Finding balance in science, values

UNBIASED DATA: The issues on which governments need science advice " such as urbanisation, climate change, obesity, disaster management and epidemics such as Ebola " are not simple and there is no single solution or answer. Here healthworkers wash their hands after taking blood samples from Ebola victims in Monrovia, Liberia. Picture: REUTERS

UNBIASED DATA: The issues on which governments need science advice " such as urbanisation, climate change, obesity, disaster management and epidemics such as Ebola " are not simple and there is no single solution or answer. Here healthworkers wash their hands after taking blood samples from Ebola victims in Monrovia, Liberia. Picture: REUTERS

Published Mar 2, 2016

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Sarah Wild

SCIENCE is often held up as a panacea for South Africa’s problems: the data will tell you whether the country can afford free university tuition or how to conserve water, science will instruct us in how to curb the obesity epidemic spreading among our citizens, or create the employment vital to quality of life.

But an international meeting of science academies in Hermanus this week said while science is important in decision-making, it cannot fix the world’s problems – but decisions and policy are poorer without it. “Policy is rarely determined by evidence alone,” said Peter Gluckman, chief science adviser to the prime minister of New Zealand. Public opinion, political ideology, fiscal objectives and obligations, and diplomatic issues form the foundation of government policy. “But better policy is made if robust scientific evidence is used.”

The challenge of science advice, Gluckman said, is hubris. “Scientists think they have all the answers, think they are above citizens, while policymakers think they don’t need scientists when they have Wikipedia.”

In South Africa, there are many examples of debates that were allowed to rage (and sometimes actions taken) without the tempering influence of evidence: the visa regulations that hurt tourism, shale gas exploration, nuclear energy, among countless others.

“In every nation, the key issue is the maturity of the relationship between science, science enterprise, society and the politics through which society speaks,” said Khotso Mokhele, science adviser to Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor. The French Academy of Science was founded 350 years ago, Britain’s Royal Society 356 years ago and Brazil’s is celebrating its centenary. There is a “maturity of relationship” between the academies and their governments, Mokhele said.

This year marks the 20-year anniversary of the Academy of Science of SA (Assaf), which hosted the InterAcademies Partnership conference on science advice. The relationships between science and the majority of South African society, and science and the country’s democratic government are comparatively new.

In her opening address, Pandor said when the ANC came into power in 1994, “we had occasion to discuss this matter of advice”.

“As a new government, we were essentially entering a political leadership of government, not having ever been part of government,” she said. There were advisers in the public service, but they “were the actors who had implemented the racist policies of apartheid”.

“The question is how can you work with these public servants whose advice you might not call trustworthy,” Pandor said.

“In science, we decided we would establish institutions that would provide us with science advice.”

These include the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Assaf.

But, as in other forms of advising, the major challenge in science advice is trust.

Gluckman cited two types of science advisers: the honest broker, who offers the data without pushing an agenda, and the science advocate, who believes that government should act in a certain way – whether in terms of their scientific agenda or the role of science in society. “The second you’re perceived as just a lobbyist for the public science system, your role as a science advisor declines,” he said.

But even when science advice is folded into decision-making, the reality is that science does not have all the answers.

The issues on which governments need science advice – such as urbanisation, climate change, obesity, disaster management and epidemics such as Ebola – are not simple and there is no single solution or answer. Speaking in the context of environmental management, United Nations Environmental Programme chief scientist Professor Jacqueline McGlade said: “Twentieth century science thinking isn’t going to help us.”

In the past, science (now referred to as “normal science”) was viewed as a linear, a process of theorising, experimentation and observation with the goal of reaching a definitive answer. But the theory has evolved into something called “post-normal science”. This is scientific enquiry that acknowledges its limitations: the “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decision urgent”, according to the researchers Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, who first wrote about it in 1991. Scientists can no longer presume to have definitive answers and silver bullets.

“Post-normal science is the heart of where governments rely on science… (The issues, such as) urbanisation, ageing populations, climate change, are not simple in the eyes of science, neither will science solve all the issues, but that is where science is needed,” Gluckman said.

These are also the areas where science meets value systems. Science is an exercise in trying to strip away values in order to generate empirical, unbiased data and information. But policy is all about values, and reflecting the values and public opinion of citizens.

Many of the contested “science” debates are actually value debates, such as climate change, genetically modified organisms, reproductive technologies and stem cells. “We pretend there is a debate about science, instead of about values,” Gluckman said.

“But if science fails to recognise the large values components (of these debates), and a lot of unknowns, then governments become sceptical about science.”

South Africa has committed itself to growing its science base and research outputs, but it will take time – more than its democracy’s 22 years – to build the trust in society and government that will see science included in policy-making. Even then, scientific evidence should inform policy, not be the basis of policy – because that assumes that science has all the answers, and it does not.

l Wild was a guest of the Academy of Science of South Africa

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