Democratising Technology - reclaiming science for development
3 Lessons from the experiences
The nine experiences demonstrate the different roles that individuals and organisations can have when attempting, or claiming to attempt, to democratise technology. The so-called 'bottom-up' initiatives that arise from people's movements, such as Brazil's Landless Workers Movement or India's People of the Forest, inevitably produce very different opportunities for people to articulate their views compared to 'top-down' processes run by governments, private foundations or international development agencies.
Whoever initiates it, any process that attempts to increase the democratic control of technology must include common-sense safeguards to ensure that the process is procedurally fair, and seen to be so. Such safeguards should ensure, for example, that no single participant dominates the discussion. Practices must also achieve certain basic levels of procedural competence, in that participants are able to undertake an informed discussion that allows them to reflect on their own views together with those of others. The democratic nature of such initiatives can further be enhanced by considering the following five issues.
Is the objective to give participants opportunities to take control of issues that concern them fundamentally?
All the experiences contained strategies for helping marginalised people wrest some of the control from decision-makers who had previously evaded accountability. The ventures which involved agricultural extension work (Farmer Field Schools and Chivi), working conditions in technology manufacture (Phase II and Seagate), brick making (Shambob), forest resource extraction (Girijan Deepika), foreign aid policies (Prajateerpu), medical research funding (Quality Research in Dementia) and land reform (Landless Workers Movement) all stand in sharp contrast to conventional social research which typically aims merely to provide data for researchers and policy-making elites.
In assembling the members of the citizens' juries, organisers of such initiatives are increasingly aware of the need to allow the jurors to create their own political space that they then might use independently of the jury process. Consequently, participants in the Indian, Brazilian and Zimbabwean juries were not plucked off the street or from voter records, as in most opinion poll, focus group and conventional citizens' jury processes. Instead they all have had some involvement with, or membership of, some kind of community group. Consequently, most have some baseline knowledge which helps them to participate. Working together with existing groups and identifying participants who are in contact with these groups means that if people want to pursue further the issues raised in the jury, they are more likely to have the opportunity, and support, to do so.
Is the initiative under collective rather than hierarchical control?
Approaches vary in the extent to which non-specialists, as opposed to scientific or administrative elites, are able to control the political space that is represented by an initiative to democratise technology.
An indication of the amount of control non-specialists can exert over a process is the extent to which they are allowed to interrogate their sources of information, rather than being merely the passive recipients of briefings and specialist testimonies. In a jury process an easy measure of this is the proportion of time that is devoted to the presentation of witness evidence versus the amount of time allowed for the interrogation of witnesses by the jurors. In Prajateerpu the ratio was roughly half and half, which appeared to be enough for the jurors to inform themselves about the factors pertinent to their deliberations. Although applications for dementia research funding came from scientists, the Quality Research in Dementia programme ensured that non-specialists had their questions answered in non-technical language before other scientists cross-questioned research applicants.
The development process for most new technologies still uses a model unchanged since the nineteenth century - first, optimise the technology, then check user acceptance, and finally examine any regulations governing its use. Given the investments made in the earlier stages, it becomes difficult to re-design a technology even when potentially harmful social effects have been subsequently identified. Hence, when faced with opposition to a new technology, policy-makers are forced into defending the technology, a technocratic managerial response in which potential social and environmental impacts, identified outside the narrow design process, are regarded as problems of user acceptance.
A refusal to involve non-specialists in research funding priorities and the technology design process - often called 'upstream' engagement - is a common failing in most systems of government. In some instances, however, such as the QRD network, systems have been designed to allow non-specialists to influence how research and technology development is funded, thereby allowing the priorities of non-specialists to shape the future of science and technology in this area.
In the case of a controversial technology such as genetic modification, a wider understanding of the interlinkages between biotechnology, corporate control, and local power structures is more likely to be achieved by taking a scenario approach than by merely asking a jury to say yes or no to a particular technology. In Prajateerpu, for example, the jury was able to compare and evaluate three contrasting scenarios, each being the product of a series of interdependent values, assumptions and predictions. GM crops were thus not judged in isolation - they were evaluated as an integral part of a wider system or development model. For example, the jurors used their experience of high-yielding varieties to critique GM crops when they were told that GM technology allows farmers to do away with pesticides. "If that really is the case, why would the pesticide companies allow GM to come in?" one juror responded, disbelievingly.
