Bridging the Expert and Citizen Divide: Integrating Public Deliberation to Inform NASA's Asteroid Initiative
Abstract
The demand for public engagement in upstream science and technology is fast becoming mainstream. From the National Academies to the European Commission, from geoengineering to gene editing, from artificial intelligence to synthetic biology—there is a growing recognition of the socio-technical nature of the inherent challenges and a variety of calls for earlier and sustained engagement with diverse stakeholders and the general public. Despite a significant increase in the number and sophistication of approaches, institutional and cultural barriers remain, particularly in linking techno-scientific discourse with socio-political discourse. We will report on a 2014 study to use Participatory Technology Assessment (pTA), a method for eliciting informed, deliberative, diverse, and representative citizen views prior to making decisions about science and technology, to inform upstream decisions concerning NASA's Asteroid Initiative. In partnership with NASA, the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network conducted pTA forums in Boston and Phoenix to assess citizens' preferences and values about potential options for asteroid detection, mitigation, and retrieval and the deployment of the Capability Driven Framework as a planning instrument for a journey to Mars. We describe the three-step trans-disciplinary research process applied for (a) issue framing and deliberation design, (b) content development and participant recruitment, and (c) value assessments and results integration. We present result highlights, describe how they were used, and what kind of impact they had on decisions made by NASA. We discuss the influence this project had on subsequent initiatives by NOAA for climate resilience planning and by DOE for nuclear waste management. We conclude with our thoughts on (i) a new institutional model and (ii) research, application and adaptation opportunities going forward focusing on the role pTA can play to bridge the divide between societal needs and experts decision-making.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.U42A..08F
- Keywords:
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- 0825 Teaching methods;
- EDUCATION;
- 6349 General or miscellaneous;
- POLICY SCIENCES;
- 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES