10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17456
Within a STS approach to science policy, the concept of coproduction suggests that scientific explanations and normative evaluations are deeply entangled. Science-based decisions surrounding the use of surgical masks and the measures for contact tracing in the context of Covid-19 show that coproduction can be a powerful democratic instrument to open up science policy to public discussion by highlighting how its statements are negotiated and elaborated.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17456
1
en
Mariachiara Tallacchini
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
app IMMUNI
Establishing a Legitimate Knowledgebased Dialogue among Institutions, Scientists, and Citizens during the Covid-19: Some Lessons from Coproduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Anniversary Reflections
2020-11-12
2023-06-26
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
27-34
TS
Mariachiara Tallacchini
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17456
27
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
2038-3460
1
app IMMUNI
en
34
Establishing a Legitimate Knowledgebased Dialogue among Institutions, Scientists, and Citizens during the Covid-19: Some Lessons from Coproduction
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17456/16304
11
                                                           Anniversary Reflection
                                                                                     27




Establishing a Legitimate Knowledge-
based Dialogue among Institutions,
Scientists, and Citizens during the
Covid-19: Some Lessons from
Coproduction
MariachiaraTallacchini
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore




     Abstract: Within a STS approach to science policy, the concept of copro-
     duction suggests that scientific explanations and normative evaluations are
     deeply entangled. Science-based decisions surrounding the use of surgical
     masks and the measures for contact tracing in the context of Covid-19
     show that coproduction can be a powerful democratic instrument to open
     up science policy to public discussion by highlighting how its statements are
     negotiated and elaborated.

     Keywords: science policy; coproduction; Covid-19; surgical masks; App
     IMMUNI

     Submitted: May 30, 2020 – Accepted: June 30, 2020

     Corresponding author: Mariachiara Tallacchini, Dipartimento di Scienze
     Giuridiche, Via Emilia Parmense 84, 29100, Piacenza, Italy. Email:
     mariachiara.tallacchini@unicatt.it.




    The relations between science, policy, and law represent a major field
of analysis in Science & Technology Studies and have the potential to
contributing to an improved quality of governance in democratic socie-
ties. Indeed, as has been recognized, science and normativity are the two
pillars through which democratic societies make sense of themselves, ma-
jor sources for authority (Silbey 2008), and the main creators of orders
and rules (Jasanoff 2012).
    Within this field, the concept of coproduction, as developed by Sheila
Jasanoff (2004), has proved as a useful tool to look at the interfaces be-

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
11 (1) pp. 27-34 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2020
28                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