The assessment of any initiative must include an examination of the extent to which its focus is on generating technologies that address future societal needs, rather than the 'end of pipe' assessment of an already-designed technology. However, democratically organised campaigns such as Phase II also have an important role in ensuring that the conditions under which existing technologies are applied are those with the greatest benefit, and the minimum risk, to workers and the rest of society.
Is adult literacy necessarily a pre-condition in the short term?
Local circumstances will determine the extent to which adult literacy is a necessary pre-condition in any process of democratising technology. The Landless Workers Movement and People of the Forest (Girijan Deepika) used adult literacy programmes over several years to help thousands of people from marginalised groups to influence the forces that impact on their lives. Aimed at a particular policy time-frame, the Prajateerpu hearings occurred over a few days and were explicitly focused on fostering deliberation among nineteen largely non-literate marginalised rural people, using a range of information providers who were critically interrogated by the jurors.
Often marginalised communities find that longer-term processes of building their capacity to use basic techniques of alphabetical and numerical literacy are an important part of achieving lasting policy changes and holding decision-makers to account. Rather than being a decision taken by outsiders, it should be for those people who have been excluded from power to assess whether their interests will best be served by a short-term interrogation of new external knowledge followed by advocacy. At a larger scale, societies need information and knowledge to be made available to a wide range of groups in order for them to be able to assess potential new technologies from varying perspectives.
Is there sensitivity to gender and other inequalities within the process?
Marginalised groups such as women, those living in poverty and minority ethnic groups may be excluded if it is assumed that participants all have the same capacity to articulate their views and the same opportunities to attend meetings. There are many ways in which gender and social class can be taken into account.
For the Indian, Zimbabwean and Brazilian citizens' juries a space was provided in which people who might otherwise have felt threatened by sharing their knowledge and experience with others could do so. Within these environments of mutual support and empathy, perspectives from the social and natural sciences as well as the knowledge of farmers and local resource users could be confronted, negotiated and combined to develop policy recommendations.
Compared to the jurors, specialist witnesses are generally wealthier and better educated, and often represent powerful organisations or social classes. Despite these asymmetrical relationships, interactions between specialist witnesses and the jurors can be made balanced and mutually respectful by sensitive facilitation. At times, however, jurors in Prajateerpu reported feeling undermined by what some specialist witnesses said or implied. Power relationships between the more technocratic witnesses and the largely illiterate yet highly knowledgeable farmers were played out repeatedly during some of the hearings.
Despite their tremendous achievements in changing power relations, the Landless Workers Movement and the Indonesian Farmer Field Schools have acted with little regard for gender hierarchies within local groups. Both organisations are now attempting to tackle the tendency for male domination in group settings.
Are there safeguards against domination by the agendas of a single stakeholder?
In any attempt to democratise technology it is important to ensure that a variety of different interest groups - including both people's movements and government policy-makers - have joint oversight of the process and that a diversity of perspectives is available to participants. This aspect is often neglected, especially by government-funded processes. Diverse control of a process can be ensured by drawing on several sources of funding. The selection of at least two funding sources which have vested interests in visions that appear to be in conflict with each other can be a good way of ensuring balance.
On issues where there is a high level of controversy it is particularly important to ensure the quality and validity of the knowledge generated. These have been central concerns for those coalitions organising citizens' juries on GM. It is vital for such groups to recognise that their subjectivity and world view could potentially influence their actions as researchers and their interpretations of events. Four primary safeguards were therefore built into the Indian, Zimbabwean and Brazilian processes, with the explicit aim of promoting diverse control and transparency: a broadly-based 'oversight panel', a range of media observers and reporters, and a comprehensive set of video archives.
Table 1 summarises a provisional assessment of the relative performance of the initiatives described in this document, based on the extent to which the processes were able to:
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link knowledge and power;
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ensure the competence of the process; and
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create alliances for change.
These three broad criteria can be used to assess the democratic credentials of the initiatives discussed.
