A New Mandate: Research Policy in a Technological Society

In the midst of the most severe financial downturn since the 1930s, and sweeping cuts to public funding across a range of policy domains, the collective scientific community has been able to avoid considerable budget cuts, resulting in an effective flat-cash settlement. Against calls for research funding to be more targeted in areas of existing national research strength of commercial capacity, and in the context defined by the looming spectre of predicted cuts to research budgets, the strategic argument deployed by a range of scientific organisations is that a broad portfolio of basic science is the best way of both defending and developing national capabilities for economic innovation and social progress. In this report we address these themes by outlining the results of a two-year ESRC-funded study of UK science and research policy. This research, which was carried out between 2009 and 2011, combined policy analysis, qualitative research and ethnographic observation in exploring the ways in which the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has navigated this changing political landscape, and in studying how, in the process, the research council has sought to develop a new institutional identity with a proactive role in the delivery of research impact. The report focuses on the two case studies the way the EPSRC has shaped the development of research programmes in nanotechnology and synthetic biology and the more recent strategic shift that has seen a range of societal challenges emerge as focal points for research funding initiatives. We argue that these dynamics represent both an opportunity and a challenge for aligning contemporary research policy with the norms of democratic accountability.

A New Mandate?
Research Policy in a Technological Society
Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience

Matthew Kearnes & Matthias Wienroth

A New Mandate?
Research Policy in a Technological Society

Matthew Kearnes and Matthias Wienroth

Correct Citation: Kearnes, M. B. and Wienroth, M. 2011: A New Mandate? Research Policy in a Technological Society. Research Report, Durham University Durham. Matthew Kearnes and Matthias Wienroth, 2011 This document is a research report of the ESRC Project Strategic Science: Research Intermediaries and the Governance of Innovation (RES-061-25-0208). For an electronic version of this report and more information about the project please see: www.geography.dur.ac.uk/projects/science Cover image: Matthew Robertson/Other Rooms Studio Cover design: Design and Imagining Unit, Department of Geography, Durham University.

Contents

Acknowledgements Executive Summary 1. Introduction 2. Opening the Black Box of Research Policy 3. Commissioning New Technologies 4. Fields in Transition 5. Framing Societal Challenges 6. Towards a New Mandate?

4 6 9 19 28 41 50 60

Acknowledgements

The last two years, 2009 to 2011, have been a turbulent period for those associated with research and with research policy in the UK. Research is a collective endeavour and we are grateful for the time and support we have received from academic colleagues and from research participants throughout this project. In particular, we would like to thank the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for the support and assistance provided in conducting this ethnographic research. Although he has now moved on to work in the ESRC, John Wands support and vision for the project has been vital in enabling the research. Equally, we would like to thank the former Nanotechnology and Next Generation Healthcare programme team within EPSRC who have hosted the ethnographic research, particularly Nicola Goldberg and Christopher Jones, for their welcoming interaction and daily advice. We would also like to thank Adrian Paul for additional assistance during this research. Over the course of the project we have benefited from discussions and engagements with a range of colleagues. In particular we are grateful many policymakers and research council staff who participated so generously in our research. Furthermore, we are grateful to the members of the projects advisory team for their support and suggestions over the past two years: Christopher

A New Mandate?

Caswell, Alan Irwin, Richard Jones, Phil Macnaghten, Robert Doubleday and James Wilsdon. This research was generously supported by the UKs Economic and Social Research Council (award no. RES061-25-0208).

Executive Summary

Background In light of what many have considered to be the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, public research funding has become a focal point for intense political and policy debate. In place of previous commitments to steady increases in public research funding recent policy debate has been characterised by calls for greater degrees of selectivity and focus in research funding decisions. In order to defend current levels of public research funding, scientific organisations have been successful in changing the basic terms of these debates. In place of a simple dichotomy between responsively defined research excellence and selective prioritisation, these interventions have powerfully argued that a broad portfolio of curiosity-driven science constitutes a strategic response to both current and possible future societal challenges and policy needs. The Issues What these recent debates have revealed is the way in which research policy and research funding are a filter for a wider set of arguments associated with the role of research and innovation in democratic societies. Political debates about research funding are one of the most significant sites for a broader political struggle over the social and cultural meanings of science and innovation.

A New Mandate?

In this report we address these themes by outlining the results of a two-year ESRC-funded study of UK science and research policy. The research focused particularly on the role of research councils in navigating this changing political context. This project, which was carried out between 2009 and 2011, combined policy analysis, qualitative research and periods of ethnographic observation based at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This report focuses on two case studies the way the EPSRC has shaped the development of research programmes in nanotechnology and synthetic biology and on the more recent strategic shift that has seen a range of societal challenges emerge as focal points for research funding initiatives. Research Findings In this report we are proposing that in these recent debates about public research funding debates two principal dynamics at work. Firstly, we argue that the efforts of the scientific community to build political support to sustain current levels of research funding have served to reframe the contemporary social contract for science. Secondly, we suggest that in response to these political dynamics the role of research councils is being redefined, where they are taking on a more active role in shaping research capability and contributing to the public consideration of scientific and technological issues. We argue that the implications of these political and institutional dynamics is that contemporary research policy is increasingly defined in social terms. Exploring research council strategies toward nanotechnology and synthetic biology we highlight the informal definitional

7

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work that is engaged in building new research communities and framing the ambit of new fields of inquiry. We argue that this definitional work is profoundly social in character, helping to define the social, economic and political ambitions of new and emerging fields of scientific and technological development. Exploring the ways in which research funding initiatives have recently taken on an increasingly strategic tone framed around strategic grand challenges we suggest that research councils are also playing a critical role in defining the critical societal aims of contemporary research practice. Exploring the implications of this changing definition of research policy we highlight three key challenges for contemporary research policy: 1. To innovate ways of unpacking dominant policy cultures that do not presuppose a dichotomy between the norms of curiosity and scientific autonomy and those of the accountability and responsibility. 2. The development of challenge-led approaches to research funding that enable a more expansive consideration of the public value of science and innovation. 3. The need for institutional innovation that opens up research council practice and research policy development to forms of democratic scrutiny and participation.

1. Introduction

For observers of contemporary UK science policy the last three years must have felt like something of a watershed. In light of what many have considered to be the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, the relationship between science and government, and particularly the future public funding of research, have become focal points for intense political and policy debate. Throughout 2008-2010 the tenor of UK science policy shifted palpably. In place of previous commitments to steady increases in public research funding, government ministers began to speak of the need to streamline the relationship between research council funding and private-sector innovation. Government ministers also began to suggest that research policy would need to be more selective: focusing on areas of existing national research and exploitation capacities, to make choices about the balance of investment in science and innovation to favour areas in which the UK has a clear competitive advantage.1 With the election of a coalition government committed to broad reductions in the levels of public spending across government, in the months before the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review and the publication of

Lord Drayson, Foundation for Science and Technology Lecture (Speech at the Royal Society, 4 February 2009) www.dius.gov.uk/news_and_speeches/speeches/lord_drayson/fst (accessed on 13 October 2009).
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the 2010 budget, policy debate about science was dominated by predictions of possible cuts to the UK science budget. Throughout 2009 and 2010 research funding bodies were asked to develop strategies from a range of forecasted scenarios including a budget freeze, or cuts of 10% and 20% over four years.2 Given this uncertain political context over the last three years, learned societies, professional bodies, research councils and other campaigning organisations have made targeted political interventions arguing for the ring-fencing of research budgets and for the recognition of the social and economic impacts of public research funding.3 Seen in this light, the 2010 science budget, which effectively freezes existing levels of public research funding, is a remarkable testament to these efforts and the collective capacity of the scientific community to defend the basic terms of the existing social contract for science. 4 In a written statement accompanying the budget the Rt Hon David Willetts MP, Minister of State for Universities and Science, outlined the nature of the settlement, suggesting that despite enormous pressure on public spending, the 4.6bn per annum funding for science and research programmes has been protected in cash terms and ringfenced against future pressures during the spending

2

R Van Noorden, UK Government Warned over 'Catastrophic' Cuts, Nature 466 (2010). 3 Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK, Impacts of Investment in the Science and Engineering Research Base, (London: Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK, 2009); Council for Science and Technology, A Vision for UK Research (London: Council for Science and Technology, 2010); Royal Society, The Scientific Century: Securing our Future Prosperity (London: Royal Society, 2010). 4 D Guston and K Keniston, eds., The Fragile Contract: University Science and the Federal Government (Cambridge, M.A.: The MIT Press, 1994). 10

A New Mandate?

review period. 5 The terminology of the budget settlement is indicative of the political arguments engaged in these debates. Cast as defending or protecting the research base from cuts to public research funding, the settlement might be read as reflecting a more enduring set of questions concerning the public value of science and the relationship between science, government and politics. What these recent and intensely political machinations reveal is twofold. Firstly, these debates are indicative of a broad struggle over the social and cultural meanings of science and the multifaceted role that research and technological development play in a contemporary social and political life. Secondly, these recent debates also reveal the degree to which contemporary policy discourse concerning science and technology are underscored by a range of concepts that concern the social, economic and political value of science. In this sense, these recent debates must be seen in the context of a set of long-term arguments concerning the relationship between scientific research and institutions of democratic politics and governance.6 Indeed, debates about science and the pointed debates about science funding and academic autonomy are typically framed by two alternative notions of political and cultural authority. On one hand, the authority of science rests on its claim to objective, disinterested and verifiable knowledge expressed in empiricist and

D Willetts, Allocation of Science and Research Funding 2011-12 to 2014-15: Written Ministerial Statement (London: Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2010). 6 S Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 11

A New Mandate?

