he understood the importance of thinking about the uncertain consequences of a new technology and bringing the public along with any government decision.
Aligning with a Europe-wide commitment to the ‘precautionary principle’ the UK government eventually upheld a moratorium, pending further field trials. Aiming to gain a wider buy-in to any new policy, in 2000 it established the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), in parallel to the Advisory Committee on Releases into the Environment (ACRE) that was tasked with approving releases.
In addition to studies on the science and economics of GM crops, a process of wider public discussion about GM crop policy – GM Nation? – was initiated in 2002. This was an important innovation. Rather than assuming that science could resolve all uncertainties, there was a need to deliberate on them in a more rounded fashion, with new uncertainties inevitably emerging in the process.
Robin Grove-White, one of the commissioners, observed that public concerns “reflected unease about likely contingencies outside the purview, or even the imagination, of present scientific understanding. This extended not only to potential environmental or epidemiological issues as yet unidentified by science, but also to potential ripple effects, whether political, social, economic or ethical in character.”
Grove-White pointed out that no provisions existed within the existing regulatory framework for addressing such uncertainties, meaning that they were effectively evaded by government and industry until later when the public became involved in the debate.
As I reflect in the book the biotechnology battles of that time were a prime example of how debates about new technologies throw up numerous uncertainties, which are seen by different actors in highly divergent ways:
“Expecting these to be resolved by some process of ‘sound science’ led by elite experts away from public scrutiny and sanctioned by politicians as ‘evidence-based’ policymaking was and remains naïve in the extreme. There are multiple uncertainties, different views and inevitably an intense politics around the ‘evidence’. This is why open public deliberation is essential and technocratic models of risk governance, even with performative concessions to consultation and participation, are inadequate. The standard approach to science-policy interactions, where scientists offer closed-down ‘results’ without any expressions of doubt, will not do. Indeed, as any scientist will confirm, such an approach runs counter to the scientific method, where doubt and ‘organised scepticism’ are central features.”
Beyond standardised risk assessments: the need for wider deliberation
One of the premises of my book is that, “regulatory decisions around a contested technology represented different contextual responses to uncertainties…. Uncertainties are therefore not neutral, somehow ‘out there’ in the world. They are always conditioned by context and circumstance, and require an engaged, open political debate about impacts and consequences, galvanising diverse knowledges and views. A standardised, instrumental form of risk assessment and governance is always insufficient.”
What we see again and again is that a risk based ‘science’ approach is clearly inadequate (along with a narrow legalistic approach). Instead, policy must make public involvement and deliberation central, from upstream science to downstream implementation and policy decisions. This was the lesson from the GM debates, but it also applies to any technology where uncertainties prevail, whether AI or nuclear reactors.
A radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices for successfully navigating uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world is required.
This will involve, as I say, “opening up spaces for wider democratic deliberation is vitally important – as part of technology assessment processes, within regulatory decision-making, in the courts and as part of broader public debate…More open processes, in a variety of forms, will help us navigate uncertainties thrown up by new developments in science and technology, meaning the many potential benefits are assured, whilst errors are avoided.”