Today’s ceremonies likely mark the beginning of a new level of discord between scientific evidence and American policy. I’ve written here about the dark days of Canada’s own war on science under Stephen Harper, which mercifully have ended, though the work that was damaged has by no means recovered. Now, under the Trudeau government we are establishing a new role of Chief Science Advisor and actively recruiting candidates.
Science advisors share some of their challenges with other science communicators like journalists and university public relations writers, in that they attempt to make technical and complex research accessible to non-scientists. But their role is subtly different because of their placement inside the policy-making circles.
A science advisor can do more than inject the scientific consensus into a policy discussion—as the broader academy can do from the outside at a single point in the process through deliberative reports. They also have the privilege of guarding the integrity of this input throughout the discussion, making sure the science doesn’t get distorted or misused, right until the moment a decision is made.
This week, the Chief Science Advisor to the New Zealand Prime Minister since 2009, and chair of the International Network of Government Science Advice, gave a talk at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy in Ottawa. Almost every challenge a government faces has a scientific dimension, he says, but the question is whether robust scientific evidence is available and whether it will be used, misused, manipulated or ignored.
Gluckman cautions against hubris as a science advisor, in that there are many values-based angles on which the advisor has no place weighing in. He objects to the term “evidence-based policy” both because evidence, to the layperson, includes anecdotal evidence, and also because science really can’t be the “basis” of policy, only something which informs it.
Even apart from the thorny subject of religion, there are borders beyond which science’s voice cannot be definitive. For example, a science advisor can tell you that adding folate to factory-produced bread should lower the incidence of spina bifida, but the question of whether the food supply should be medicalized is a matter for a wide variety of specialities.
Scientists are good at problem definition, but not generally as good at finding workable, scalable and meaningful solutions. For example, climate change can be neatly defined within the bounds of climate science alone, but its solution involves dozens of other fields of expertise.
Intriguingly, there can be such a thing as too much emphasis on science in a policy debate. The fixation on the scientific evidence of climate change has sometimes been belaboured to avoid engaging in values discussions that need to happen, like awkward conversations about economic trade-offs.
Gluckman’s 10 pieces of advice to any incoming science advisor, as told to Nature in 2014:
- Maintain the trust of many.
- Protect the independence of advice.
- Report to the top.
- Distinguish science for policy from policy for science.
- Give science privilege as an input into policy.
- Act as a broker not an advocate.
- Engage the scientific community.
- Engage the policy community.
- Expect to inform policy, not make it.
- Recognize the limits of science.