The Sciencewise Expert Resource Centre (Sciencewise-ERC) is undertaking in depth studies of six areas that pose particular challenges when planning and delivering public dialogue.

The results of this research will help central government departments and agencies by seeking ways to address those challenges, including the production of practical tools and guidance.

In-depth sessions will be held on each of the topics below and participants are invited to select three topics in priority order that particularly interest you.  One being the most important and three being the least.  You will then be able to participate in two in-depth sessions at the workshop.

To register and select your three topics click here.

The areas being examined are:

• Assessing organisational readiness for undertaking dialogue and other engagement methods. Using organisational development approaches to ensure that they are ‘fit for purpose’ in relation to public dialogue work.

• Mass engagement – the why and how of undertaking larger scale engagement projects.

• Effective use of experts in dialogue projects

• Evaluating public dialogue

• Enabling and sustaining citizen involvement

• Working with science communicators and the media

1. Assessing organisational readiness for undertaking dialogue and other engagement methods

This research will test the hypothesis that different types of dialogues require different attitudes and skills by the ‘commissioning’ body. For example, that one type of organisation or department may commission and use a particular dialogue really well, whilst another organisation of equal calibre will do the same type of dialogue poorly because of the different cultural values and norms within the organisation.

The work entails developing a method which enables commissioning departments/ teams/ public sector organisations to:

• identify which types of dialogue are likely to fit best with their culture, objectives, decisions and constraints, using one or more diagnostic tools
• from that analysis, to understand their organisational strengths and weaknesses in relation to dialogue work
• plan how to address their organisational realities by building capacity to utilise a wider range of dialogue types.

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2. Mass engagement

This research responds to the growing interest in large scale public engagement projects. It can be argued that increasingly, there is a governmental preference for deliberative processes that involve very large numbers of people. This is based not only on expressions of interest received by those carrying out such work, but also on projects that have been delivered over the last few years, eg America Speaks, Your Health Your Say, sciencehorizons, the nuclear consultation process etc.

This work will entail

• understanding the drivers and motivations for large-scale public engagement
• beginning to establish the essential characteristics and types of processes in current use, including strengths and weaknesses of different process types
• providing guidance on how to maximise success in large-scale engagement

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3. Effective use of experts in dialogue projects

Science and technology issues often raise a range of vociferous views. Experts are often wheeled out to support one ‘side’ or another’s view, sometimes the integrity of expert input is questioned and disputes over the ‘facts’ can ensue. These adversarial interventions do little to move an issue forward but simply entrench participants further into positional bunkers.

So, how can expert input be used in public dialogue processes to enhance the process and the credibility of the outcomes, in relation to policy making? How can public dialogue enable both scientific and societal inputs to come together to provide the evidence base to inform more robust policy? What do we mean by ‘expertise’ and where may it be sourced from?

This research will examine how to enable ‘expert’ advice to be effectively used in public dialogue and within the policy making process, including:

• guidance on the role and commissioning of expert advice in science & technology public dialogue.
• exploring the challenges for the expert involved in public dialogue and how they could be overcome.
• developing the evidence base for good practice.
• looking at cultural issues within the science community, commissioning organisations and society more generally which create and/or contribute to the challenges faced by ‘experts’

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4. Enabling and sustaining citizen involvement

There is evidence that citizen groups engaged in public dialogue processes have kept in touch with each other and the issue they were dealing with for months and years after the dialogue officially stopped. They report having become more active in their local areas and more aware of how the governance of science and governance generally is done. Current dialogue practice in the UK does not factor this reality in; in fact it is more likely that having participated, citizens will hear no more from the process commissioners.

The research will consider how to enable and sustain citizen involvement, and whether post-participation could usefully add another dimension to the inclusion of the public in policy making. This will include:

• Collecting existing good practice in engaging people in dialogue and maintaining positive relationships beyond the life of a specific project

• Generating guidance for policy makers and other commissioners on how to involve citizens, during and after a dialogue project

• Generate guidance for participants on what they should expect from their involvement in a dialogue project and what is expected of them

• Establish a framework/foundation for a participant network and, if possible, engage participants from previous and existing projects in the network

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5. Evaluating public dialogue

There is a growing body of experience and of evaluation research on public dialogue / engagement in national public policy, including around science and technology issues. However, the evaluations to date have tended to be specific to the particular initiative.

There is also some initial research work on measuring the value (including the benefits and costs) and the impacts of public engagement activities on policy and policy makers (in terms of quality of policy, and learning for policy makers), but this work is still at a very exploratory stage and there are few shared principles, models or frameworks across the field.

This research will therefore explore and build on the existing experience and research in evaluating public dialogue and engagement to develop new frameworks and models for measuring and demonstrating the value and impacts of public engagement activities around national policy issues.

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6. Working with science communicators and the media

Although some significant policy decisions on ethical issues such as hybrid embryos have been achieved through using dialogue, the process of dialogue itself is not considered to be newsworthy by the media. This is particularly problematic as many dialogue activities tend to rely upon the media for recruiting and involving citizens. This research aims to identify ways of engaging (and involving) traditional and non-traditional mass media in engagement activities, enabling large audiences to be reached. It will do this by:

• Developing an understanding of the media’s perceptions of public engagement, the barriers to involving them and opportunities offered by new media

• Developing a ‘proposition’ for the media that explains dialogue in terms they can relate to, identifies the potential areas of interest for them and addresses as many of their concerns and barriers as possible

• Exploring the potential of new media to disseminate messages about public dialogue
• Developing practical guidance for engagement practitioners and Public Relations professionals involved in engagement activities

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