Phil Macnaghten
Biographic Data
| ID | 298556 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Phil Macnaghten |
| GIVEN NAMES | Phil |
| FAMILY NAME | