Invitation to CONFERENCE
Science and policy in times of multicrisis and dissent:
Issues of framing, authority, evidence – and political-economic power
Date:
Thursday 15 May – Saturday 17 May 2025
The conference will be open to both on-site and online participation.
Location:
Academy of Science, Athens, Greece
Co-organisers:
European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility
Mariolopoulos-Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences
Critical Scientists Switzerland
Funders:
Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer pour le progrès humain
Triodos Foundation
Zukunftsstiftung Landwirtschaft – GLS Treuhand
Conference Registration:
For online and onsite registration visit https://ensser.org/registration/. Onsite registration is also possible via eventbrite
Fee:
We kindly ask all participants to transfer an individually chosen donation to ENSSER
via bank transfer or paypal: https://ensser.org/donate/. We do not want to raise a financial threshold for taking part in the conference, but on the other hand, donations are a very important source of income for our work.
This conference is dedicated to the complex relationships between science, policy and private interests in this age of global multicrisis. The results of the conference will be discussed soon after it with EU politicians and administrators at a workshop in Brussels.
Many scientists claim they are not heard by politicians, while politicians typically claim that their policies and actions are “science-based”. This contradiction deserves further examination, along with the further forces and actors involved nowadays.
Since the mid-twentieth century, science and policy have developed under the growing influence of increasingly powerful and aggressive political-economic interests. As “science” has lost much of its earlier public authority and legitimacy, commercial interests – which have for decades been the biggest funders, owners and beneficiaries of ‘public’, i.e. governmental, including military, scientific R&D – have presented themselves as pursuing only objective, ‘public good’ knowledge and innovation, thus giving new meaning to “science”, while concealing or denying their increasing control of scientific R&D, investments, regulations and innovations.
Scientific advice to policy-makers continues to be hotly contested, especially when political actors, scientists and politicians disagree. However, policy decisions which claim to be justified by reference to scientific advice, often serve short-term industrial and corporate interests rather than, for example, the protection of public and/or environmental health and sustainability. Supposedly open democratic and scientifically informed policy choices are increasingly determined by corporate private choices or presumptions as to what are the main policy issues and challenges anyway, what counts as ‘the public interest‘.
What are the roles of scientific evidence and advice and of corporate and non-commercial societal interests in political decision-making? In what ways do unaccountable political-economic actors, interests and assumptions shape political and scientific assumptions about what is possible and what is needed? Under what conditions can existing public problem-definitions, as well as just decisions on them, be made scientifically and democratically legitimate? How should scientific advisors and policy-makers respond to scientific disagreements? And what can responsible scientists do when governments adopt measures intended to shut down or at least control scientific dissent, when it challenges dominant official narratives?
Questions like these will be at the heart of the three days of reflection at this conference. By promoting open debate and reflection, this conference aims to engage with the plurality of perspectives. It will also examine attempts to polarise and over-simplify debates, which often happens by deploying misinformation and opportunistic selections of experts and evidence. How can ENSSER and its members combat repressive actions towards dissenters, and reopen spaces for debate that other forces have attempted to close? Could scientific determination to recognise complexities and ignorance, naturally also encourage precaution in face of hubristic claims of omniscience and control? In particular, how can such an essential and broad initiative give due space for more emphasis on sustainability, with all its dimensions, including environmental, economic and social (justice, equity, inclusion)?
In this conference we shall examine interactions between politics and science in three areas that clearly differ in the extent of disagreement among scientists, and we will scrutinise the roles of industry and other interests in these areas. Counter to the conventional media and scientific account, there is only rarely consensus among scientists, and even less so when the topics are policy-sensitive. Disagreements and honest debate are key intellectual and normative influences on healthy scientific openness, and on the direction and pace of technoscientific change and innovations. The degree of scientific (dis)agreement varies a lot between different areas of science. Industry often distorts the science it provides to policy-makers. Uncertainties and knowledge-gaps are essential elements of science; yet official scientific advisors to public policy-makers typically portray the available evidence as sufficiently robust to support their conclusions and recommendations. We aim more fully to understand the relationships between scientific, political, and hybrid scientific-and-political considerations in political decision-making.
In the current permacrisis, we cannot afford to forego potential social and technological options which have been ignored, marginalised, or excluded due to their lack of commercial self-interest. Therefore, scientific debates need to be broadened again, not reduced. Politicians may not be expected to take part in scientific deliberations, but when there are competing scientific opinions and policy-relevant uncertainties in the available scientific evidence and interpretations, politicians need to be fully informed about those diversities and uncertainties, actively engage with them, and make democratically accountable decisions about how to respond when facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. There is a politics as well as a science of uncertainties, in which ENSSER is already engaged. The precautionary principle, and more or less precautionary policy options, are often available for policy-makers, to guide them in their decisions; but good science as well as robust democracy, need to uphold their essential role in principle, independent from particular choices.
The conference will result in a report on different approaches, suggestions and possible solutions discussed at the conference. As a general point, ENSSER will support the standpoint that most societal options are not immediate, but involve long-term commitment to radically more modest and societally self-reflective learning, supporting a science which feeds and is fed by those normative principles in nature and society. The conference report will be the basis for an in-person follow-up workshop with members of the European Parliament and their scientific advisors in Brussels. This will provide ENSSER and its partners with an opportunity: to discuss the results of the conference at the heart of the EU decision-making, with those that have the political responsibility to get us out of this permacrisis; to hear the problems they face; and, hopefully, to find trajectories that we can identify and work on, together.