positivist research practices. 7 On the other hand, political authority is cast as rest[ing] on the consent of the governed and is exercised on the basis of power.8 Sustaining the public funding of and cultural patronage for a research base, broadly autonomous from direct political interference, therefore requires a set of foundational conceptions of the social purposes of science and innovation. In turn these underlying concepts operate as a mandate that defines the role of research funding bodies in shaping and coordinating the development of scientific research in socially progressive directions. In their study of the development of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Guston and Keniston characterise these foundational concepts as a social contract for science. This contract is framed by a set of mutual obligations whereby government promises to fund the basic science that peer reviewers find most worthy of support and scientists promise that the research will be performed well and honestly and will provide a steady stream of discoveries that can be translated into new products, medicines and weapons.9 Though there are many differences between the political contexts that gave rise to the NSF, in the years immediately following the Second World War, and the current debates about the UK science budget, what these recent events reveal is a broader renegotiation of a social contract that has sustained the political case for the public funding of basic science. It is notable that the

K Litfin, Environment, wealth and authority: global climate change and emerging modes of legitimation, International Studies Review 2:2 (2000): 122. 8 Ibid. 9 Guston and Keniston, eds., The Fragile Contract: University Science and the Federal Government, 9. 12
7

A New Mandate?

debates during 2008-2010 concerning UK science funding were characterised by two alternative conceptions of the role of publically funded research in contemporary social life. In light of broader economic conditions, government ministers had begun to voice concern about the relative autonomy of research funding decisions. The crux of this concern centred on whether scientific excellence alone was the best criteria for the award of public research awards. In response, scientific organisations adopted a twin strategy, arguing that while science is of inherent social and cultural value, a broad portfolio of cutting-edge research serves to underpin a societys capacity to innovate and meet strategic challenges. These arguments which appear to have been broadly successful in defining a world class science and research base [as] inherently valuable, as well as critical to promoting economic growth10 were mounted on the basis of a broader suggestion that curiosity-driven research needs to be protected by policy makers.11 Against calls for research funding to be targeted in areas of existing research strength and commercial capacity, and in a context defined by the looming spectre of predicted cuts to research budgets, the strategic argument deployed by a range of scientific organisations has been that a broad portfolio of basic science is the best way of both developing national capabilities for economic innovation and social progress and for building resilience in an uncertain world. It is in this sense that we might understand these debates as a political struggle between two underlying conceptions of the role of science in contemporary society. In one

Willetts, Allocation of Science and Research Funding 2011-12 to 2014-15: Written Ministerial Statement. 11 Royal Society, The Scientific Century: Securing our Future Prosperity.
10

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A New Mandate?

sense science is defined in cultural terms and is associated with the values of discovery and curiosity. In another sense research is cast as a strategic resource to accomplish politically expedient aims. What has characterised recent debates is a realignment of these terms, whereby the scientific community has been largely successful in redefining scientific excellence as constituting a research base that will underpin future national capacity. The social theorist Andrew Barry characterises the role that science plays in contemporary political thinking by developing a notion of a technological society. He suggests that one of the defining characteristics of this society is a political preoccupation with the problems technology poses, with the political benefits it promises, and with the models of social and political order it seems to make available.12 In this sense he suggests that the ways in which modern societies collectively orient the direction of scientific research and technological development is not simply a technical matter. Rather, it is indicative of the social, cultural and political values that are invested in scientific knowledge and expertise. In this context Barry suggests that: A characteristic feature of political conflicts over scientific and technological developments [is] that they are not always directed toward the centres of political authority. The oppositional politics of a technological society are displaced elsewhere, emerging, often

A Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: The Atholone Press, 2001), 2. 14
12

A New Mandate?

unexpectedly, at many sites of scientific and technical practice.13 Highlighting the sites in which political conflicts about science often erupt, Barry draws a distinction between political authority and the politics of a technological society. Whereas the political refers to the formal and institutionalised processes of political deliberation, the politics of science emerge in sites where underlying social norms associated with technological developments become focal points for critical scrutiny. With this in mind, the central argument of this report is that political and policy debates about levels of public funding for research, and the proper role of research funding bodies, might be understood as a preeminent political site in which the roles and purposes of scientific research are dissected, debated and contested. Developing this we suggest that research council initiatives must be understood in social and political terms as part of an ongoing and long standing set of debates about the relationship between science and the institutions of democratic governance. In this report we address these themes by outlining the results of a two-year ESRC-funded study of UK science and research policy. The research focused particularly on the role of research councils in mediating between the demands of formal policy objectives and the development of research policies and programmes. In particular we focus on strategies adopted by UK research councils to support the development of two areas of emerging research nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We also document a notable shift in

13

Ibid., 205.

15

A New Mandate?

research policy that is characterised by a move away from research support mechanisms targeted at technologically specific research areas to interventions orientated around the notion of grand societal challenges. 14 This research, which was carried out between 2009 and 2011, combined policy analysis, qualitative research and ethnographic observation, in exploring the ways in which the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) navigated this changing political landscape and how in the process it sought to develop a new institutional identity with a proactive stake in the delivery of research impact, the shaping of research capability and the development of research leaders.15 The focal point for this study is an analysis of the EPSRCs role in the development of strategic research programmes. Over the last thirty years a succession of new research programmes have come to dominate public policy considerations of science and innovation. Areas of research such as information and communication technology, biotechnology and, more recently, nanotechnology and synthetic biology embody the strategic potential for science to produce socially progressive innovations and commercial opportunities. Such programmes are often represented as the cuttingedge of contemporary scientific practice, heralding the potential for exciting breakthroughs and transformative applications. The development and emergence of these programmes has also become a central site for policy debate and discussion focusing on two main questions: how best to organise and coordinate the development of

S Brooks et al., Silver Bullets, Grand Challenges and the New Philanthropy (STEPS Working Paper 24, Brighton: STEPS Centre: 2009). 15 EPSRC, Strategic Plan 2010 (Swindon: EPSRC, 2010). 16
14

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emerging areas of research and how to mitigate their possible risks and social implications. The inauguration of new research programmes has become a significant political site in which strategic rationales for public research funding sit alongside broader arguments about the cultural worth of science and innovation. In recent years a new terminology of grand and societal challenges has become a new synthesis for research funding in light of concerns about the capacity for largely peer-reviewed research funding to address enduring and strategic challenges. In this light EPSRC has begun to conceptualise its role as a sponsor rather than funder of research with an explicit and proactive stake in aligning the engineering and science base for the good of the UK as a whole.16 This shift in emphasis has important implications for understanding the councils strategic vision for research to help solve some of the most serious challenges facing the UK.17 We argue that the terminology of societal challenges represents a significant opportunity to reconsider the relationship between scientific and technological developments and social progress and the increasingly explicit role of research councils in shaping research capacity toward these challenges. Throughout this report we focus on the, often unacknowledged, role that research councils play in defining new areas of research and shaping capability in areas of strategic need. As we discuss below, these processes are typically informal; research councils engage in strategies designed to build research communities, define key terminology and coordinate the

16 17

EPSRC, Delivery Plan: 2011-2015 (Swindon: EPSRC, 2010), 6. Ibid.

17

A New Mandate?

development of research agendas. We argue that what our research reveals is that these informal practices are profoundly social in character that the composition of research communities, the negotiation of research goals and the definition of key terms involve questions of social meaning and ambition. These practices shape the ambit of new fields and help to define their social, economic and political goals. As contemporary research policy continues to emphasise the role of science and innovation in meeting strategic societal challenges we close the report by arguing for a set of institutional innovations that would open up this definitional work to public scrutiny and democratic accountability. In order for science to be made more democratically accountable we must recognise the profound role that research councils and funding organisations play in shaping research trajectories and role that they might play in opening up scientific practice to public deliberation and scrutiny.

18

2. Opening the Black Box of Research Policy

A recent NSF-funded workshop report noted that research policy is frequently treated as a black box that is not systematically examined. But because research policy plays such a significant role in contemporary research systems, understanding its operation is of critical importance for informed decision making. Far too little is now known about precisely how research policies are implicated in social and scientific change. 1 The authors of the report demonstrate how analyses of contemporary science and research policy have tended to rely on a largely unexamined and linear model of policy making, which typically progresses from agenda setting, to decision making, to implementation, to evaluation. 2 This conceptual blind spot is curious given the intellectual vibrancy evident in contemporary sociological analyses of scientific practice. Indeed, through close analyses of the spaces of scientific practice, work in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) has powerfully demonstrated the ways in which science is influenced by a range of social, economic and political factors that shape the institutional settings in

M Feldman et al., Research Policy as an Agent of Change - Workshop Report (Arlington V.A.: National Science Foundation, 2003), 6. 2 Ibid.
1

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which science is practiced. 3 Often understood as opening the black box of scientific practice this research has also demonstrated that a range of social and cultural imaginaries are implicit in the ways in which technical problems are defined and research agendas established.4 The research that this report is based on starts from a similar proposition; can we begin to open the black box of research policy, and investigate the social, economic and political practices that shape policy making in science? And, can we develop an alternative conception to the linear model of policy making that would uncover the discursive terms that underscore contemporary political debate concerning science. In the first stage of our research we conducted interviews with senior EPSRC staff together with representatives of a number of other science policy organisations and intermediary bodies. 5 These interviews focused on the nature of contemporary science policy-making, and particularly the role of the EPSRC in responding to and contributing to government policy. Based on these interviews, we argue that contemporary research policy is characterised by a range of underlying narratives concerning the nature and social purposes of scientific

W. E Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. (Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 1995). 4 G E Marcus, ed., Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles and Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 5 These additional interviews included representatives of the Research Councils UK (RCUK), the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), The Council for Science and Technology (CST), The Royal Society, The Royal Academy of Engineering, The National Physical Laboratory, The Institute of Physics, The Science Media Centre, The Campaign for Science and Engineering, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Wellcome Trust. 20
3

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research. We suggest that contemporary research policy is a political site in which conflicting understandings of the relationship between science and society are negotiated. We also suggest that these narratives shape the institutional role and mandate of research councils. Underlying Policy Narratives Much of the recent debate in UK science policy is structured by a contrast between norms of scientific autonomy and democratic and political oversight. Conceptions of science as an inherently creative and serendipitous practice are typically set against strategic arguments concerning the potential for scientific research to produce socially desirable commercial innovations. Of course these terms are not unique to these contemporary debates. Recent research in STS has demonstrated the persistence of these cultural terms in both scientific practice and broader policy discussion. For example, Jane Calvert shows how the terminology of basic science remains current in the ways in which scientists talk about and understand their research.6 She suggests that notions of unhindered, and curiositydriven, research provide a way of understanding the social and cultural meanings of science and research. In our research representatives of science policy organisations seemed to share these ideas concerning the social and cultural value of science. For example, a representative of the Wellcome Trust outlined the nature of the distinction between basic and challenge led research: Well obviously a huge breadth of research that gets funded a lot of what we fund is basic

6

J Calvert, The Idea of 'Basic Research' in Language and Practice, Minerva 42 (2004).

