Integrating expert and public input into policy design
In lieu of a post, here is an assignment from my "Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society" course at Berkeley.
In lieu of an actual post, I thought I’d post an assignment prompt for my “Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society” course that I worked on last year (and plan to re-use this year).
Section 1 lays out the rationale behind the assignment; section 2 is the actual assignment prompt that students see; and section 3 is a list of references that students have to use.
Any and all feedback would be most welcome! Anything from suggestions on how to improve the assignment or pointers to more references or anything else that you think of. Please leave any feedback in the comments! Or email me at shreeharsh at gmail dot com.
Special thanks to my cohort in the 2023-24 Lecturer Teaching Fellows program at UC-Berkeley who gave me some great suggestions to improve this as well as my GSIs in Fall 2023, Bethany Smith and Sam Hilkey.
Rationale
This is the final assignment and corresponds to the third unit of the course which is titled “Science and Policy.” As many readers of this post probably know already, we live in a time when science has become a big part of policy-making process. Want to build a nuclear plant? Want to build a pipeline? Want to set immigration policy? The policy-making process on many of these decisions involves doing studies and making at least some decisions based on those studies. But that opens up a bigger question: the point of the policy-making process is to align all the different and fractious interest groups who have different ideas about the project. And these disagreements often find their ways into the expert discourse as well: experts disagree all the time when it comes to questions of public importance.
As the sociologist Gil Eyal has written, this sort of publics-experts disagreement is often written about as a “crisis of expertise.” But what it is really about, Eyal says, is that governments of developed countries turned to “science” to make decisions about public problems because they hoped that the science would dissolve the many public fractious disagreements. Instead, this “scientization of politics” led to the “politicization of science” as public disagreements were pushed into the expert domain. As Eyal puts it: “the two processes reinforce and entangle one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture.”
Which still leaves the question: what’s the right policy-making process that gives due importance to public disagreements and expert disagreements and which also is capable of reaching a decision? Through the class, students learn quite a bit about the interaction between science and policy as it has played out in the US and Europe. Some of the things they learn are:
Publics are always divided. Political action always involves trade-offs. There are very rarely clear heroes and villains.
Trust is complicated in general and trust in experts even more so. Trusting experts requires both that the experts make their reasoning clear but also that they don’t make it too clear.
Issues can be scientized and politicized; neither option necessarily reduces conflict.
Experts are not disinterested actors; but not because they have been bought by corporations or because they are leftist radicals. Experts are not disinterested because they come to issues through the lens of their expertise.
There are multiple ways of integrating public input and expert advice; the answer is not that the public needs to be educated about science. For example, political arrangements in Germany are consensus-seeking while the United States favors adversarial mechanisms. Both have their pros and cons.
Students apply these insights in the context of a real, authentic problem: the regulatory approval of Waymo’s robotaxi service in the East Bay. This means that some of the ideas discussed in class (through examples from other regulatory controversies) don’t just stay abstract; students really need to apply them to a concrete problem. In this case, I was able to find a problem that is truly local to the Bay Area. Waymo robotaxis are already ubiquitous on San Francisco streets and Waymo is in negotiations to have them out in the East and South Bay and is doing trials to see how self-driving vehicles might navigate freeways.
Assignment prompt
In this assignment, you will play the role of a city government servant. You are employed by the city but are not an elected official. You do answer ultimately to elected officials (and through them, to their constituents, the residents of the city) but your job is not at their mercy.
The self-driving car company Waymo has recently applied to your city (as part of their application to a cluster of cities in the East Bay) for a permit to run a pilot version of their self-driving taxi service in the East Bay (see the map above).
You have been tasked by your elected officials to work with other similarly-tasked officials from East Bay cities to design a policy-making (or decision-making) process in which information will be gathered, relevant interest groups and stakeholders have a chance to articulate their views, and questions created for relevant experts to answer. The process should be no more than 6 months long.
Your first step--and the goal of this assignment--is to write a memo describing the policy-making process you will use: you need to describe both the broader values and underlying philosophy that the policy-making process is an expression of as well as describe specific details (such as policy options and information-gathering exercises).
Your memo is addressed to the elected officials in your city. Do not assume that they have taken this class or that they are familiar with the details of self-driving cars so your job is to explain to them both the problem you are trying to solve and the solution (i.e., policy-making process) you are proposing.
Your memo will be private for now but remember that as a government official, it can be requested by any member of the public through the Freedom of Information Act. This typically happens when things go wrong.
Your memo should be about 3000 words (excluding the "Sources" section). The word-length is important; if your memo is too long, it will not be read. Make the best use of the number of words allotted to you. To justify your choices, you should draw on the listed sources below. You should use at least 3 theory-related sources and at least 4 topic-related sources. Do not assume your audience has read these sources.
Your memo should contain the following sections:
Title:
Give your memo a title that reflects your argument in some way. Remember this is a formal document--that will also be read by the broader public--so avoid literary flourishes as much as possible.
Executive Summary (no more than 200 words):
Your Executive Summary is an overview of the brief and should summarize all the sections concisely in no more than 200 words. Remember the point is that someone only reads your Executive Summary, they should be able to get the essence of your argument. Even though this is the first section in your memo, it's best to write this at the end after you've finished writing the other sections.
Context and Problem Diagnosis (800 words):
This section breaks down the problem for your reader. In this section, you need to answer the following questions:
(1) Describe the context of the issue.
(2) What is the problem exactly? What values are at stake in the definition of the problem? Describe exactly the different competing values you would be trading off during the policy-making process. Some possible values you can think about are: safety, innovation, employment, cost (meaning money spent by tax-payers or customers), and ownership; there are many others. Explain the trade-off between these competing values.
