Tom Wakeford

When I was young I was in digs occupied by fellows with Oxbridge degrees. I thought, ‘My God, clever fellows’ – you know – ‘keep your mouth shut when they’re doing the crossword ‘cos you’ll say the wrong word!’ One of them was a principal lecturer: a brilliant chap.

One day he went out on his bike and the chain came off. He walked all the way back for me to put the chain on. He couldn’t do it, so I showed him, but a week later the same thing happened again. I discovered a man could be brilliant in his own way — but couldn’t put a chain on a bike.

I realised then there was a thing called the educated idiot; that common sense was spread across the population and that there are professors who are idiots – just the same as there are navvies who are idiots. For the first time in my life I began to realise that to be educated and to have one of these wonderful degrees didn’t confer wisdom on you. So when I go to the NFU [National Farmers Union meetings] and hear that a famous professor said something – well, maybe he can’t put a chain on his bike, either!

This is the story told by a Cumbrian farmer to Peter and Jean Williams, the as-yet unsung pioneers of two-way processes of engagement between citizens. In 1987 these two extraordinary people took part in conversations which, two decades later, are beginning to influence the way the UK generates new knowledge.

The Williams had spent their whole lives among the Lakeland fells. They were held in high esteem by the isolated hill farmers who packed their children off every day to the small school where Peter was headmaster. Then, just after he retired, the Chernobyl reactor melted down.

Facts wrong

Over the next few weeks, hill farmers in Cumbria and Wales found themselves at the whim of government agencies and their scientists. Large numbers of sheep were prevented from going to market or even culled, based on the guesswork of supposed experts at MAFF (the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food - now DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). These same officials predicted that the hillsides would soon contain so little radioactivity that the disruption to farmers would be minimal. People who worked the fells, and others, suggested that MAFF’s models were based on erroneous assumptions, but they were ignored.

In fact, the MAFF scientists had got their facts drastically wrong. Among the errors they had made was to assume a sheep’s diet was just grass. Yet farmers knew that for much of the year sheep survived by eating lichens and mosses, which concentrate radioactivity in their tissues, leading to sheep swallowing far more radiation than in the scientists’ models. Twenty years on, some Cumbrian farms still can’t sell their lambs.

Hands-on expertise

Hoping to understand more, Peter and Jean teamed up with Brian Wynne, a social researcher who had also grown up in the area. They sat with local farmers, not as experts extracting data, but as co-inquirers.

Williams, Williams and Wynne demonstrated that the knowledge of non-scientists such as farmers, shepherds and other farm workers was more reliable than much of that used to deal with the crisis by MAFF officials. Yet, this hands-on vernacular expertise was often dismissed by the unaccountable scientific elite as merely being the ignorance of lay people.

Inspiring others to carry out similar co-inquiries, Wynne has prompted new thinking that has gradually brought concepts of citizen participation and public engagement in science into the mainstream. Organisations as diverse as DTI’s Sciencewise, Greenpeace and the Rowntree Trust have adopted two-way mechanisms of dialogue, allowing the perspectives of non-specialists to be discussed on equal terms with those of specialists such as scientists, engineers and social researchers.

A good listener

The Beacons of Public Engagement programme reflects this growing acceptance of the importance of non-specialists. The higher education funding bodies for Scotland, England and Wales are investing £8 million into changing the culture in our learning institutions with the aim of ‘specialists involving, listening to, developing their understanding of, and interacting with non-specialists’.

Though Peter Williams died shortly after the Chernobyl research was complete, he and Jean made a vital contribution to showing our scientific academies that wisdom and good judgement are partly about being a good listener - not something you can learn merely via a university degree.

Further reading

Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne 1996, Misunderstanding Science?: The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology (Cambridge University Press)

Tom Wakeford is Director of Co-Inquiry and Public Engagement at PEALS Research Centre, Newcastle University