What do civil society organisations expect from participation in science? Lessons from Germany and Spain on the issue of GMOs

Maria Paola Ferretti and Vincenzo Pavone

Science and Public Policy, 2009, vol. 36, issue 4, 287-299

Abstract: Recent debates in science and technology studies, as well as more practical approaches to science policy both at national and European level, have stressed the relevance of citizen participation in the field of science. This paper investigates what some of the key actors in this debate, civil society organisations, expect from participation. The paper presents two case studies of civil society participation in the field of novel biotechnologies in Germany and in Spain. Despite the differences between the experiences of participation in these two countries, our study shows that current institutional approaches, which are inspired by the ‘democratisation of expertise’ perspective and set up essentially at the ‘downstream’ level, seem less promising than ‘upstream’ models of participation, which, in contrast, appear more meaningful from a ‘co-production of science’ framing. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.3152/030234209X436527 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:scippl:v:36:y:2009:i:4:p:287-299

Access Statistics for this article

Science and Public Policy is currently edited by Nicoletta Corrocher, Jeong-Dong Lee, Mireille Matt and Nicholas Vonortas

More articles in Science and Public Policy from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().