(3) Who are the different publics and interest groups who have a stake in the outcome of the issue? What is at stake for them and what are the interests and priorities they bring to the issue? What values are they likely to prioritize and what are the conflicts between them? What are likely to be (or are) their actions and strategies?
(4) Who are the experts who have the most to contribute to the issue? What do they bring to the table? What does their expertise consist of? In addition to their expertise, what kinds of interests do the experts bring to the issue, by virtue of their training and/or their institutional affiliation? On what values and value trade-offs can the experts have most to say? What values are the experts likely to prioritize and why? What are the conflicts between different experts, or between experts and various publics?
(5) What do you think is the main impediment to creating a trustworthy policy-making process? For instance, are there two values that are particularly hard to reconcile? Explain this in detail and why it matters. Draw upon your previous discussion of competing values, publics, and experts.
Policy Options (800 words):
This section should lay out some possible policy options, i.e., possible outcomes of the policy-making process. Remember that although you are not suggesting a specific policy outcome in this memo, it is important to start the process by listing some potential policy options. All interest groups and publics have a preferred policy outcome and keeping a somewhat expansive list of options can help them compromise.
Here are some possible policy options to start thinking with: Waymo One will be allowed to pilot its project for only one year; Waymo One will be given an open-ended license with periodic reviews; Waymo One will be denied the license; Waymo One will be allowed to run their service only at specific times and places, etc. It is important to be specific while listing policy options. For instance, for the option on periodic reviews, it’s important to address the question of how exactly the review will be done: will it be done by committee? Who will be on this committee? You can choose to address this here or in the “Policy Process” section below.
Make sure you think about at least 4 policy options. Motivate these policy options drawing on the analysis you wrote in the previous section on “Context and Problem Diagnosis.” These policy options might be inputs that you can use in your policy-making process; e.g., a committee tasked to answer a certain question may be asked to deliberate with these options in mind.
For each policy option, you have to describe the following:
(1) What are the value tradeoffs in that policy option? What would be the costs and benefits of that policy option?
(2) How would some of the policy-level details of that option be decided? E.g., if you restricted Waymo One to particular times and places, how would those be decided?
(3) What would be the reactions of the different publics and interest groups to this option? Are certain options better in terms of helping the different interest groups compromise? If so, how?
Policy Process (1000 words):
This section lays out the sequence of deliberative decision-making process that you recommend should happen over the next 6 months. The final step in this process will be you writing a public report based on the results of that process and submitting it to elected officials that they can then use to make a final decision. The elected officials, obviously, are free to override your recommendations.
You can use the following techniques in your policy-making process: website with requests for comments, focus groups, surveys of the population, targeted detailed interviews, committees that have been asked to answer a specific question (which may consist of members of the public or particular experts), town-halls, among others. Remember to be specific and give some details: e.g., if you suggest that X question be answered by Y committee, explain exactly what X is and how Y committee will be selected.
For each step in the policy-making process, describe:
(1) What are the inputs and outputs of that step? How will publics, interest groups or experts be involved in this step?
For instance, if you are instituting a committee, tell the reader: (a) How will members be selected? (b) Will the committee's deliberations be open? Why or why not? (c) What will be the committee's remit? (d) How will you make sure that the committee does not break down and actually delivers its output on time without losing credibility? (e) Will you compensate them for their time? Etc. Use concepts we have learned in class such as objectivity, trust, expertise, civic epistemology, and others although please remember that your audience does not know them. This may be the part where you draw most on the theory-related sources.
(2) Explain how this step is related to the previous step and to the next step. Which is to say: explain how this step fits into the sequence of steps.
(3) Describe what particular values that step will address and how it will help figure out the value tradeoffs. (Perhaps there are values that you have not thought of that will be generated in this step; if so, explain how that will happen.)
(4) How difficult is the step? What would it mean for a step to have been accomplished successfully? What would it mean for it to fail? How does your design help it succeed rather than fail?
For instance, the process of public input gathering might be swamped by proponents and opponents who will never agree on anything, or, self-driving vehicle companies may be resistant to releasing data or some of their proprietary information, or that stakeholders might be stymied by not being able to agree on a standardized definition of “safety,” or something else.
(5) The final step you will describe will be a description of the report you will write. Describe how your report will draw on the outputs of the previous steps. Even if you don’t know the content of the report yet, explain what form it will take. E.g., you might say that your final report will be a set of four policy options that elected officials can then choose from as well as a set of decision-rules to help them choose those options. In which case, explain how you will derive the policy options based on the results of the previous steps you have described.
Position Statement (200 words):
Describe your own politics and affiliations as the author of this memo. You must answer the following questions:
(1) Where do you stand on the different competing values at stake in this issue?
(2) What organizations (including political parties and advocacy groups) are you a member of that have shaped your views on this topic? What kind of expertise and training do you have that has shaped your views?
(3) How have you ensured that your policy-making process is trustworthy and independent of your views?
Sources:
This should be a bibliography of the sources that you have used for your argument selected from the list below. The sources should be cited in the body of the memo. You can use any style for references as long as you are consistent. Remember the point of a citation is that another person reading it should be able to find the reference (and/or the quotation) easily. Some are *theory-related* meaning that they deal with the theory of formulating policy that incorporates both expert and public input; others are *topic-related*, i.e., about self-driving cars.
Sources
Sources are of two types: theoretical (about theories of public-expert deliberation in STS) and topic-related (those related to self-driving cars). Among topic-related sources, I have made a distinction between primary sources (e.g. California’s vehicle collision report repository) and secondary sources (an analysis by the journalist Timothy Lee of these collision reports).
For reasons of space—this post was getting way too long—you can access the sources on a separate page.