The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke, JR.

I read this book to seek an answer to a question bugged me for quite some time: what is an ideal role for a scientist in environmental policy making? On one hand, we cannot be as "objective" as we hope ourself to be; on the other hand, many scientists, especially those who have a natural science background, hate to be associated with the word "advocacy".

To be an "honest broker" was the answer given by Roger Pielke, Jr., although he also offered other three choices: pure scientist, science arbiter and issue advocate. Indeed the book "aims to identify a range of options for individual scientists to consider in making their own judgments about how they would like to position themselves in relation to policy and politics (back cover)".

These four choices or "idealized roles for scientists in decision-making" were presented as a 2*2 matrix in Table 2.1 (pg 14). The y-axis is view of democracy, and the x-axis is view of science. The two view of democracy are "interest group pluralism" coined by Jame Madison (1787) and the semi-sovereign people (1975) by E.E. Schattschneider. According to Madison, experts best serve society by aligning themselves with their favorite interest groups. In comparison, Schattschneider argued a grassroots approach where everybody in the society, including experts, is allowed to voice his view on alternatives. Out of the four roles, pure scientist and issue advocate fall into the interest group category, and scientist arbiter and honest broker fall into the grassroots group.

Another dimension used to classified the four roles was view of science. The author called two views of science a linear model and a stakeholder model. The linear model takes two forms, one is to divide scientific knowledge into basid and applied research, and a second form is to suggest achieving agreement on scientific knowledge is a prerequisite for a political consensus to be reached and then policy action to occur. As an alternative the stakeholder model "holds not only that the users of science should have some role in its production but that considerations of how science is used in decision-making are an important aspect of understanding the effectiveness of science in decision-making (p14)". Issue advocate and honest broker fit into the stakeholder model and pure scientist and science arbiter fit into the linear model.

After explaining the two models the author went on in describing when they should each be applied. For "Tornado politics", where decision context characterized by both values consensus and low uncertainty, it is OK for a scientist to put on a hat of either science arbiter or pure scientist (depends on whether one chooses to connects to the policy). Because a linear model actually works in this case, in other words, better sciences mean better policy.

However such a linear model doesn't work anymore for "Abortion politics", where uncertainty is high and no values consensus exist. Different stakeholder groups may hire they own scientists (issue advocate) and because uncertainty is high, diverse even opposite scientific evidence may be presented and canceled out with each other. Obviously in this case better science is not the answer. An honest broker is the proposed role here, and a scientist is supposed to present different policy options as a participant of a policy making process (stakeholder model).

In Chapter six the book took a turn, instead of asking what scientists' role in policy, the question was how science policy influenced scientists. Under the linear model, the answer is not so optimistic (table 6.1): those who claimed to be pure scientist and science arbiter became issue advocate. Because a science policy operated under the linear model assumes science dictates policy, in order to please funders who have had assumption in mind, scientists were forced to say their scientific results would lead to a certain rosy picture, which made themselves issue advocate!

The problems associated with the linear model were further elaborated in the next chapters by a couple of concrete examples. In the case of "preemption and the decision to go to war in Iraq", "dressing up an issue that is fundamentally Abortion Politics in the guise of Tornado Politics created incentives for the Bush Administration’s misuse of intelligence in political advocacy in support of the Iraq war (p112)." "Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled (said Robin Cook, when reigned his position as a member of Tony Blair's Cabinet, P108) ". In the case of the skeptical environmentalist,"because scientific understandings are supposed to motivate political action, winning a scientific debate leads to a privileged position in political battle. Consequently, scientific debates are in effect political debates because resolving scientific debates will resolve political conflicts. Science thus becomes a convenient and necessary means for removing certain options from a debate without explicitly dealing with disputes over values. The linear model can seem like the issue advocate’s trump card in political debates. For who can argue again truth? (p124-5)"

If I have to summarize the core message of this 188 page book, it would be "provide choices but not answers in the situation of abortion politics". Overall I found the books is helpful in understanding the bigger context of science's role in policy-making. For instance, I did know the so-called linear model doesn't work in the real world from my experience in working on ecosystem service valuation. But I thought that was mainly due to conflicting interests and didn't really put the uncertainty piece together. Probably that was because as an ecologist by training, the uncertainty bit had been always in the background and only during my PHD research research did the value piece surfaced.

P.S. Here is my note of the book and here is the author's blog.

PPS. A couple of scholars' reviews on the book, and I particularly like this paragraph from S. Jasanoff,

"What STS scholars have insisted on is that the very process of collecting and codifying information is value-laden and should not be insulated from democratic accountability. Nor should ambiguities in the available knowledge be concealed behind monolithic claims of scientific certainty."