More than human science policy?

Abstracts

Research impact and the “do no significant harm” principle

Michael Bernstein, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology; with Thomas Franssen, Robert D. J. Smith, and Mandy de Wilde

With the passage of the European Green Deal, research and innovation must now demonstrate that investments “do no significant harm” (DNSH) to EU environmental objectives. To date, the way the European Commission has chosen to enact the DNSH principle in areas like nuclear power and natural gas investments draws extensively on quantitative, modernist tools that identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on technical approaches to assessing significant harm ignores the high levels of imprecision, ambiguity, and uncertainty characterizing the social contexts in which harms emerge. This is particularly the case for investments in research and innovation, where performing the promises of impact often unlocks future funding.

A better approach to DNSH might thus be to acknowledge the relational nature of harm and develop broad capabilities across R&I systems to engage and, as Haraway urges, ‘stay with’ the harm. Facing questions of significant harm with gravity is vital because another way of looking at research and innovation – and economic activity more broadly – is a history handing out rights to harm people and ecosystems in the name of progress. In this presentation, we ask: what might happen to our innovation governance regimes were we to take seriously the challenge of recognizing significant harm as being negotiated from specific temporal, locational, and species standpoints? We discuss concrete ideas of how more experimental orientations could translate to concrete interventions and what the benefits of such approaches might be for governing research and innovation in the Anthropocene.

Re-imagining research practice and policy for biodiversity renewal

Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, University of Exeter; with Angela Cassidy

The necessity of working across disciplines and beyond academia to address ecological disruptions is a well-established policy imperative, yet there remain scarce accounts of how such collaborations work in practice, particularly for other-than-humans. To investigate how the ongoing development of collaborative projects is shaped by policy logics (among other factors), we draw on our prior experience in interdisciplinary research to interrogate and present initial findings of an embedded STS study of a large-scale biodiversity renewal research project, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council within its major ‘Changing the environment’ (CtE) program. CtE can be read as the latest iteration of a longstanding challenge for funders supporting environmental research, as these problems, while obviously concerning more-than-human worlds, are frequently framed in terms of human economies, health, or food security. The need for transdisciplinary approaches to biodiversity loss has been recognized since at least the 1970s, but as the long history of interdisciplinarity in environmental research suggests, existing funding policies alone are insufficient to ensure transformative collaboration.

In response to the CtE agenda to create integrated solutions to environmental problems, the in-progress ‘Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach’ (RENEW) project aims to re-centre *people* in ecological research across seven co-designed, interdisciplinary themes. Through creative methods, interviews, and participant ethnography, we explore – and (in)form – *collaboration in practice* in RENEW. What happens when a natural environment research council funds a project with significant, heterogeneous social science, arts and humanities components? Might re-centring ‘the human’ challenge anthropocentric problem framings, knowledge hierarchies and lost learning?

Creating spaces for more-than-human science policy in synthetic biology?

Robert Smith, University of Edinburgh; with Jane Calvert

This is a speculative talk. In autumn 2023, we'll host a workshop that tries to create a space for thinking through the more-than-human futures being configured by scientists creating organisms with radically re-engineered genomes. In doing so, we want to bring multispecies ideas into conversation with science policy. But to be frank, we have no idea how to do this. Here's one reason: scientists attempting to design and engineer biology often speak to the creative possibilities afforded by their new tools. They dream of transforming the logic of existing industries from one of extraction, rooted in chemistry, to one based on growth and circularity, with biology at its heart. Gingko Bioworks, a prominent SynBio company, brands itself as ‘The Organism Company’ and produces publications that draw on feminist STS to ask how we can design equitable and inclusive futures in harmony with nature. But we know from past experience with emerging technologies that institutional norms, political ideologies, and incumbent interests usually transform these emancipatory imaginations to produce something else. Currently, decisions about whether and how these technologies are developed are being made by small groups of elite scientists, bureaucrats, and venture capitalists with their eyes on maintaining national competitiveness, selling human health, and driving economic growth. The logics of their technologies of government have little space for more-than-human thinking. Using examples from synthetic biology, such as the prospect of gene drive squirrels and radically engineered clostridia, we'd like you to think with us as we begin to create this experiment in science policy.

