The institutional embeddedness of ethics advice

Author: Prof. Dr. Holger Straßheim

This is Part 1 of Prof Staßheim’s reflections of international comparative analysis of ethics bodies and committees. Part 2 will focus on Civic Epistemologies.

Probably one of the most pressing problems within recent studies of ethics advice and expertise concerns the institutional and cultural embeddedness of science-policy relations. In this piece I discuss what this notion of embeddedness means in relation to ethics advice and expertise, and why it has been considered a problem. 

Embeddedness is a problem because it complicates one of the ever-recurring questions of ethical expertise: ‘What counts as good ethical advice?’. Many researchers have been searching for an answer to this question by formulating common standards and identifying good practices. Current studies suggest, however, that the understandings and styles of policymaking and their ethical foundations vary across national contexts, jurisdictions and time (Giuliani 2023). 

International and intersectoral comparisons point to a broad diversity of standards and practices even within Europe. As a result of these institutional and cultural differences ethics advice appears in an astonishing variety of shapes. Instead of ‘one best way’, there seems to be a broad spectrum of institutional constellations, of various understandings of ethical expertise and contexts of science-policy interaction (Wilson et al. 2023). 

Ethical advice differs fundamentally in terms of how to produce and validate ethical principles and professional knowledge, how to evaluate their policy relevance, and how to translate them into administrative practices and decisions. This epistemological and political diversity of approaches and understandings exists partly within national and local contexts, but even more so across countries and regions.

To capture the variety of science-policy interactions it might be helpful to take a look at the more general but very fruitful classifications and typologies of advisory arrangements that have been presented over the past decades (the following is based on Jung, Korinek, and Straßheim 2014). 

National and local policy styles

Probably one of the earliest approaches distinguishes between national and local ‘policy styles’ (Richardson 1982). At its core, it emphasizes the historically evolved institutions, procedural rules and politico-administrative cultures characterizing governmental and advisory systems. For example, Wagner and Wollmann suggest distinguishing between an active interventionist, a reactive, a conflict-laden, and a consensual pattern of engagement of social scientists in policy research and consulting (Wagner and Wollmann 1986). 

In a similar vein, Renn (1995) presents an influential and often-cited cross-country typology of three different styles of policy advice: an adversarial or pluralist style of science-policy interactions (e.g. the US); an embodied or service-based style (e.g. the UK); and a corporatist style (e.g. Germany, Sweden, partly the Netherlands). 

As Wagner and Wollmann (1986, p. 14) acknowledge, however, the notion of policy-styles is limited because it reifies the overall characteristics of ideal types and therefore notoriously fails to capture the intricacies of advisory practices, the cross-sectoral variations and the long-term changes within and between these systems. 

Models of science-policy interaction 

Since then, questions on the coordination and demarcation between science and policy have gained importance. Wittrock (1987) distinguishes between eight models of science-policy interaction (enlightenment model, classical bureaucratic model, technocratic model, engineering model, policy learning model, social problem-solving model, adversary model and dispositional model) depending on:

• differences or similarities between the operational logics of science and policy,
• strong or weak interactions between both spheres, 
• and the relative primacy of one of the spheres.

Building on Wittrock, Hoppe conceptualizes the production of knowledge at the science-policy nexus as a problem of boundary setting and emphasizes the ‘frictions, chafing and clashes between these models’ within boundary arrangements at different levels and across policy areas (Hoppe 2005, p. 212).

Insights from critical policy studies and science, technology and society studies

Both critical policy studies (CPS) as well as science, technology, and society studies (STS) have provided fruitful insights to further develop the comparative research on expertise and policy advice. Both fields challenge the belief that science can be ‘a value-free, technical project’ (Fischer and Gottweis 2012, p. 2)and that it is ‘an autonomous ‘republic’ that can be separated from politics’ (Beck 2015). 

Instead, they seek to ‘understand the relationship between the empirical and the normative’ (Fischer and Gottweis 2012, p. 2) as they are configured in processes of ‘the co-production of science and the social order’ (Jasanoff 2004). 

Expertise and policy advice are understood as being embedded ‘in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions’ (Jasanoff 2004, p. 3). 

Both CPS and STS assume that there are distinctive cultural and discursive contexts of policy expertise and evidence-production. By comparing how such ‘civic epistemologies’ (Jasanoff 2005) or ‘policy epistemics’(Fischer and Gottweis 2012) shape the ways policy-relevant knowledge is produced, publicly justified and translated into policymaking, they hope to find answers to the question of why understandings of evidence vary significantly.  In the next blog post we will take a look in more detail at this notion of ‘civic epistemologies’ as a conceptual tool informing how we might go about comparing and analysing ethics advisory systems in different national contexts. We find out some interesting differences between the UK and Germany.

Bibliography

Fischer, Frank, and Herbert Gottweis, eds. 2012. The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. “The idiom of co-production.” In States of Knowledge. The co-production of science and social order, edited by Sheila Jasanoff, 1-12. London/New York: Routledge.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.

Giuliani, Marco. 2023. “Policy-taking styles: a typology and an empirical application to anti-Covid policies.”  Journal of European Public Policy:1-25. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2188891.

Hoppe, Robert. 2005. “Rethinking the science-policy nexus: from knowledge utilization and science technology studies to types of boundary arrangements.”  Poiesis & Praxis 3 (3):199-215.

Jung, Arlena, Rebecca-Lea Korinek, and Holger Straßheim. 2014. “Embedded expertise: a conceptual framework for reconstructing knowledge orders, their transformation and local specificities.”  Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences 27 (4):398-419.

Richardson, Jeremy, ed. 1982. Policy Styles in Western Europe. London: Allen and Unwin.

Wagner, Peter, and Hellmut Wollmann. 1986. Patterns of Engagement of Social Scientists in Policy Research and Policy-Consulting – Some Cross-National Considerations, WZB Discussion Papers P 86-3. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin.

Wilson, James, Jack Hume, Cian O’Donovan, and Melanie Smallman. 2023. “Providing ethics advice in a pandemic, in theory and in practice: A taxonomy of ethics advice.”  Bioethics n/a (n/a). doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13208.