controversy in stem cell research

Networks of articulation: Public negotiation of the acceptability of stem cell research in Denmark Maja Horst Copenhagen Business School mh.lpf@cbs.dk Paper presented at 4S/EASST Conference, Paris 25-28 August 2004 Session: Politics and technologies of participation Organised by Annemiek Nelis, Rob Hagendijk & Gerard de Vries The Danish public is generally seen to be sceptical towards biotechnology, a scepticism that collides with the explicit wish by government to make biotechnology a key factor in future economic growth. In 2002 a policy report identified stem cell research as a very promising scientific field, and argued that the ban on experiments with embryos be lifted. Until then, government had been reluctant to ease the limitations, but after a policy process involving calls for public deliberation and a formal hearing, legislation was changed in order to permit research on ‘spare’ embryos. The present paper seeks to explore the types of representation of different public opinions and viewpoints in this policy process. The focus of the paper, however, is not to analyse the distribution of power in the policy process, in order to assess the relative impact by various concerned groups (Callon 2002). Rather than perceiving different groups of actors as pre-given entities, and subsequently measure their impact, the paper seeks to explore the construction of representations of different types of actors – human as well as non-human - actors with a legitimate claim to be represented in the process. The issue of embryonic stem cell research has been surrounded by calls for public deliberation since it was first put on the public agenda in Denmark. Several aspects of the issue has been regarded as controversial, but the main conflict is the question of whether it is legitimate to use embryos for research in a way that destroys the embryo – hereby treating the embryo as a means to some end, rather than as a goal in itself as a human life. What I want to argue in this paper is that the framing of this conflict has changed throughout the Danish policy process. Originally it was framed as a conflict between two ethical principles, but gradually these principles 1 were substituted with personalised actors. This meant that the conflict came to be framed as a question of balancing the preferences of different groups of actors. Hereby the question of representation was changed from a question of deciding between principles in a hierarchical social structure to a question of balancing preferences in a competitive social structure. A few introductory points about the Danish case are necessary, as they are crucial to the understanding of the expression ‘the public negotiation of acceptability’. In general, Denmark is characterised by high levels of general education, cultural homogeneity and a consensus seeking political culture. Still, biotechnology has been the object of heated controversy over the past three decades. The underlying ideal of the Danish political tradition is that public debate is necessary for establishing legitimate closures in the form of solutions to these controversies. Methods of facilitating public deliberation on science and technology have therefore been implemented in various ways over the last 20 years. The most famous example of this is the institution of consensus conferences promoted by the Danish board of technology. But this is only one of the ways in which public deliberation are sought to be incorporated in policy processes regarding science and technology. They also include various other advisory bodies and forms of participation as well as the notion that mass mediated debate is important in this context. This extensive definition has consequences for the object of study in this paper, as the expression ‘negotiation of acceptability of stem cell research in the policy process’ necessarily has to be described as a process that covers a broad set of activities. They include the legislative process in parliament as well as the formal hearings, the interventions by different advisory bodies and the public debate as it unfolds in the mass media. The short story of the negotiation about acceptability of stem cell research can be described as follows: In October 2002 an expert committee issued a report about future prospects regarding genetic technology. The report argued that stem cell research was a particularly promising field of research and that governmental restrictions ought to be lifted, so that spare embryos from fertility treatment could be used in stem cell research. This led to parliamentary calls for ‘broad public 2 debate’ that could serve as basis for policy decisions1 and the board of technology was consequently commissioned to arrange a one-day hearing in January 2003. After a round of public hearings, the first bills were introduced on 2 april 2003 and were passed into law on 27 Maj 2003. The core ambition of the present paper is to look at these various activities in order to follow the construction of representation of specific legitimate viewpoints. This ambition is built on a theoretical framework inspired by ANT. In this framework, the public sphere can be seen as a laboratory, albeit a virtual one, in which actors can test ‘what they can get to hold with what’ (Latour 1999:162-3) in the negotiation of acceptability of stem cell research. Various articulations are put forward in order to create a specific interpretation of the current situation – of its legitimate actors, possibilities in stem cell research, problems of disease and so on. All of which can be summarised in a particular articulation of current challenges and the possible solutions to these challenges. Representation, in this context, is therefore not restricted to human actors, but is defined as reference to the various actants presented as someone or something that should be taken into account. The crucial point is that any public statement concerning stem cell research is the result of associative articulation, in which a particular set of relations between occurrences, actors, challenges, and solutions are established in order to sustain a particular argumentation regarding the acceptability of stem cell research. When time is taken into account these statements can be seen to be linked together in networks of articulation, which can turn out to be more or less stable. Representation, in this perspective, is thus the outcome of a process of public articulation. It is defined as the articulation of a specific actor, whether human or non-human, as an actor with a legitimate voice in regard to stem cell research, and hence as an actor whose propositions should be taken into account in the policy process. In the remaining part of the paper I will concentrate on the various constructions of representation in the consultation phase of the policy process. Which kinds of actors are articulated as necessary to take into account, and how does this construction of representation take place? Representation of legitimate propositions is articulated in two very different forms during this policy process. The first form is the primary form in official policy 1 Folketingsforslag V27 vedtaget d. 29/11 2002 (FF2110) 3 documents and early discussion in parliament, whereas the second form has precedence in media coverage and later discussion in parliament. In the first form the core issue regarding stem cells is articulated as a conflict between different systems of logic. In the expert committee’s report from 2002 the conflict is described as a tension between science on one hand, which offers hopes for the future, and ethics on the other hand, which urges caution. Subsequently, this report translates this tension into a conflict between two ethical principles – one that values the potential benefits higher than the wish to protect the human embryo, and one that puts the necessity of protecting human life above all else. Similarly, the