(Arlington, VA) After a day discussing Civic Science at the NSF, I am inclining to this conceptual model:

Note that none of these circles is conterminous with any other. I believe, for example, that one can be a good citizen in a context (such as a church) that is not and should not be democratic. I believe that some valuable science is not done in public or with the public, although it must be justified to the public if they are asked to pay for it. And I believe that there are worthy aspects of civic life that are not scientific. Nevertheless, the three circles overlap, and given our particularly dire problems–matters like the climate crisis–a democratic civic science must be expanded.

See also is all truth scientific truth? and is science republican (with a little r)?.

(Arlington, VA) I am at the National Science Foundation for a meeting on Civic Science. According to the background materials,

Civic science is a method of inquiry into important contemporary issues that enriches democracy by bringing citizens from all backgrounds and disciplines – not just scientists – together in shared projects that analyze current conditions, envision a better future, and devise a pathway to that future. Civic science is both an approach to generating knowledge and a democratic practice. In civic science, scientists express democratic citizenship through their scientific work: they engage in democratic world-building efforts as scientists. … The fundamental scientific question of “how does the world work” is situated in the context of democratic inquiry into a critical question—“What should we do in the face of complex problems?” Civic science, thus, integrates its work closely with the “purposive” disciplines of arts, humanities, and design, which ask fundamental questions about what is good and just, encouraging us to envision and debate ways of relating and living as civic agents.

Civic science is like “transdisciplinary” science (e.g., NRC 2014), but expands and enriches such frameworks by closely linking the practice of science to democracy and to other ways of knowing and learning from arts, humanities and design traditions and fields. Similarly, Civic Science is like community based participatory research (CBPR) and social movement-based “citizen science” in that it focuses on complex, pressing, real-world problems, and values diverse ways of knowing. However, in ways that usefully challenge theory and practice in CBPR, civic science intentionally and explicitly aims to promote democracy by framing scientific inquiry as an opportunity for participants to develop their capacity to work across differences, create common resources, and negotiate a shared democratic way of life. …

Civic science draws from research and theory in three areas: science and technology studies (STS), civic studies, and complex systems theory. Together, they provide the rationale for civic science and point to the benefits of pursuing civic science as an approach for furthering knowledge and democracy.

 

The dominant theory of democracy used to be a sovereignty theory. A “people” would consist of a bounded group, all of whose members would have equal rights to discuss and decide the issues that came before them. Such groups might be nation-states bounded by international borders, but they might also be organizations or associations; they were sovereign to the extent that they could make decisions about categories of issues. They would thus exercise what the French Revolutionary theorist Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the ancients,” meaning the right “to deliberate, in a public space, about war and peace, to ratify treaties of alliance with foreigners, to vote laws, pronounce decisions, examine the accounts, actions, and management of officials, to compel them to appear before the whole people, to accuse them, to condemn or acquit them.”

Two problems arise for all such sovereign groups: 1) they may not have a legitimate moral basis to exclude outsiders from their decisions, and 2) they may not have actual control over the situations that they confront. For example, the US may not have a legitimate moral justification to exclude Germans from influencing our government’s surveillance policy, which also affects Germany; and the US government cannot control capital markets or pollution flows that cross its borders.

These problems have become more severe and more evident in a highly interconnected world. A traditional justification for the sovereignty theory presumed that nation states could safeguard the interests of their own members without impinging often on others. But, as my friend Archon Fung writes, “If there once was a time when the laws of a nation-state could adequately protect the fundamental interests of its citizens, many argue that such time is past.” He and others argue that we should shift from a sovereignty theory to a “theory of affected interests,” or at least add the latter to our understanding of democracy.

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This video from Frontiers of Democracy 2014 is my best effort to summarize my book We Are the Ones … in 9 minutes and 39 seconds. It presents the book as an effort to answer the problem that was most on my mind during the conference–how to achieve leverage over large systems while retaining the human relationships and sense of personal agency that are most evident when we work together in small voluntary groups.