tween science and regulatory processes in all institutional branches, from
the legislative (Jasanoff 2005) to the judicial (Jasanoff 1995), and the ad-
ministrative level (Jasanoff 1990). The notion of coproduction suggests
that facts and values, scientific descriptions and normative evaluations,
formally separated as the two different logical worlds of “is-ought” (a
quasi-definitional formula of modern thought), cannot be set apart when
they interact in the real world of science and society. The actual life of
science, policy, and law involves a more complex combination of descrip-
tions and prescriptions. Focusing on how the boundaries between facts
and values are reciprocally generated, coproduction aims at deconstruct-
ing and disentangling them, by looking inside the black boxes of regula-
tory science. For these reasons, besides being an analytical tool, copro-
duction can be a powerful democratic instrument to open up science pol-
icy to public discussion by highlighting how its statements are negotiated
and elaborated.
     The current crisis related to COVID-19 has allowed these complex re-
lations to emerge and to become apparent to citizens in all democratic so-
cieties through the dialogues, the open and hidden controversies, negotia-
tions, and decisions among politicians and decision-makers, their scien-
tific advisers and the wider scientific communities. The public discovery
of the true life of science-based decisions, still often imagined and depict-
ed through the myth of “science speaks truth to power” (Wildafsky
1979), is a relevant opportunity for intentional institutional unveiling and
disclosure of the coproduction of science and normativity. This approach
would allow, even under less extreme and tragic conditions, to make all
parties – namely decision-makers, scientists, and citizens – more aware of
the intrinsic dynamics of knowledge and power in negotiating and estab-
lishing norms and courses of actions in more scientifically reliable and po-
litically responsible manners. In other words, it would improve the legit-
imacy of democratic life.
     With an unprecedented clarity, the 2020 emergency has given visibil-
ity to several phenomena that are both STS well-explored topics and in-
teresting cases for a coproductionist analysis: from the role and construc-
tion of experts and expertise to the relations between heads of govern-
ment and their chief-scientists, to the political choice of single or multiple
advice and advisers, to the styles of communication and the management
of citizens’ rights to receive and ask for information, to the revision of
facts in order to reframe decisions and responsibilities.
     I would like to focus on two relevant topics that have been central in
the COVID-19 crisis and are deemed to become a durable presence in
the relations between science and policy in democratic contexts – here by
looking at them mostly through the lenses of the Italian situation. One
topic concerns how institutions have proved largely unable to reliably and
responsibly provide arguments in making normative decision in the face
of scientific uncertainty. The other relates to the new epistemic roles for
citizens and to the emergence of a broader meaning for citizen science.
Tallacchini                                                                29
     As to the institutional communication of how uncertain knowledge
has been used in policy decisions, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed
that, when faced with uncertain scientific knowledge, decision-makers
have often failed to provide a robust explanation of their reasons for
adopting a specific scientific hypothesis. Indeed, policy-makers do not
seem equipped, not only scientifically but also politically, to distinguish
between actual disagreements among experts in the same field and the
heterogeneous assumptions and perspectives characterizing different dis-
ciplines (e.g. virology and epidemiology). Moreover, hiding behind pre-
sumed objective and certain knowledge is easier than taking responsibility
for endorsing an uncertain scientific scenario – perhaps together with a
plan to cope with the limits and rate of errors of the vision adopted.
     The case for surgical masks, namely their necessity or irrelevance to
prevent infection, has been paradigmatic of this apparent awkwardness as
well as of coproduction as a tool to clarify and legitimize decisions. At the
beginning of the emergency, most policy officers, politicians, and scien-
tific advisers (starting at World Health Organization [WHO] level) failed
to openly admit the scarcity of masks as a reason to prioritize their use by
the health personnel, while advising citizens to act carefully in the ab-
sence of these protective devices. Instead they chose to hide the reality
behind the “scientific fact” that masks were useless for healthy people.
Only later, when masks became widely available, suddenly their use
turned out to be almost mandatory – again with reference to a single sci-
entific paper showing that a six feet distance could not be safe enough
(Bourouiba 2020). WHO changed its guidance from “no evidence that
wearing a mask by healthy persons (...) can prevent them from infection”
(April 4, 2020) (WHO 2020a) to “(m)asks can be used (...) for protection
of healthy persons” (June 5, 2020) (WHO 2020b). 1 This single event was
literally “unmasking” how the “cherry picking” of scientific data could be
tactically managed to back-up difficult policy decisions, instead of operat-
ing in transparency and building reciprocal trust between institutions and
citizens (Culver 2020; Alvaro 2020).
     An institutional culture of dialogue with citizens in science policy,
where scientific evidence and proposed norms are presented and dis-
cussed by highlighting all the assumptions, correlations, and implications,
and where facts and values are opened up in their reciprocal, coproduced
establishing credibility and legitimacy, cannot be improvised. This culture
has to be daily interwoven in the institutional fabric of relations with citi-
zens in order to generate confidence on both sides. Moreover, this culture
requires an updated epistemological vision, where post-normal science –
namely when facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and deci-
sions urgent (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) – becomes the normal condi-
tion for all societal choices, and where scientific uncertainty is unfolded
to explain how and why normative decisions are made (Toews 2020; Tal-
lacchini 2020).
     The second topic for reflection relates to how, in the context of the
30                                                           Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

