Sheila Jasanoff abstract

The world’s written constitutions scarcely mention science in explicit terms, and yet science exercises power on a par with the constitutionally designated institutions of government. Perhaps most obviously, science constrains the form and scope of state action through its power to declare matters of fact and to enable technologies. Yet, as shown by decades of research in science and technology studies, public science is itself socially and politically constructed through rules of delegation, deference, and accountability that are seldom openly acknowledged or systematically analyzed in legal or political theory. In this talk, I will draw on examples from the governance of environmental risk and the biosciences and biotechnologies to explore the constitutional place of science in contemporary democracies. It emerges from this analysis that the uses and accommodations of science in public reason form a distinctive element of national political culture. Institutionally mediated relations between science and politics affect what democratic publics accept as evidence, how they perceive the common good, and how they contemplate their futures. Science in this way participates not only in making societies as they are but in shaping imaginaries of societies as they ought to be.