Draft Programme
Thursday 15 May
18:00 – 18:20 Welcoming
- Prof. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati, Medical School of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Chair of ENSSER and Secretary of the Board of Mariolopoulos Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences
- Christos Zerefos, Secretary General of the Academy of Athens
18:20 – 20:00 Round Table: Science in a time of permacrisis – the roles of science in political decision-making, and of politics in scientific decision-making
Moderation: Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, retired from Institute of Integrative Biology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland
- Larissa Bombardi, Department of Geography, University of São Paulo, Brazil (on leave) and Visiting Researcher at CESSMA (Centre d’études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques), Programme PAUSE, Université de Paris, France
- Giuseppe Longo, Centre Cavaillès (République des Savoirs), CNRS and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
- Ignacio Chapela, Dept. of Environmental Science, University of California Berkeley, USA
- Ricarda Steinbrecher, EcoNexus, Oxford, UK
- Emeritus Prof. Vyvyan Howard, Professor of Bioimaging, Biomedical Sciences Institute, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
- Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati, Medical School of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Chair of ENSSER and Secretary of the Board of Mariolopoulos Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences
Friday 16 May
10:00 – 10:05 Morning welcome and information
- Prof. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati
10:05 – 13:45 Session 1: Political Economy of Science and Political Decision
- Moderation: Prof. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati
10:05 – 11:00 How has science come to be recognised and institutionalised as a policy resource in the past 80 years?
- Emeritus Prof. Brian Wynne, Professor of Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK
11:00 – 11:55 Under what conditions can the interactions of scientific and political considerations in policy-making be both scientifically and democratically legitimate?
- Emeritus Prof. Erik Millstone, Emeritus Professor of Science Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, UK
11:55 – 12:10 Coffee Break
12:10 – 13:05 What is the role of the economy in regulating the relationships between science and political decision-making?
- Irina Castro, University of Coimbra, Portugal
13:05 – 13:45 Discussion Round: Knowledge Transfer for Policy in times of crises – who selects knowledge and scientists, and when?
- Speakers of session 1
13:45 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 18:50 Session 2: Illustrative examples of science – policy interactions
Moderation:
- Ignacio Chapela, Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California Berkeley, USA
- David Gee, Centre for Pollution Research and Policy, Brunel University, London
14:30 – 15:30 Dissent: The case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and New Genomic Techniques (NGTs)
- Ricarda Steinbrecher, EcoNexus, Oxford, UK
15:30 – 16:30 Relative consensus: The case of Climate Change
- James Skea, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
16:30 – 16:50 Coffee Break
16:50 – 17:50 No debate yet: The case of soil science
- Andrea Beste, Agricultural scientist, graduate geographer and soil expert, Mainz, Germany
- Rob Blakemore, Soil ecologist, Australia
17:50 – 18:50 Three case studies: (20 min. each including questions)
- Ignorant by design: Regulatory science, comitology and the agrochemical industry – Dr. Barbara Berardi, Director of Research and Advocacy, Pollinis, France
- Court ruling demands the South African government to apply the precautionary principle in GMO approval requests – Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, Agroecologist, retired from Institute of Integrative Biology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland
- How to obstruct critical science: the Bonus Eventus files – Lighthouse Reports (speaker TBD)
Saturday 17 May
9:00 – 9:05 Morning welcome and information
- Prof. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati
9:05 – 10:35 Session 3: Roads to follow for a more fruitful science-policy relationship
Moderation: Diederick Sprangers, Scientific Coordinator of ENSSER
9:05 – 9:35 Why we need policies ‘based on the best scientific knowledge available’ and not ‘science based’ policies
- Christine von Weizsäcker, Advisory Board of the Federation of German Scientists and Scientific Committee of the German Society on Human Ecology, Germany
9:35 – 10:05 Why ‘science’ as currently conceived is often part of the problem, and how it could become part of the solution
- Ephraim Poertner, Critical Scientists Switzerland, Affiliated Researcher, Political Geography, University of Zurich
10:05 – 10:35 [Title TBD]
- John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, USA
10:35 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:45 Round Table: What roads can be followed?
Moderation:
- Ephraim Pörtner (TBC), Critical Scientists Switzerland, associated researcher in Political Geography at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern
- Irina Castro, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Panel:
- Emeritus Prof. George Chrousos, Professor of Pediatrics and Endocrinology and former chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Athens University
- Petros Varelidis, General Secratery of Ministry of the Environment (TBC)
- Angelika Hilbeck, Agroecologist, retired from Institute of Integrative Biology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland
- Andrea Beste, Agricultural scientist, graduate geographer and soil expert
- John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University, USA
- David Gee, Centre for Pollution Research and Policy, Brunel University, London
- Aude Lapprand, Physical chemist, Sciences Citoyennes, France
Including discussion
12:45 – 13:00 Closing
- Prof. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati
13:00 Optional Lunch
Workshop, Brussels: Date to be determined, onsite only
A report will be written with the conclusions and recommendations from the conference about improving the relationship between science and policy. This report will be presented by ENSSER to EU politicians, administrators and their scientific advisors in a workshop to be held in Brussels some time after the conference. One or more of them will be asked to comment on the report. This will be followed by a discussion of the report, with some of the speakers of the conference. The workshop will last one afternoon.