pandemic, the circulation of knowledge among institutions, scientists,
and citizens has revealed new critical roles for citizens in using scientific
knowledge, and perhaps has broadened the meaning of citizen science.
These roles and this emerging meaning for citizen science can be better
understood and implemented in the light of co-production.
    Often and repeatedly, in the past decades, Italian citizens have been
represented as scientifically ignorant and irrational, and averse to science
and technological innovation. The same accusation has accompanied
public acceptance of biotechnology and genetic engineering, electromag-
netic fields, and more recently vaccines. In this latest case, the Italian gov-
ernment has adopted a compulsory approach to vaccination (Law
119/2017), also backed-up by a decision of the Constitutional Court
(5/2018) portraying scientific certainty and objectivity as the rationale for
legally binding measures – even though, according to a “Nature” editorial
(2018), this approach seemed more typical of countries with poor demo-
cratic traditions, “mostly the post-Soviet Union States”.
    Indeed, Article 32 of the Italian Constitution encompasses two differ-
ent visions of the right to health, defined as an individual fundamental
right, but also compatible with mandatory treatment authorized by the
law when public health is at stake. However, if traditional methods and
measures in public health have been developed, especially in the field of
infectious diseases, in connection with legal acceptance of compulsory
measures and strong limitations of fundamental rights, in the past decade
disease control and surveillance have been increasingly made more partic-
ipatory and primarily based on citizens’ individual and collective respon-
sibility (Epstein 1998; Gainotti et al. 2008). Lacking an institutional cul-
ture and training for dialogue with citizens, the Italian government did
not even try to discuss and build a collaborative vision of the right to
health, framed around participation, solidarity, and reciprocity, neither in
the vaccine domain nor in other public health domains (from environ-
mental health to screening programs) because adoption of this path in-
volves admitting and coming to terms with scientific uncertainty (Tallac-
chini 2019, 2020).
    What the crisis has shown is that the very same citizens, previously
depicted as undisciplined recipients of compulsory measures, have turned
into essential actors in dealing with the pandemic (Ministero della Salute
2020a). Indeed, citizens’ accurate understanding and implementation of
scientific knowledge in their daily behaviour, and more broadly their vol-
untary compliance with government recommendations about self-
certification and self-isolation have been at the core of the containment
strategies.
    If harmonizing individual and collective health is a key to a health sys-
tem in line with the principles of a democratic and under the rule of law
society, this approach is also coherent with an epistemologically advanced
vision about how conditions of scientific uncertainty need to be opened
up, shared, and discussed in order to make social decisions more robust
Tallacchini                                                                   31
(Stirling and Scoones 2009; Tallacchini 2019).
    The scientific information and science-based practices that citizens
have acquired, have become acquainted with, and have been implement-
ing since the pandemic has started – e.g. the safety protocols that individ-
uals have to set up and apply in all kinds of private or professional activi-
ties (from properly sanitizing personal food items to safely running a
commercial activity)– not only require a reciprocally trusted relation with
the institutions offering the necessary knowledge, but are also going to af-
fect society as a whole. This phenomenon can be described as a fairly new
meaning for citizen science, where institutions have to widely rely on lay
people’s ability to properly manage knowledge and practices with crucial
impact on keeping social life safe. Indeed, if this phenomenon is not en-
tirely new, its dimensions and impact certainly are. From this perspective,
Toews et al. (2020) have highlighted that:

    the whole world becomes an extended peer community, as the appro-
    priate behaviour and attitudes of individuals and masses become crucial
    for a successful response to the virus. This extended peer community is
    the opposite of a technocratic, number and model-based decision strate-
    gy.

    Among these new epistemic roles for citizens, where citizens’ science-
based behaviour and trust are becoming increasingly important, the (of-
ten governmental) implementation of tracing digital technologies to pre-
dict and control the spread of the virus reveals interesting features (Bar-
sallo Lynch and Zabierek 2020). These forms of so-called participatory
surveillance for public health purposes are portrayed as a move towards
more democratized practices as they function on a voluntary basis and di-
rectly engage the observed subjects. However, making tracking voluntary
does not justify its overall legitimacy, as participation per se is not signifi-
cant if the powers involved and all the procedures are not disclosed, clari-
fied, and balanced (Biggeri and Tallacchini 2018). In the Italian case of
IMMUNI, the app that “uses technology to alert the users who have had
a risky exposure – even if they are asymptomatic”, 2 a lot of attention has
been paid to the anonymization of data and its deletion after two weeks as
a way to gain citizen’s trust. Privacy and data protection, however, have
been overemphasized as the single concerns in the overall process, even
though a lot of uncertainty and undisclosed knowledge surrounds all the
administrative mechanisms and potential gaps and inefficiencies involved:
first of all, the risk for citizens to find themselves lockdown after an alert
without the certainty of being timely tested and unlocked after the quar-
antine. The document released by the Italian Ministry of Health (Ministe-
ro della Salute 2020b) in late May on contact tracing does not mention
the issue and limits its provisions to the moment when the user who is
SARS-CoV-2 positive is invited by health personnel to download the app
and to transfer his data to the Ministry for Health. The app has been pub-
32                                                              Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

licly released without having taken care of all its practical implications.
    Quite interestingly, the problem has been raised, instead, by a WHO
brief, in June 2020, that has introduced new criteria “for releasing
COVID-19 patients from isolation” (WHO 2020c). WHO was previously
recommending two negative RT-PCR tests at least 24 hours apart, but “in
light of limited laboratory supplies, equipment, and personnel in areas
with intense transmission” WHO reframed its requirements asking “that
patients’ symptoms have been resolved for at least three days before re-
lease from isolation, with a minimum time in isolation of 13 days since
symptom onset” (WHO 2020c, 3). To date the Italian government has
not adopted a position about implementing the new criteria, which in-
crease dramatically the individual responsibility in managing knowledge
as the decision about having recovered from the disease is left to citizens.
    Again, the governmental perspective that limits concerns to data pro-
tection is an example of the institutional reductionist vision of technosci-
ence – not perceived as a complex process embedded in social and bu-
reaucratic practices – and of the lack of a well-designed plan for citizens
while asking them to go blind into implementing the governmental app.
Using coproduction to clarify the intersections between knowledge and
decision-making may contribute to a better epistemology and an im-
proved confidence in the relations among institutions and citizens.


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Tallacchini                                                                    33
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1
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2
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