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knowledge across disciplines and backgrounds.
• future-facing education: by refocusing learning towards
engagement and change processes that help people to
consider prospects and hopes for the future and to
anticipate, rethink and work towards alternative and
preferred future scenarios.
• inter-cultural learning: by replacing dominant teaching that
promotes only Western worldviews, in favour of experiences
that extend inter-cultural understanding and the ability to
think and work using globally-sensitive frames and methods.
• transformative capabilities: by creating an educational focus
beyond an emphasis solely on knowledge and understanding,
towards agency and competence.
• crossing boundaries: by taking an integrative and systemic
approach to learning, to generate inter-disciplinary, interprofessional
and cross-sectoral learning, to maximize
collaboration and shared perspective, while being
empathetic to bias and differences of perspective.
• social learning: by developing cultures and environments
for learning that harness the emancipatory power of
interactions outside of the formal curriculum and classroom,
particularly through the use of new technologies and
internship activities.
We may be at the beginning of a fresh approach to learning,
to meaningful engagement and to the role of the scientist/
facilitator in the fusion of knowledge and values through
authentic processes of conversing. To get there we need to
learn from sincere efforts to bring in a wider conversation
over innovation and risk.
This raises the matter of the degree to which education,
particularly in schools, but also in higher learning, should
address capacities for open-mindedness, flexibility in coping
with many strands of disciplines and measurements, and
citizenship in the form of a sense of moral responsibility
for the wellbeing of both present and future generations. It
may well be that this is one outcome of this assessment of
innovation and risk, namely preparing all future young people
for a world of coping and improving learned capabilities
of empathy, resilience, compassion, determination, and
adaptation.
The experiences of the GM and radioactive waste
disposal consultations
In 2002/3 the government sponsored an unusually large
scale public debate over the possible commercialisation of
genetically modified crops in the UK. This process, called GM
Nation?, was examined in considerable detail by Tom Horlick-
Jones and colleagues 24 (2007). The government established
an Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission
(2001:12) which argued for a massive public discussion on
the grounds that any public policy on GM should “expose,
respect and embrace the differences of view which exist,
rather than bury them” 25 . The result was a complicated
drama of many scenes and acts where a novel mix of “fact”,
“value” and “learning” unsatisfactorily ill-combined.
The Horlick-Jones study 24 concluded that the GM
Nation? process was well meaning, sincerely attempted,
but ultimately flawed. There was imperfect coordination
between the various stages of scientific assessment and
public engagement. The government’s own decision-making
advisory procedures were complex and confusing. It was
also breathless and rushed. The briefing materials provided
for the public meetings were bland and incomplete. The
broad mass of the mostly disengaged public was not involved
(a Habermasian observation). The process heightened
antagonism rather than reduced it. So the outcome
indicated a higher status of outright opposition to GM than
was observed in the general public from opinion polls (an
observation that is admittedly very time dependent).
These findings reveal the difficulty of creating a
consultative process that meets everyone’s expectations.
This is particularly so because the process was feeling
its way, and there were powerful commercial interests
involved, both in favour (on the biotechnology side) as well
as opposed (on the food retail side). There were important
legal features involving the European Union 24 . All this is of
great interest in the light of a fresh initiative favouring GM
crops in the light of a growing and wealthier population
seeking more environmentally and socially demanding food
supplies in the face of declining biodiversity and climate
change 26 . Even though the stakes are much higher today,
it is unlikely that any rapid decision favouring GM crop
production in the United Kingdom or the European Union
more generally will prove imminent — despite the recent
agreement from the EU’s Environment Council to give
member states more flexibility over GM crop experiments
and production. (This would need to be agreed by the
European Parliament before coming into force.) This
observation underscores the ambivalence with which the
general public regard much of innovation and risk, favouring
the broad benefits but wary of the uncertain long-term
consequences, particularly where traditional science does
not seem to have a clear answer. The case study by Phil
Macnaghten in Chapter 2 endorses these conclusions. He
argues persuasively for a more preparatory institutional
capability to be much more aware and sensitive to various
bodies of amassed bias in anticipation of ‘going public’ with
an innovation.
This anomaly is particularly evident in the long running
and tortuous process regarding the deep disposal of
The GMNation? process
was well meaning,
sincerely attempted,but
ultimately flawed.