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science. So that would be research where the scientists are heavily involved in identifying the research questions. We see other funders, like the research councils because they sit closer to government [as being] more responsive to government and are becoming more responsive to government priorities. And we have had a healthy debate within the science community, as to the extent that the research councils should be doing that.7

Given the enduring power of this underlying image of science as culturally distinct and autonomous from politics, what is striking about recent debates in the UK concerning public research funding is the way in which policy arguments have shifted. In light of a political debate that began to question the value of public research funding and in the face of predicted cuts to research budgets a range of intermediary bodies adopted a modified position, arguing that a broadly defined research base is both inherently valuable and represents a key capability required to meet strategic global challenges. A representative of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) explained the nature of this modified argument: What we did was give evidence to the Select Committee, commenting upon it in the media, meeting with Ministers and civil servants, and questioning, first what was at stake in terms of this focus debate. If it was about transferring funds from certain areas of research to others, if it was about narrowing the research base, in essence, we were concerned about the possibility

Interview with a representative of the Wellcome Trust, August 2009. 22
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that it could lead to the narrowing of the research base, and narrowing of opportunities for the future, by trying to select what areas of research were going to have the most potential. And basically looking at examples where government have tried to do this in the past and have not been very effective at, as it is said, picking the winners, in terms of research. So, we were trying to figure out what was at stake and also explain why both a broad and a strong research base provides a competitive advantage to the UK, rather than trying to go down this focus route. 8 Calvert concludes her analysis of role that the concept of basic science plays in contemporary political debate by noting that basic research is a protean concept. It may be helpful to think of the concept not in terms of one definition, but as having flexible boundaries and multiple definitions. 9 If the current UK budget settlement for science is indicative of the success of the strategic policy interventions of a range of science policy organisations, it also indicative of the flexibility of the concept of basic science. The notion of a strong and broadly-defined research base is here redefined as both an end in itself and, in strategic terms, as providing an underpinning capacity for ensuring the UKs continued international competitiveness and capacity to meet strategic challenges. It is the flexibility of this terminology that has also enabled research councils to develop a new institutional mandate, one that is closely allied to the values of basic research whilst also marking out a new intention to shape

Interview with a representative of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, August 2009. 9 Calvert, "The idea of 'basic research' in language and practice.", 266.
8

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capability in areas of strategic national need. A New Institutional Mandate In light of the strategic arguments deployed in defence of a broadly defined research base, our interviews with EPSRC staff reveal an overarching shift in research council strategy. Speaking just before the launch of the 2010 EPSRC Strategic Plan, the councils CEO outlined the political intent in the councils strategy, suggesting that it was targeted to influence wider political debate about science: Well, the 6 May is election, thats what I gambled on a year ago, I said, The election will be in May. So if you work backwards the latest we could publish our strategic plan, and actually talk about it and feed it into government and to stakeholders would be March. So everything was sort of set back then. Luckily, they didnt bring the budget, or the election, forward.10 In this sense the release of the 2010 Strategic Plan served a distinct political purpose. It was brought forward, before the 2010 general election, in a period of considerable uncertainty about future policy responses to science and continuing levels of science funding. In conjunction with a range of other policy interventions, the Strategic Plan broadly sought to defend the existing science budget and reconfirm a model of science investment based on low levels of prioritisation and selectivity. The CEO continued by explaining the councils strategy:

Interview with the CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. 24
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What I deliberately wanted to do with it was use it to argue for increased funding. The plan this time is a very high level document. In fact, it only has three strategic aims, major strategic aims. And a lot of the detail is not in there, the detail will be in the delivery plan. But the major focus is, not surprisingly, excellence with impact, which is a continuation of what were already doing but obviously focussing more on ensuring that the excellent research does actually get translated through to benefit for whoever the end user is going to be, whether thats a policy advisor from government, or whatever.11 What is striking here is the way in which the councils strategy is defined in relational terms. In making a strategic argument about research funding, the publication of the 2010 Strategic Plan also makes an implicit argument about the role of the council in shaping national research capacity and translating excellent research into social and economic benefit. What is significant about this change is that it not only signals a shift in the relationship between the council and its research community but also articulates a more explicit role in contributing to wider public and political debates about matters concerning the public value of science and research. In an interview, the CEO of EPSRC outlined the nature of this strategic shift: I mean in part its because we are becoming more explicit about what we are trying to do. Changing the agenda, or driving the agenda

11

Ibid.

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We have deliberately tried to go out and be more visible. We have a programme with the impact programme and the pioneers events to try and identify, in a much more explicit, more visible way, what comes out of, and what is actually dependent on engineering, physical sciences. And part of that is persuading the public as well. ... So weve got to get others, weve got to get our strategic partners to give the same message, weve got to get government departments to agree, the chief scientific advisors in government departments have got to be on message. So we tried to produce a much more explicit communication programme, aimed very much at those stakeholders.12

This shift in strategic direction is most evident in the councils recent Delivery Plan: 2011-2015. The plan outlines the ways in which the council is repositioning itself to become more active in partnering with the research community to generate the fundamental knowledge, and develop the skilled people, essential to business, other research organisations and 13 This new strategy, where the council government. will take up a more proactive role in shaping research capacity toward national policy priorities, is encapsulated in an attempt to move from being a research funder to being a sponsor of research. This model of research sponsorship represents a significant reconceptualisation of the relationship between the council and its research community. In this sense, the EPSRCs Delivery Plan: 2011-2015 represents the culmination of a range of strategic interventions made

Interview with the CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. EPSRC, Delivery Plan: 2011-2015, 2. 26
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in the context of debates about the public funding of research. In place of a simple dichotomy between responsively defined research excellence and selective prioritisation, these interventions have powerfully argued that a broad portfolio of curiosity-driven science constitutes a strategic response to both current and possible future societal challenges and policy needs. This argument has therefore required EPSRC to change the ways in which it structures its relationship with its research communities, becoming more explicit about its role in shaping research capacity and in developing research leaders. What we see here is a shift in emphasis in contemporary British science policy. While maintaining traditional notions of the value of basic science and research council autonomy typically referred to as the Haldane Principle14 research councils have, in recent years, begun to play a more proactive role in shaping research policy agendas. While the EPSRC has begun to talk about shaping research capability and developing a new relationship with its research community these initiatives are also influenced by a broader political debate about the value of science and of public research funding in general. As we explore in the subsequent chapters of this report one of the most significant ways in which research councils are able to engage in the coordination of research agendas is in the development of new research programmes, particularly in areas of new and emerging technologies. However, as we discuss below, this process is not straightforward but rather requires forms of informal policy work to build research communities and define new fields.

14 David

Edgerton, "The 'Haldane Principle' and other invented traditions in science policy," History and Policy, www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-88 (2009). 27

3. Commissioning New Technologies

Speaking in the year 2000 at the California Institute of Technology, President Clinton outlined the ambitions of what was, at that stage, a new field of research: Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumours that are only a few cells in size. Some of these research goals will take 20 or more years to achieve. But that is why there is such a critical role for the federal government.1 In his speech President Clinton echoed what would become a cardinal definition of nanotechnology that an emerging capacity to miniaturise technology, and indeed to control and harness the material world at the nanoscale, would herald untold social and economic benefits. Debates about emerging technologies embody many of the concerns of contemporary science and research policy: how to coordinate the development of new

W Clinton, President Clinton's Address to Caltech on Science and Technology, http://pr.caltech.edu/events/presidential_speech/pspeechtxt.html (accessed on 5 June 2008).
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research agendas in order to realise the potential of new fields, and how to balance this with the need for appropriate regulatory arrangements. In this chapter we explore the development of research agendas in nanotechnology and synthetic biology, suggesting that while both fields have been focal points for policy debate and deliberation, the ways in which these considerations have been translated into research programmes are less clear. We focus particularly on the role of the EPSRC who, in the absence of an overarching government strategy, has provided institutional mechanisms through which research agendas have been developed and defined. Based on archival sources, research interviews and periods of ethnographic research based at the EPSRC between 2009-2010, we explore the way in which the council has played a central, if under-acknowledged, role in the development of research communities in both synthetic biology and nanotechnology. The councils initiatives have also played a definitional role in shaping emerging research agendas and wider public debate in each field. Both the technical ambitions and the broader social and political definitions of such fields are, however, rarely stable. Our research demonstrates that, particularly in the case of nanotechnology, in the light of a changing political context the EPSRC has acted to transition existing nanotechnology research into other allied programmes, particularly manufacturing and healthcare technologies.

29

A New Mandate?

Building Research Communities Research council strategy regarding fields such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology has been primarily aimed at building a community of researchers particularly given the multidisciplinary nature of research in both fields. In addition, research councils have engaged in what might be termed definitional work in providing outline descriptions of research agendas and developing wider public dissemination and communication strategies.2 For example, on the basis of reviews of the councils initiatives in nanotechnology, conducted in 1999 and 2005, the EPSRC adopted a dual strategy of making targeted investments in the field while building a wider community of researchers through responsive mechanisms and other dissemination initiatives. Collaborating with the BBSRC and the Ministry of Defence, the council established two Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRC) in 2003. These two centres an IRC in Nanotechnology led by the University of Cambridge and an IRC in BioNanotechnology led by the University of Oxford promised to build capacity by developing networks of researchers nurtur[ing] the revolutionary aspects of nanotechnology while also providing a firm foundation for evolutionary studies building on established technologies. 3 An executive manager explained the councils strategy in this period: This was about bringing research groups together ... And I think the motivator for that is actually: would those communities naturally have

2

S Molyneux-Hodgson and M Meyer, Tales of Emergence Synthetic Biology as a Scientific Community in the Making, BioSocieties 4 (2009). 3 Tender documentation call for proposals for Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations in Nanotechnology. 30

A New Mandate?

aggregated together? Probably not. And this was a little stimulus to bring them together in a flexible and effective way, to really advance, as I say, the nanotech agenda and opportunities base. And they were quite significant investments for the Research Councils to make. Each centre, being of the order of 10 million over 6 years, so quite a sizeable investment in research terms at that period.4 In this sense, the establishment of the IRCs as flagship investments was also designed to have a range of more informal effects in creating and shaping an emerging research community that helped EPSRC in articulating nanotechnology both in research and policy terms. As the public profile of nanotechnology developed throughout the early 2000s particularly with the 2004 publication of a Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering report on nanoscience and nanotechnology5 the EPSRCs continuing reliance on responsive mode funding became the focus of critical debate. In the absence of a clearly developed national strategy that would match international comparisons debate about the strategic direction of nanotechnology research in the UK largely centred on the effectiveness of the EPSRCs funding initiatives. In response to these concerns, the council began to develop a new strategic approach to the field. In addition to the formation of a nanotechnology strategic advisory team (SAT) and the appointment of a Strategic Nanotechnology Advisor, the core of the new strategy was the development of an interdisciplinary grand challenge funding programme

Interview with an executive manager, EPSRC, December 2009. Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies: Opportunities and Uncertainties.
4 5

31

A New Mandate?

in areas of strategic importance where nanotechnology [might make] a significant contribution, and where the UK research and user base can make a distinctive contribution, based on a shared vision between stakeholders of the grand challenges in each of these areas.6 These challenges formed the central element of the RCUK cross-council Nanoscience Through Engineering to Application programme (led by EPSRC). Focused on three specific areas of nanoscience research environment, healthcare and carbon capture and storage the council aimed to consolidate the nanotechnology research community while demonstrating the effectiveness and relevance of the councils existing strategy and EPSRCs de facto leadership of UK nanotechnology research policy. This strategy had a number of different objectives. As the CEO of EPSRC explained, foremost among these objectives was to demonstrate the potential impact of nanotechnology research in areas of strategic significance: The current cross-council programme was an attempt to see whether, after essentially ten years ten years after that initial large capital inflow into nanoscience there was a chance of getting any early wins in terms of pulling some nanoscience out of the basic lab and either through into engineering, or ideally through into industry, into the user base.7 Research council strategy toward synthetic biology has followed a similar, albeit more hesitant, trajectory.

EPSRC, Report of the Nanotechnology Strategy Group, (Swindon: EPSRC, 2006), 4. 7 Interview with The CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. 32
6

A New Mandate?

Initial policy interest was again sparked by international developments, particularly high-profile research investments in the US. Though recent policy reviews consistently report a research market in synthetic biology of 1.8bn8 over the next ten years, coupled with anticipated applications in areas such as biofuels, vaccines and bioremediation, current research council strategy toward synthetic biology has been relatively sanguine. A unique feature of synthetic biology is that strategic projections of the fields potential9 sit alongside visions of synthetic biology as form of advanced open source biotechnology.10 There is a playfulness to the international image of synthetic biology that research council staff have found difficult to reconcile with its projected and potential implications. The public profile generated by the Craig Venter Institute and particularly claims to have created a synthetic life form11 again contributed to this sense of caution in research council strategy. A head of programme at EPSRC discussed the councils concerns regarding the field:

Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, Synthetic Biology, Postnote 298 (2008). 9 Strategic investments in the field include: the NSF-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) based at UC Berkeley, grants for the medical application of synthetic biology research made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the formation of the Energy Biosciences Institute led by BP and the US Department of Energy. 10 A Balmer and P Martin, Synthetic Biology: Social and Ethical Challenges (Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham, 2008). 11 I Sample, Craig Venter Creates Synthetic Life Form, The Guardian Thursday 20th May (2010).
8

33

A New Mandate?

Extract Ethnographic Notes

In mid March 2010 EPSRC and BBSRC coordinated a networking meeting in a Cotswold country hotel. Designed for researchers working in synthetic biology those attending the meeting were draw from a number Networks in Synthetic Biology that had been funded over the previous year and was designed to assess the research areas of the various networks and begin to carve out a definition of the field. Over two days researchers discussed posters, listened to presentations from leading figures in the field and engaged in networking exercises. The event felt like a corporate retreat complete with a set of team building exercises. However, there was one significant difference; we were here to discuss the definition of an emerging field of research and innovation. Throughout the meeting different definitions of the field circulated. Was synthetic biology bringing the principles of engineering to life? Is it defined by the creation of interchangeable biological parts? Is it a form of extreme bioengineering? Or would a more mundane and potentially less controversial definition be better suited to the field? Of course, as an observer to the meeting it was not clear that any single definition came to dominate. However, what was clear was that along side these definitional debates were a set of discussions regarding the scope and ambition of the field. Would synthetic biology simply help us understand the underlying mechanisms of biological systems or was it driven by more pragmatic goals the development of new biofuels and pharmaceuticals, for example? These discussions were very informal, provisional and inconclusive. They were statements of hope and expectation, rather than mapped out plans. They were conducted in conversations across tables and on Post-It notes and the flip chart paper used in networking exercises. Again no single goal or definition emerged. However, what was palpable was the sense of expectation that synthetic biology was important, that it would produce exciting new potential research areas and that (and this was a crucial point) that it would produce social and ethical implications that we would need to attend to.
34

A New Mandate?

The problem with synthetic biology is that it is still within the research domain owned by the researchers over-promising and underdelivering. And if were not careful it will end up being another classic UK success in research, failure in terms of delivering the benefit. . And there I think there are some real issues because you have a community which has very much embraced the concept of open innovation and is driven by these global events the IGEM competition where all the researchers come together and they have these competitions. And the researchers very much want to share methodologies, they want to share models and so on. And thats perfectly natural and thats great but in terms of delivering the benefits though, its how to translate that into something that ultimately a private sector organisation can pick up and use and benefit from. So, you have this real tension I think between converting this very open public-spirited attitude through into private organisations and companies. And Im not sure whats the right way to do that in a way that doesnt destroy or distort the research.12 At issue here is a definition of the field as either a researcher-led programme or one with significant strategic and commercial potential. In light of these concerns, research council strategies toward synthetic biology have been marked by a sense of cautious optimism and have been characterised by attempts to generate interdisciplinary research collaborations, to scope existing UK research expertise and strategies

12

Interview with a head of programme, ESPRC, November 2009.

35

A New Mandate?

aimed at defining key features and goals of the field. Aside from a dedicated science and innovation award to the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College, London, these have included flashlight funding in engineering challenges in synthetic biology, designed around workshops for early career researchers and the development of new collaborative teams of researchers in the field; a collaborative sandpit funding scheme, co-funded by the EPSRC and NSF; and the collaborative funding of seven research networks in synthetic biology, co-funded by the EPSRC, BBSRC, ESRC and AHRC. Defining Emerging Technologies What is significant about the councils strategy to both nanotechnology and synthetic biology is the way they have also helped to generate research agendas, to identify common problems and to develop a consistent nomenclature in both fields. Perhaps the primary institutional site where this kind of definitional work is engaged is in the inter-council negotiations concerning the ways in which nanotechnology and synthetic biology relate to the remit of individual councils. Informal conversations with EPSRC staff, conducted during this project, suggested that the councils early strategies toward nanotechnology were driven in part by a desire to exercise a strong leadership in the field after having lost biotechnology to the BBSRC. Similarly, research strategy in synthetic biology has been characterised by a debate concerning the definition of the field and how this relates to the remits of both EPSRC and BBSRC.

36

A New Mandate?

An EPSRC programme manager elucidates the councils strategy regarding the field: BBSRC is quite often seen as the lead because of the natural assumption that, you know, its biology. The fact is with this particular area you know engineering has a huge, huge impact and thats the real sort of ethos of synthetic biology: bringing engineering applications to biology. So we [EPSRC] are very keen that what weve done and what were doing has the biggest impact, so when it comes with these enquiries we make sure that we really get that across and the message out there.13 This conflict over the remit of individual councils in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology is indicative of a wider process where research council strategies give shape and meaning to emerging areas of research. By emphasising the role of engineering in synthetic biology, the EPSRCs strategy has the effect of defining the field in particular terms: as a broad attempt to bring engineering principles to biological systems, rather than defining the field simply as an offshoot of systems biology. For EPSRC, strategies aimed at building research communities in both synthetic biology and nanotechnology are also understood as a way to develop these areas from the bottom-up, without the need for challenge led research funding. For synthetic biology, the argument that the council adopted is that by building interdisciplinary collaborations the field will be developed with a wider range of disciplinary input, guided by the council, rather than be grabbed and dominated by two communities,

13

Interview with a programme manager, EPSRC, December 2009.

37

A New Mandate?

i.e. the biologists or the chemists. 14 An executive manager explained EPSRCs approach: So I would see [synthetic biology] very much as an enabler or a part of a solution to another problem youre trying to solve, but in order to solve it you have to create a constituency of researchers to develop activity in that area, to show that it can be done and so the stimulation and research ... Now, if youre looking at the role of research councils in that space: nobody other than the research council would do that first bit because its in none of their interests to do it, but its in our interest to do it. What weve then got to do is say why are we doing it. And, hopefully, if it was part of the solution at some point in time, you would capture that: Here are some examples of the solutions now in practice but that could be another fifteen to twenty years away.15 In a recent review of UK research strategies in synthetic biology, Molyneux-Hodgson and Meyer comment that the seemingly mundane task of defining a field and settling on a name is a difficult exercise. Naming something synthetic biology is not an innocent exercise, for it delimits, renders more visible, more powerful, and increases the potential to attract funding for certain forms of work. 16 The definitional work engaged in mapping out research agendas and priorities in fields such as synthetic biology and nanotechnology

14 15

Interview with an executive manager, EPSRC, November 2009. Interview with an executive manager, EPSRC, November 2009. 16 Molyneux-Hodgson and Meyer, Tales of Emergence Synthetic Biology as a Scientific Community in the Making, 136. 38

A New Mandate?

therefore has a wider set of social and political meanings. In our study we have seen two distinct forms of definitional work in the strategies adopted toward nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Firstly, as we note above the political reception of both nanotechnology and synthetic biology has been influenced by inter-council negotiations and questions concerned with the remit of individual research councils. Of course this is particularly important in interdisciplinary areas of research, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, which cross between the traditional boundaries between physics, biology and engineering. As we have suggested, the debate between EPSRC and BBSRC over leadership in synthetic biology is more than simply a matter of institutional fit. Rather it concerns the overall ambitions and ambit of the field. In particular these negotiations concern the degree to which synthetic biology would be defined as the the application of rigorous engineering principles to biological system design and development 17 with an explicit emphasis on engineering, design and replicability or whether it would be defined more conventionally as an extension of existing commitments in the life sciences and systems biology. Though, at the time of writing these institutional and definitional issues have not been resolved, they point to a second form of definitional work evident in strategies adopted toward both synthetic biology and nanotechnology. In both of these fields of research

17

Royal Academy of Engineering, Synthetic Biology: Scope, Applications and Implications (London: Royal Academy of Engineering, 2009), 5.

39

A New Mandate?

councils have also adopted a more informal set of strategies designed to build research communities, identify research problems and possible application pathways and define key research terminology. This informal work typically involves working with researchers in new areas of scientific investigation and development organising workshops and town meetings, site visits to research groups and engaging in broader public dissemination initiatives18 in an effort to establish fields in both scientific and social terms. Alongside issues of terminology and ambit these strategies function to build a set of socio-technical imaginaries and expectations that come to be associated with the promise of research investment in these fields.19 It is in this sense that we argue that research council strategies and initiatives are critical institutional sites where the societal ambitions of new fields of research are both established and negotiated.

18 See 19

the extract from our ethnographic notes above. S Jasanoff and S-H Kim, "Containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea," Minerva 47 (2009), N Pollock and R Williams, "The business of expectations: How promissory organizations shape technology and innovation," Social Studies of Science 40, no. 4 (2010). 40

4. Fields in Transition

The social or technical definitions of new fields of research are, however, rarely stable or static. Interviews conducted with EPSRC staff, together with ethnographic research undertaken throughout 2010, reveal that during this period the councils strategy particularly toward nanotechnology began to change. Nanotechnology began the 2000s with the high hopes of Present Clintons address to the California Institute of Technology; that advances in nanoscience would herald the development of the tools for a new industrial revolution and deliver astronomical economic windfalls. For many nanotechnology was set to become the star technology of the new millennium. However, by the end of the 2000s an entirely different set of discourses were circulating in the field. Though still viewed as promising, nanotechnology began to be regarded as an underpinning and enabling set of techniques rather than as a stand-out area of technological development. During this period, research council staff began to speak of the need to transition existing nanotechnology research into other programmes and to discontinue unique nanotechnology funding initiatives. In this chapter we focus on how this transition was handled by EPSRC and the ways in which council initiatives functioned to redefine the field in light of a changed political and policy context.

A New Mandate?

Dynamics of Hope and Disappointment There is perhaps nothing surprising in the trajectory that nanotechnology research has taken over the last decade. Indeed, the collective sense of disappointment in nanoscale research might be understood as a response to the degree of promise invested in nanoscience and often the unhinged hubris that surrounded early efforts to carve out a political case for public investment in the field. Examining what they term the dynamics of expectation in life science research Brown and Michael note that the health and life sciences are populated with innovation concepts whose associated promise has shifted in emphasis over the course of the last decade or more, often between extreme revolutionary potential on the one hand and despairing disappointment on the other. 1 In this light perhaps we should not be too surprised to find that synthetic biology is being thought about in similar terms as providing the tools for a new revolution in biology and the life sciences and that these promises always run the risk of precipitating disappointment.2 Brown and Michael go onto to suggest that the dynamics of hope and disappointment serve important social and political purposes, that such language is a particularly important organising dynamic in these areas because so many of these fields are yet to see

N Brown and M Michael, "A sociology of expectations: retrospecting prospects and prospecting retrospects," Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 15, no. 1 (2003): 4. 2 M Morange, "A new revolution? The place of systems biology and synthetic biology in the history of biology," EMBO Reports 10 (2009). 42
1

A New Mandate?

products through to actual clinical use.3 What Brown and Michael suggest is that the expectations and hope invested in new fields of research help to mobilise political and social capital. Expressions of disappointment in the failure of particular areas of research to live up to their promises might also be understood in similar terms, as a renegotiation of this capital and as enabling the construction of new research agendas and priorities. In both cases research funding bodies play a crucial role in the definitional work required to build communities of researchers in new fields and in the transition of some fields from being strategic priorities to becoming more geneic underpinning capacities. Early Wins and Unfulfilled Promises In the UK a number of factors contributed to a shift in emphasis that meant that nanotechnology began to be understood in more muted terms. Perhaps chief among these was the release of the long awaited UK Nanotechnologies Strategy. 4 After what had been an intense period of policy development both nationally and internationally the 2010 UK government strategy gave few details of future initiatives and largely failed to articulate a vision for nanoscale research. The strategy was regarded within the EPSRC and more broadly as disappointing5 as it seemed to confirm a diminished enthusiasm for nanotechnology among policy makers. This political message also represented a more general shift away from technology-specific programme

Brown and Michael, "A sociology of expectations: retrospecting prospects and prospecting retrospects.", 4. 4 HM Government, UK Nanotechnologies Strategy: Small Technologies, Great Opportunities (London: HM Government, 2010). 5 R Maynard, The UK Nanotechnologies Strategy - Disappointing, http://2020science.org/2010/03/18/the-uk-nanotechnologies-strategydisappointing/ (accessed on 20 March 2010). 43
3

A New Mandate?

development in favour of programmes defined around policy priorities and societal challenges. Throughout 2010, discussions within EPSRC centred on the transition of existing research commitments in nanoscience into other programmes principally manufacturing and healthcare technologies and the soft landing of the nanotechnology research community.6 In light of this change in emphasis, an associate director at EPSRC explained the ways the nanotechnology programme would be transitioned to other cross-council initiatives: In order to understand what to do in nano, you need to understand what youre funding and what other people are funding, and what the portfolio looks like. You cant just say, well we didnt call them this, and ignore everything else. So we really do try and understand them and manage them as a portfolio of research ... So rather than having a budget line with a nano tag on it, we might say were actually going to do nano-focussed work under our Global Uncertainties line, or Energy line, or under LWEC.7 Much like the definitional work engaged in building new research areas, this shift in emphasis was also accompanied by a definitional change. In place of more strategic definitions of the field and the attempt to shape nanotechnology research agendas around contemporary policy problems within EPSRC nanotechnology was redefined as a broad portfolio of underpinning research that cut across a range of other

6 See 7

the extract from our ethnographic notes below. Interview with an executive manager, EPSRC, November 2009. 44

A New Mandate?

dedicated programmes. Nanoscale research began to be seen as a capacity that would enable developments in other fields, rather than a unique area of technological development. This redefinition, which in some ways recalled earlier definitions of the field as a form of advanced metrology and nanoscale fabrication, required council staff to carefully consider both the needs of the existing nanotechnology research community and ongoing research commitments. In redefining nanotechnology as underpinning other programmes, the council emphasised the link between nanoscale research and longer-term programmes in manufacturing and healthcare technologies and existing collaborative engagement with other research councils, thus building a new institutional coalition for nanotechnology that would share the responsibility for driving the field forward in the coming years. The CEO of EPSRC explained the councils new strategy toward nanotechnology in the following terms: I mean nanoscience will still be a very large part of our portfolio. If you actually look at the total amount of nanoscience we fund, compared to the 39 million which was the cross-council programme, theres an awful lot of nanoscience funded in the basic responsive mode pot, theres all the CDTs which are a fairly significant investment, running up to 2019, so were going to be continuing to fund nanoscience. Weve just started that nanoscience call with the US Environmental Protection Agency and MRC. So there are things that will continue. But that wont be a cross-council programme, but it may be a bilateral or trilateral programme with MRC, NERC or BBSRC. ... It was an attempt to demonstrate some early wins. And if it succeeds,

45

A New Mandate?

then, to be honest, the outcomes of that will fall into the manufacturing programme, or the process-engineering area. The work on nanoparticles will presumably feed into the research that MRC hopefully will be continuing to fund on the potential effects of nanoparticles in the environment. Because thats not our space, thats NERC and MRCs space.8

The notion of early wins is important here. The key issue for the council is the ways in which processes of research definition are tied to public policy priorities. Nanotechnology remained attractive for the council inasmuch as it enabled it to demonstrate the strategic effectiveness of its funding initiatives in a promising new field. When a sense of disappointment began to set in that began to be evident in national and international policy discussions in the late 2000s9 the council acted quickly to redefine its nanotechnology investments as underpinning other strategic areas of research, in medical devices and material science.

Interview with the CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. D Berube, Nano-Hype: The Truth Behind the Nanotechnology Buzz (London: Prometheus Books, 2006), I Illuminato and Georgia M, Nanotechnology, Climate and Energy: Over-Heated Promises and Hot Air? (Melbourne: Friends of the Earth, 2010) 46
8 9

A New Mandate?