report from the Ethical Council articulates the conflict about stem cell research as rooted in the general discussion about the moral status of the foetus. The council describes four different perspectives on this moral status, which are said to represent general attitudes to the problem. In a different policy paper, however, the council does link particular members to particular ethical arguments so that it is possible to distinguish between the ethical viewpoints of the majority and the minority of the council. As we shall see later, this has specifiable consequences. As a final example, I want to mention the first debate in parliament, which is a very long debate that primarily concentrates on the status of the embryo: when is a human life so worthy of protection that even the interests of the nation, the hope of curing various diseases and national prosperity cannot outweigh this status? The common feature in all these examples is that the controversy regarding stem cell research is articulated as a conflict between some general principles that point in different directions. In this second slide, I have tried to summarise this representation of the two conflicting principles put forward in the original expert report. Each of these principles is described as universal, and hereby the conflict is articulated as a question about which one of these principles should be regarded as supreme. When political decision-making is called for, it is presented as the task of deciding upon this conflict about supremacy. Which one of these principles should be regarded as the most fundamental? The second form of representation is found in the latter part of the parliamentary process as well as in the media coverage of the policy process. This form articulates the controversy concerning stem cells as a conflict between different human actors 4 with individual and opposing interests. The main contradiction in this description is the conflict between two important alliances. On one hand we have the stem cell researchers, who are portrayed as having personal and institutional interests in more liberal conditions for research; and the patients, who are portrayed as having legitimate and sustainable expectations of future cures. It is interesting to note that these expectations are not based on very much substantial evidence. Rather it seems to be the case that expectations in themselves constitute sufficient argumentative support for the call for a change of legislation. On the other side of the conflict we find the political party of the Christian democrats and the minority in the Ethical Council, who argue on behalf of the unborn life of the human embryo. In contrast to the earlier representations of ethical principles, however, these actors are now articulated as actors with a particular set of ethical preferences, rather than as speaking from a universal ethical principle. It is their personal structure of preferences, which they represent in articulation, not a general ethical principle commonly accepted in society. In the course of this shift a third party with a particular set of interests is also emerging. This is the group of infertile couples, who are supposed to donate the embryos to research. Since the controversy has evolved into a conflict between different parties they have entered the scene as yet another group with a legitimate set of interests that has to be taken into account. In this way a different conflict emerges between the researchers’ wish to use embryos for research and the infertile couples’ wish to have more babies. Here, it seems to be a common interpretation that in general, and as a group, infertile couples ought to have better conditions in the IVF treatment and this is put forward as a kind of compensation for the new question about donation that is put to these couples. In terms of representation, the shift between these two forms has rather large consequences. This can be illustrated by the role implied for the politicians. In the first form they were supposed to be the judges over what principle should be considered supreme. In contrast, the second form describes them as mediators who are supposed to find a pragmatic compromise between the interests and preferences of all the individual actors. Here representation is primarily understood as the articulation of the interests and preferences of particular groups of people. In this context the relative weight of each representation is equivalent to the length and strength of the networks it is connected to. The longer the networks, 5 the more important each actor seems to be in the effort to reach a pragmatic compromise. On this background the last slide demonstrates the resulting networks of articulation regarding the acceptability of stem cell research. Although I don’t have time to explicate all of the relevant actors and their connections, the slide demonstrates how the network in favour of legalising embryonic stem cell research turns out to be able to muster more and stronger representations than the other network. In this way the qualitative differences between fundamental ethical principles in the first form have been substituted with quantitative differences between networks of articulation. In conclusion, I would like to emphasise that representation in policy processes is not a simple thing. Different types of representation imply different models of problem solving. In the first form the policy process is described as a means to find the right decision with regard to the two contradictory ethical principles. The policy process is basically a process in which representations of the ethical principles are proposed and scrutinized in order to establish which of them should have supremacy. In this way we can speak of a hierarchical social model, where the central question for political processes is to determine which basic principle should be guiding the hierarchical order. In contrast the second form can be seen as a competitive social model, where the central political question is that of how to mediate between different representatives and their mutual tensions and alliances in order to determine how the strongest network can be assembled. In the concrete case of stem cell research it can be observed how the hierarchical model of problem solving is substituted with the competitive model. The shift is characterised by a change from the representation of principles to the representation of people or groups of people. This can be viewed as a simplification, because it makes compromise possible. But it simultaneously makes some viewpoints difficult to incorporate. The discussion about the moral status of the foetus in contemporary society is, for instance, difficult to incorporate in the second form – rather it is translated into a question of specific actors with particular moral preferences. In my experience this kind of simplification through translation from the first to the second model is quite common with regard to policy processes concerning biotechnology, but I want to stress that I find it extremely important to be aware of 6 the different performative effects in each of these models. In the first model the question of representation seems to be a question of citizens considering the common interest. In the second model, representation can be seen as a question of consumers in the political market trying to get the best compromise. On this basis we might want to inquire into the political outcomes of operating within a model that describes representation as quantitative mediation between individualised preference structures. Reference List Callon, Michel (2002): The increasing involvement of concerned groups in R&D policies: what lessons for public powers? In Aldo Geuna et al. (eds): Science and Innovation: Rethinking the rationales for funding and governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Latour, Bruno (1999): Pandora's hope. London: Harvard University Press 7