Where the birds are not going: seabird tracking and environmental policies

Mayline Strouk, University of Edinburgh

For seabird researchers, fieldwork used to be an experience of both wonder and frustration, as after spending months on a remote island observing, catching, sampling, and ringing birds, they leave for months or years with unknown destinations. The “mysterious lives of seabirds” (Brooke, 2020) are now being unraveled with the development of tracking technologies, which allow researchers to follow the birds along their journeys at sea, knowing where they go and what they do. However, a more-than-human approach calls to consider the extractive dimension of bird tracking. This presentation, therefore, aims to discuss the ambivalence of seabird tracking as a method used to protect the marine environment, focusing specifically on the case of Scotland and Norway. I will consider the affective dimension of tracking and its implications for the more-than-human world. I will show how curiosity about the lives of seabirds and production of knowledge is then combined with concerns for the stress and disturbance it might cause to the birds. By introducing a more-than-human perspective, this ambivalence is even more striking and also questions the very possibility of knowing animals without any harm. Moreover, tracking is a method used to inform marine policies and environmental impact assessments for offshore energy production such as oil and wind farms. From a policy-making perspective, the value of seabird tracking is therefore less about knowing where the birds are going than where they are not going. The birds’ trajectories at sea are then informing an extractive approach to the marine environments in which they live.

Weaving conversations >> seats at the table: Metaphors for imagining multispecies policy

Erika Szymanski, Colorado State University

As a multispecies STS researcher, I want to see a multispecies understanding of society built into human governance and collective planetary flourishing embraced as an incontrovertible policy goal. Simultaneously, I have few aspirations of changing anything, not only personally but because routes to success are difficult to imagine. Effecting multispecies policy feels simultaneously essential and impossible. In response to that frustration and to the provocation of this panel, I ask: What role might multispecies theorists like me play, if any, when we feel incapable of enacting change? What am I—and maybe others—trying to do anyway?

Toward addressing these questions and to rethink my own feelings of incapacity in more enabling terms, I look to the metaphors that may be employed for imagining multispecies theory-policy connections. I offer texts and textiles as a productive and maybe-hopeful alternative to futures and roadmaps, tables and chairs, and sediments and archaeologies. Where roadmaps suggest route-planning, text(ile)s suggest curating from among the set of available options. Where tables encourage thinking about representation and equity, text(ile)s suggest thinking about participation and varied capabilities. And where sediments focus attention on large-scale stabilities (and how, e.g., partial successes such as Buen Vivir feel culturally inaccessible in my own context), text(ile)s focus attention on small-scale conversations.

Drawing on examples of attempting to link in-progress energy transitions with multispecies theory, I suggest tugging on threads and weaving fabrics through multispecies conversation as an imaginative strategy that attends more to accessible presents than it does to inaccessible futures.

In the midst of it instead of thereby - science (policy) as part of society and nature, not beside it

Magdalena Wicher, University of Bergen, Institute for Advanced Studies

Feminist STS and techno-scientific activism have, over time, repeatedly addressed questions of power, agency, situatedness, and also objectivity (of science). However, a recurrent and weak conceptualization of goals, agency, and power leads to failure in the context of transformative change toward a world beyond economic interests and growth (Weber & Rohracher 2012), centered on a discourse that is more than human. Self-reflection, responsibility, and responsiveness are seen as self-evident when working with concepts or within fields such as feminist STS, RRI, or TIPs, but at a certain point, reflection on the theories themselves and how we implement them and become "part of the story" is lacking. We then distance ourselves from the original ideas about sustainability, responsibility, and questioning issues of power.

When we see ourselves as part of the problem (Trojer & Gulbrandsen 1996), our own roles, stakes, and practices become visible. Applying Bourdieu's notions of position, field, and capital to the discourse will help me outline my/our roles within my/our daily routines – as a researcher in third-party funded projects, as a doctoral student, and as an activist – and, in particular, illuminate blind spots inherent in my and our own position(s).

This could lead to a renewed focus on questioning science, policy, and politics and their relations. We might ask ourselves to what extent we ourselves are part of the problem and how we, as scientists, can initiate a discourse that exists beyond a view of nature as economic capital and instead, as Donna Haraway (2016) suggested in her turn from the Anthropocene to the Chthulucene, "a time when humans will seek to live in balance and harmony with nature (or what is left of it) in 'mixed assemblages.'" How can we, as humans – in our different roles – arrive at a production of knowledge that reflects not only science and society but also nature with all its lived realities and species?

Organizers

Robert Smith, University of Edinburgh; Michael J. Bernstein, Austrian Institute of Technology; Filippo Cuttica, independent consultant; Thomas Franssen, University of Leiden; Cian O’Donovan, University College London; and Mandy de Wilde, University of Amsterdam.