Extract Ethnographic Notes During the early months of 2010, when the nanotechnology and next generation healthcare team was given a new head of programme from outside the team, it became apparent that nanotechnology would undergo significant changes. The new leading manager had considerable experience in managing broader programmes such as Energy. This personnel decision implied that it was the healthcare aspect that would be developed further rather than the technology-driven Nanoscience programme. Soon after, the team was asked to scope potential trajectories for nanotechnology. During an Away Day, they devised three scenarios that ranged from the continuation of the programme, to a slow ebbing away, to a dissolution with redistribution of individual grand challenges to other existing programmes. The latter option seemed the most likely from the start, yet the council was at pains to negotiate a transition rather than a complete halt in the context of EPSRCs strategic planning for the incoming government and its Spending Review.

47

A New Mandate?

It is for this reason that we argue that the strategies that the council adopted toward nanotechnology and is currently adopting toward synthetic biology are important in shaping the trajectory of each of these fields and must be understood in the context of a broader renegotiation of EPSRCs role in supporting wider and more applied research programmes: those of manufacturing and healthcare technologies. The senior strategy planning officer at EPSRC explained this context in the following terms: [N]ano has got potential to help meet those higher societal challenges, of course. Synthetic biology, we dont know where thats going. ... We know that, for us, advanced manufacturing or high value manufacturing will feature as our kind of... a new sort of synthesis of funding.10 What our research has shown is that research council strategy has had a significant effect in shaping the development of research in nanotechnology and more recently in synthetic biology. The EPSRC's strategy of facilitating the development of research communities in both fields has also had a definitional effect, influencing the formation of research agenda and policy priorities. Our research shows that, in recent, years this definitional work has taken a different tack redefining nanotechnology as an underpinning technical capacity rather than an area of strategic research investment and emphasising a series of cross-cutting societal challenges as a key driver of council initiatives. In this sense, the councils strategy toward areas of research such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology is conditioned by a range of strategic and institutional

Interview with the senior strategy planning officer, EPSRC, March 2010. 48
10

A New Mandate?

factors, not least the emergence of societal challenges as a new discursive synthesis for strategic research funding. We will consider the emergence of societal challenges in the next chapter, but here we conclude by emphasising that in building research communities in new areas, and in strategies designed to transition existing commitments into other priority areas, these research council initiatives involve matters that extend beyond the merely technical aspects of scientific research. Rather these strategies concern the social ambitions of new areas of research and the degree to which they are shaped by strategic public policy priorities.

49

5. Framing Societal Challenges

In a guest lecture at the University of Nottingham on 25 November 2005, the then Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, called upon the UK research community to turn towards addressing a number of Grand Challenges which the World faces which can only be tackled by science and technology on an international basis. 1 Embedding national research efforts in the context of global economic and social concerns, the minister implicitly drew upon the United Nations Millennium Goals2 in arguing that UK research efforts needed to address key societal challenges. Similarly, the Warry Report on Increasing the Economic Impact of Research Councils suggested that: RCUK should engage Government, business and the public services in a wide-ranging dialogue to develop overarching, economically relevant research missions. These missions should address major strategic challenges for the UK.3

Lord Sainsbury of Turville, Science Policy in the Global Knowledge Economy (guest lecture at the University of Nottingham, 25 November 2005), http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20060130194436/http://www.dti.gov.u k/ministers/ speeches/sainsbury251105.html (accessed on 25 February 2010). 2 UN Millennium Goals Project, http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/index.htm (accessed on 21 March 2011). An agenda of eight goals was developed between 2002 and 2005. The UN has set a deadline for achieving considerable change on these eight goals by 2015. 3 Research Council Economic Impact Group (Warry report) Increasing the Economic impact of the Research Councils (2008), available at, e.g.: http://www.vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/201891/Warry-Report.html (accessed on 21 March 2011).
1

A New Mandate?

Linked to an ongoing debate about research funding, the report by the Research Council Economic Impact Group suggested that the research councils needed to actively engage with several audiences, in addition to the research community, about their research funding activities. This engagement has been cast as essential in the development of funding programmes that are increasingly tied to national policy priorities and to an international humanitarian agenda. It is in this context that we observe the emergence of the terminology of societal challenges as a new framing for more explicitly selective research funding initiatives. In this chapter, we draw on ethnographic research and interviews with representatives from the research councils and other science policy intermediaries in exploring the emergence of societal challenges thinking in UK science policy and how this has been translated into challenge-led initiatives to research funding. Societal Challenges The first significant outline of what would become the societal challenges funding programmes was made in the 2007 PreBudget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review.4 In this report a set of demographic, environmental and technological challenges are cast as enduring yet increasingly pressing societal concerns. They encompass issues as diverse as:
4

Demographic and socio-economic change, Increasing pressures on natural resources and the global climate, Intensification of cross-border economic competition, The rapid pace of innovation and technological diffusion,

HM Treasury, Meeting the Aspirations of the British People (London: The Stationery Office; 2007); Treasury Challenges: The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, The Allocations of the Science Budget 2008/09 2010/11 (London: The Stationery Office, 2007). 51

A New Mandate?

Continued global uncertainty with ongoing threats.

While these five challenges do not define a particular set of political or policy priorities per se, they constitute an agenda, or vision, for areas in which public funding should aim to deliver scientific input into pressing societal issues. The RCUK have responded to the Treasury Challenges in various ways, the most prominent being the emphasis on cross-council collaboration in mission programmes. Through the crosscouncil programmes, the individual research councils have aimed to coordinate their initiatives in order to demonstrate the impact of their research support programmes, against these challenges. The challenges have also provided a framework for the articulation of the cross-council programmes, mobilising a set of core, cross-cutting, concerns: ageing and healthcare; energy and environmental change; manufacturing; digital economy and food security; and global uncertainty. A programme leader at EPSRC outlined the relationship between the councils initiatives and the challenges outlined by the UK Treasury: Well, I think the government priorities are I was going to say vital, vital is the wrong word, but are very important to framing some of the questions that we then look at in the individual programmes, and obviously looking at the cross-council programmes that we have now, the Treasury challenges that were issued some years ago were quite instrumental in helping other cross-council programmes.5 International Humanitarianism It is clear though that the language of grand societal challenges is not unique to the UK. Recent social scientific scholarship has

Interview with a head of programme, EPSRC, November 2009. 52
5

A New Mandate?

highlighted the link between the emergence of grand challenges thinking and the increasing influence of nongovernmental bodies in national research policies. 6 Organisations such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are significant direct funders of research and have begun to articulate their research strategies in the language of strategic grand challenges in an effort to develop interdisciplinary research efforts in key areas of global health research. Focussing on the role of the philanthropic sector, Brookes et al. suggest that third sector funders are increasingly energising the development of ambitious and longterm research agendas, operating as catalysts for other intermediaries in the policy landscape.7 It is also important to note that the strategies adopted by NGOs and philanthropic foundations have an indirect influence on national research policies that is much more significant than the direct funding of research. Citing the influence of the Gates Foundation on council strategy, a representative from MRC noted that challenge-led approaches to research programmes are employed by a variety of actors: The paradigm for [strategic planning] is the way Gates has approached things: we want research in the following diseases ... What weve got are our grand challenges, and theyre no different from the grand challenges being developed in Europe ... no different from the ones that Gates and others will be putting out.8

See, for example: A Allan Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicines Greatest Life Saver (London: WW Norton, 2007); or: N Cullather Miracles of Modernization: The Green Revolution and the Apotheosis of Technology, Diplomatic History 28(2) (2004), 227-254. 7 S Brooks et al., Silver Bullets, Grand Challenges and the New Philanthropy (STEPS Working Paper 24, Brighton: STEPS Centre, 2009). 8 Interview with a senior executive manager, MRC, July 2010. 53
6

A New Mandate?

In addition, an executive manager at NERC indicated the role of international environmental debate on the formation of the Living With Environmental Change programme: It was possible to look at the Stern report and say: ah, these are the places where NERC science could fit in, and also these are the policy areas in government, which are likely to be important in the future. So I think we began to see a prospect there of linkages being made. And I suppose then there was a big UN report which ... filled a gap that was present in the UN Millennium assessment. And it covered an area that IPCC didnt cover. ... You could see that there was an urgent need for doing some work on ... pressures from environmental change.9 By referring to wider research agendas, the research councils are able to position themselves as having a significant and strategic role internationally as research facilitators. However, research council strategy also extends towards encouraging novel configurations of research and entering into new relationships with other actors in the funding and policy landscape to change both research council operations and the research conduct of their communities. Research council initiatives to build challenge-led research investments might therefore be read in the light of two distinct dynamics the new international currency that grand societal challenges have in catalysing research investment in broadly humanitarian causes and the influence these discourses have had on shaping national political priorities in areas of policy making such as healthcare and aging, environment and climate change and energy and renewable technologies.

Interview with an executive manager, NERC, June 2010. 54
9

A New Mandate?

Setting the Agenda in Societal Challenges Though the most obvious effect of this discourse has been the inauguration of seven cross-council research programmes, coordinated through RCUK, within the EPSRC its effects could be felt more broadly. While the council currently leads two of the RCUK cross-council research programmes the terminology of societal challenges has been more broadly adopted across the councils research portfolio. For example, in interview a head of programme at EPSRC indicated the way in which this discourse has been more generally implemented, suggesting that: All the councils themes are societal challenges. And then a lot of the research has, sort of, its roots, or its mainstay in the councils remit. So a lot of energy research is to do with, for example, solar cells in chemistry and materials; things like wind turbines, its engineering design; and gear boxes.10 The approach adopted by the council, in the context of this emerging policy discourse, was to begin to redefine existing programmes as challenge-led initiatives, while making a broader political argument concerning the role of the council in actively shaping research capacity. During the period of our research, internal council negotiations during the development of the ESPRC delivery plan 2011-2015 included preparations for the creation of two new EPSRC societal challenge programmes alongside the existing RCUK programmes. These included new programmes in Next Generation Manufacturing and Health Care Technologies framed in the same way as the RCUK societal challenge programmes. In addition, the council adopted a broader political argument, suggesting that due to it disciplinary remit and particularly

10

Interview with a head of programme, EPSRC, June 2010.

55

A New Mandate?

the role of engineering in delivering practical applications of research the councils existing research portfolio was implicitly directed toward social challenges. Secondly, the council acted to link arguments about these societal challenges to a broader reconsideration of its role in shaping research capability in light of the strategic arguments deployed in support of existing levels of public research funding. An executive manager at the council outlined the core of this argument: One of the roles of a research council is to lead the response of the science base to national priorities. So its these things that are national priorities and you are funded as a research council to do research in important areas. To what extent can you show that youre leading the research response to those national priorities?11 In this sense the discourse of societal challenges is linked to an attempt to engender a change in the relationship between the council and its research community, one where the council is seen to take an active role in shaping research capability towards priority areas. The development of research programmes in areas such as Energy are representative of EPSRCs capacity to define a research issue and engage in public policy agenda-setting. The broad framing of the societal challenges programmes has permitted the research councils to define the issues, set agendas and develop the constituent research areas. This approach is partially driven by the expectation that interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research will likely produce more complex and successful approaches and solutions to societal challenges. Equally, that wider outlook has enabled the research councils to re-construct ongoing research efforts under agenda-driven and agendadriving headings. The Energy cross-council theme

Interview with an executive manager, EPSRC, November 2009. 56
11

A New Mandate?

encompasses not only the dedicated programme but also a much larger host of responsive mode research. A programme manager at EPSRC articulated the distinction between the programme and the Energy portfolio in the following terms: People are coming through the responsive mode same as they do when they come in through Physical Sciences [funding programmes] ... and the Energy programme doesnt contribute to that. But it does come under the Energy portfolio, so thats where we get away from, sort of, a labelled Energy programme. But if you look across the research councils theres a whole portfolio that is energy, which we now present to BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills], because theres been a lot more money spent on Energy, other than just the Energy programme.12 Leading public discussions on science The councils strategy in building challenge-led research programmes and emphasising the role that peer reviewed research plays in meeting these challenges is therefore an explicitly political one. What our research shows then is that as national and international research policy has become more overtly framed by notions of strategic societal challenges the council has adopted a more ambitious role in contributing to and shaping public discussion concerning science and engineering. The CEO of EPSRC outlined this approach in the following terms: So, in part, we felt we had to go out there and really get over the message that, first of all, we are an industrial nation, we are a manufacturing nation. If the UK is going to have an economy which is resilient to changes whether

12

Interview with a head of programme, EPSRC, June 2010.

57

A New Mandate?

theyre financial swings, whether its terrorism, population movements or whatever, it needs to have a strong manufacturing base as part of that economic mix anyhow.13

The shift of emphasis towards societal challenges has required the council to engage in an explicit public campaign to raise awareness about the role of science in meeting these critical challenges. Engaging in a series of public engagement activities, consultation exercises and dissemination activities, the councils CEO explained this strategy in the following terms: So weve also got to get out the message as to what is actually coming out from engineering and from the physical sciences are anyhow. Not just how its enabled other research to be effective. So weve deliberately tried to go out and make that much more visible.14 Part of this approach is the development of case studies and researcher profiles, publishing brochures and glossy leaflets, sponsoring public events and building web sites that communicate human face of science.15 The message that the council has sought to communicate is that scientists are both real people who are also engaged in research on real problems. Understood simply these strategies aim to counter a persistent image of scientists as disengaged boffins by emphasising an engagement in tractable and recognisable problems. More broadly however, these awareness raising and publicity campaigns are also structured by an attempt to reinforce the value of science and innovation in meeting these challenges, especially in light of arguments about the future of public research funding. For example a research manager at

Interview with the CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. Interview with the CEO, EPSRC, March 2010. 15 See for example: www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/casestudies/ 58
13 14

A New Mandate?

NERC links this challenge-led approach to a broad strategy to influence contemporary public and policy discourse concerning science: Yeah, [environmental] mitigation, adaptation, we have to do something because if we dont were in a lot of bother. That was still something that was more in the scientific community than in the public policy community. And certainly not yet in the publics mind. The public were aware of it but it didnt have there wasnt the scientific force to make the public switch their attitudes or their behaviour immediately.16 The approach here is to utilise direct political intervention alongside forms of public dissemination and communication to reinforce a set of policy messages about the importance of engineering and the physical sciences in meeting contemporary national and global challenges. In the case of the EPSRC, the council has been explicit in reframing its research programmes in manufacturing and health care technologies as challenge-led as part of making a broader political argument about the strategic significance of EPSRC-funded science. Again what we see as part of this strategy is the importance of the definitional work engaged by research councils. In the series of challengeled initiatives launched over the last few years research councils have acted, in largely informal ways, to define key societal challenges and to shape public discourse around these initiatives.

16

Interview with an executive manager, NERC, July 2010.

59

6. Towards a New Mandate?

What then are the social and political challenges facing contemporary research policy? On the one hand efforts to enhance scientific and technological innovation, are increasingly central to the economic strategies of industrialised nations. In the face of fierce international competition and the rise of new global powers, policy makers are increasingly looking to research policy to provide a strategic capability for future technological innovation.1 On the other hand, over the course of the last century, the capacity for scientific and technological innovation to radically transform everyday life has increased almost beyond measure. Indeed, a series of technological risk-based controversies has fundamentally altered the role that scientific and technical expertise play in contemporary public life. Science has became by default not only an informant of public policy, but also a powerful cultural agent, [and] arbiter of public meanings. 2 In these risk controversies and debates about the role of scientific advice and technical expertise it has been these public and civic meanings that have come under sustained critical scrutiny.3

1

Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future," (Washington, D. C.: National Academy of Sciences,Ntaional Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, 2007). 2 R Doubleday and B Wynne, "Despotism and democracy in the United Kingdom: experiments in reframing relations between the state, science and citizens," in Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age, ed. S Jasanoff (MIT Press: Cambridge, M. A., 2011). 3 S Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

A New Mandate?

In this context the challenge facing contemporary research policy is a fundamentally political rather than merely technical one. This challenge concerns the role of research policy in a technological society that is characterised by a multi-faceted relationship between science and society. Roger Pielke Jr. suggests that ultimately, any discussion about science in policy and politics is grounded in visions of democracy.4 Perhaps more than anything else what the recent debates about UK science funding have demonstrated is the way in which research policy and research funding are a filter for a wider set of arguments associated with the role of research and innovation in democratic societies. In a similar fashion, though mostly couched in technical and financial terms, recent debates about levels of public research funding in the UK have functioned as a political site where contending arguments about the public values of science and research are at their most poignant. Commenting on US science funding Daniel Sarewitz comes to a similar conclusion, suggesting that budgetary changes are treated by the science and technology community as surrogates for the well-being of the science enterprise, whereas the interested public considers such changes to be surrogates for progress toward particular societal goals.5 We might regard political debates about research funding as one of the most significant embodiments this process, and as indicative of a broader political struggle over the social and cultural meanings of science and innovation. The research we have presented in this report demonstrates two principal dynamics at work in these debates. Firstly, our research suggests that the efforts of the scientific community to build political support to sustain current levels of research

4

R. A Pielke Jr, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 151. 5 D Sarewitz, "Does science policy exist, and if so, does it matter?: Some observations on the U.S. R&D budget," (Discussion Paper for Earth Institute Science, Technology, and Global Development Seminar, April 8: 2003). 61

A New Mandate?

funding, and defend a broadly-defined research base against calls for greater selectivity and focus have, conversely, also had the effect of reframing what might be thought of as a contemporary social contract for science. In these recent debates it has been the value of maintaining a research base that has been redefined as both inherently valuable and strategically opportune. Secondly, our research demonstrates that this shift in the political justification for public research funding has also had the effect of repositioning the role of research funding bodies. In making the case for a broadlydefined research base the EPSRC has recast its own institutional role from being a research funder to that of an active sponsor of research with a direct stake in developing research leaders in order to deliver long-term impact for the health, prosperity and sustainability of the nation and the world.6 In practical terms the effect of these political arguments about public research funding is that research policy is increasingly being defined in social terms. As we have explored throughout this report, EPSRC strategy is increasingly defined around the notions of research sponsorship and the drive to encourage the UKs best minds to engage with societys most important research problems.7 Similarly the notion of societal challenges now dominates policy thinking regarding long-term multidisciplinary research problems. Our ethnographic and qualitative research has revealed the largely unacknowledged role that research funding bodies play in defining new areas of research, building research communities and framing the social ambitions of new research programmes. As we have argued throughout this report these, typically informal, processes have a significant influence on the nature of scientific practice and the trajectory of new fields of research. However, the

EPSRC, Delivery Plan: 2011-2015 (Swindon: EPSRC, 2011). Ibid. 62
6 7

A New Mandate?

significance of this form of informal definitional work is not confined simply to the negotiation of research questions and issues of nomenclature. Rather this informal work is significant in framing the socio-technical imaginaries that are built into, and come to define, new areas of research. In what follows we outline a series of challenges implied by our research. We ask whether the rechanneling of strategic research funding towards perceived societal challenges will enable a more expansive consideration of the public value of science and innovation? Will the ways such research problems are understood render them open to a range of possible responses that include both scientific and technical alongside social and cultural innovations? In suggesting ways in which research funding bodies might respond to these challenges we outline three findings from our research together with their implications for contemporary research policy. Unpacking Policy Cultures We began this report by considering the political debates about public research funding and the broader reconsideration of the value of scientific research and technological innovation. One of the factors that contributed to the intensely political nature of these debates was that, for a moment in 2008, a wellestablished policy consensus concerning the value of science and innovation, and particularly the value of basic and curiosity driven science, was substantially questioned. Throughout 2008-2009 the potential for reductions to research budgets predicted to be anywhere between 10-30% dominated science policy debate. Given this political challenge, the research we have outlined here has demonstrated the collective capacity of the scientific community to defend existing levels of public research funding. Interventions made by a range of intermediary organisation emphasised the inherent values of basic science and excellence and critically sought to redefine notions of the research base as a strategic
63

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national research capability. These interventions largely succeeded in creating a political alternative to instrumental notions of selection and prioritisation in awarding research budgets, and thus helped to recast the contemporary meaning of both science and the role of public research funding. A notable feature of these debates is the relatively wellestablished terminology in which the problems of public research funding are posed. Notions of basic and curiosity driven science are typically counterpoised against those of political interference, strategic selectivity and focus. As we have explored above, the dichotomy between these two conceptions of science reflects a set of long standing arguments about the relationship between scientific expertise and the institutions of democratic government. What these recent debates show then is the way in which policy making is influenced by a set of quite resilient discourses and narratives. For example, Shackley and Wynne demonstrate the ways in which these kind of cultural discourses are often influential in framing dominant sciencepolicy cultures. 8 These cultures delimit the ways in which contemporary science policy issues are framed and thus shape the range of available policy options and the relationships between actors. Significantly, the results of our research demonstrate that, in response to a changing political context, the scientific community was broadly successful in creatively redefining the research base as a critical national research resource. In this sense, the terminology of basic and curiosity-driven science are characterised by what Pinch and Bijker term interpretive

S Shackley and B Wynne, "Representing uncertainty in global climate change science and policy: boundary-ordering devices and authority," Science, Technology, & Human Values 21, no. 3 (1996). 64
8

A New Mandate?

flexibility.9 These terms are cultural constructed in such a way that they can be put to use in a number of different guises. The critical challenge implied by our research is whether we can innovate ways of opening up these underlying, and dominant, policy narratives in such a way that do not presuppose a dichotomy between the norms of curiosity and scientific autonomy and those of the accountability and responsibility of the research community to address issues of enduring social need.10 Framing Research Agendas Understanding the factors that influence the emergence and development of new scientific and technological research programmes has been one of the most enduring research problems in STS research. Does the appearance of a new set of research questions and objectives simply represent the natural development and maturity of the more established disciplines? Are new programmes of research, in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, merely based on incremental technical advances? Or, alternatively, is the emergence of new research agendas indicative of the structural conditions that sustain the contemporary research enterprise and are they in fact developed because they are deemed strategically significant? Or, is the development of new fields of research indicative of a range of social and cultural factors: the formation of new interdisciplinary research communities together with new fora for scientific collaboration and exchange?

9

T Pinch and W. E Bijker, "The social construction of facts and artifacts: or, How the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other," in Shaping Technology/Building Society, ed. W. E Bijker and J Law (Cambridge, M. A.: The MIT Press, 1992). 10 Work here on responsible innovation is one recent develop that is taking up this challenge. See for example: R Owen and N Goldberg, "Responsible innovation: a pilot study with the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council," Risk Analysis in press, no. 30 (2010). 65

A New Mandate?

Whilst, of course, there is no straightforward or definitive answer to these questions, what our research demonstrates is the constitutive role played by research funding bodies in shaping the development of new research agendas. Our research also demonstrates that this process is not clear-cut. It is not simply a matter of translating policy priorities into research initiatives. Aside from a limited number of targeted investments, the EPSRCs strategy toward both nanotechnology and synthetic biology has largely relied on responsive-mode funding alongside a range of community building initiatives designed to seed novel collaborations. Research council initiatives have therefore been driven by a desire to develop a broad portfolio of research in both fields, in order to maintain the UKs international standing, whilst at the same time demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach against national policy priorities. As we have suggested, research council strategy might also be understood as form of definitional work that has the effect of outlining the boundaries of each field and their specific research goals. In the case of nanotechnology this definitional work is evident in the recent publication of the Councils nanotechnology landscape document. 11 By mapping the portfolio of funded grants into specific sub-themes, and against international comparisons, this approach has the effect of defining the scope and ambition of UK nanotechnology research. The critical point here is that definitional work also has a social function in framing programmatic research goals, mapped against policy expectations. If, as we have suggested, contemporary research policy is increasingly being redefined around the notion of societal challenges the question that remains concerns the degree to

EPSRC, "Nanotechnology Programme," (Swindon: EPSRC, 2009). 66
11

A New Mandate?

which this strategy will also facilitate wider public and political deliberation concerning the nature of these challenges and research goals. Commenting on the development of the concept of grand challenges in UK policy thinking, Wilsdon, Wynne and Stilgoe ask a similar set of questions. They suggest that while identifying a set of long-term challenges is a positive and encouraging sign, they also ask: can this process mark the start of a wider debate about the public value of science? Will it discuss the role of scientific innovation in addressing societys problems, alongside other forms of cultural, political and institutional innovation? And can such discussions be opened up to include a broader range of voices and perspectives?12 Given the ways in which questions related to the public value of science are being asked with increasing frequency, across the spectrum of contemporary research policy, these questions remain highly pertinent. In order respond to the challenges outlined here one implication of our research is that institutional innovation will be necessary, building forms of public deliberation and social scientific insight into the development and articulation of challenge-led initiatives. For example, current programmes of public engagement and broader political deliberation which have helped to unpack the social and ethical dimensions of research in areas such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology are broadly organised around the notion that such technologies may have societal implications that might be better anticipated by early public deliberation. In order to open up questions related to contemporary societal challenges, our research implies that this orientation needs to be rethought. We might, for example, distinguish between the implications of an area of new science and technology and its desired outcomes or research goals thus enabling public and political

12

J Wilsdon, B Wynne, and J Stilgoe, "The Public Value of Science: Or How to Ensure that Science Really Matters," (London: Demos, 2005), 52. 67

A New Mandate?

deliberation in the formative stages of research agenda setting and problem formulation.13 The same approach might be used in order to help frame cross cutting societal challenges in an expansive manner, in a way that is open to a range of disciplinary insights and approaches. From Research Funding to Research Sponsorship The final implication of our research is that the core challenge facing research funding bodies is their capacity to innovate in light of changing circumstances. This capacity is, in turn, influenced by the institutional contexts through which the role of research councils, and other intermediary bodies, are defined and mandated. As we have explored above, in UK policy thinking the role of research councils is defined in relatively formal terms, particularly through an analogy to the Haldane Principle of research council autonomy. Though this principle has been extensively debated in recent years it maintains significant influence in contemporary policy thinking, embodying an institutional expression of the underlying cultural norms of curiosity and scientific excellence. However, as we have explored above, the EPSRC is actively reframing and adapting its institutional role in light of the changing terms of contemporary science and research policy. In an interview the CEO of EPSRC explained the councils new strategy in the following terms: In one of his first meetings that he chaired at council [the chair of EPSRC Council] said As far as I can see the research councils are essentially a slot machine. And as far as the academics are concerned you are their slot

The recent public dialogues conducted by the EPSRC, as part of the councils Nanotechnology Healthcare Grand Challenge are one example where the council utilised public deliberation in the framing of a research programme. See for example, R Jones, "When it pays to ask the public," Nature Nanotechnology 3, no. October 2008 (2008). 68
13

A New Mandate?

machine. They come in and they put their penny, the research grant application, they pull the lever, and if they are lucky three oranges come up and they get their grant. And the slot machine plays no role other than to process the grant, to be the mechanical processor. What it ought to be doing is actually deciding on what sort of players and what sort of application it ought to be playing a more active role rather than a passive one. And, we were moving in that direction if we want to actually change the research that is being done, or the balance, then you cant do that if youre a slot machine.14 The image of the slot machine evokes the intermediary position of research councils. Traditionally conceived as simply a vehicle enabling the responsive generation of scientific excellence, the quotation indicates that the EPSRC now aims to take a more proactive role in shaping national research capacity. In seeking to move from being a research funder to a research sponsor a move that the council acknowledges will represent a significant change to our relationship with those we support15 the question that remains is what principle or mandate will be required in order to sustain and govern this change in the councils institutional role. In their study of Dutch scientific advisory processes Bijker et al. suggest that one of the strengths of a successful advisory body is that it constantly knows how to adapt to the changing social circumstances and contexts, precisely by defining another role for itself in relation to its surroundings and audience.16 What Bijker et al. suggest is that the capacity for intermediary bodies to innovate is conditioned by the relational contexts that define their institutional role. For the EPSRC it is clear that moving

14 15

Interview with CEO of EPSRC, 8 March 2010. EPSRC, Delivery Plan: 2011-2015. 16 Wiebe. E Bijker, Roldan Bal, and Ruud Hendriks, The Paradox of Scientific Authority: The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies (Cambridge, M.A.: The MIT Press, 2009), 140. 69

A New Mandate?

toward a model of research sponsorship entails changing the nature of the councils relationship with three principle audiences: its constituent research community, central government and society more generally. The strategy of the council thus far has been to become more explicit and proactive in each of these relationships particularly in adopting a more active sponsorship role in contributing to contemporary policy debate. Given the broader themes of our work what is of most interest is this public role and how, in becoming more explicit in framing research agendas, institutions such the EPSRC might adopt a more expansive and active role in contributing to public policy. Pielke Jr develops a typology of four idealised roles of scientific expertise in decision-making. He distinguishes between the pure scientist, the issue advocate, the science arbiter and the honest broker of policy alternative. Though the details of this typology extend beyond what we can discuss here, it is his model of the honest broker that we suggest defines a model relevant for understanding the institutional transformation necessary to move from being a research funder to being a research sponsor. For example, Pielke Jr. defines the honest broker in the following terms as engag[ing] in decision-making by clarifying and, at times, seeking to expand the scope of choices available to decision-making and by seeking to place scientific understandings in the context of a smorgasbord of policy options. 17 The research we have presented in this report and particularly the ways in which contemporary research policy is being defined in increasingly social terms suggests that this model of the honest broker is an appropriate expression of what might become a new mandate for research funding bodies. If research into contemporary societal challenges is to be undertaken in a democratically robust manner, what will be required are

Pielke Jr, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, 17. 70
17

A New Mandate?

institutional innovations that open up rather than close down public policy alternatives and research agendas.18 To emphasise our broader argument this can never simply be a technical matter.

A Stirling, ""Opening up" and "closing down": power, participation and pluralism in the social appraisal of technology," Science, technology & Human Values33 2, no. 262-294 (2008). 71
18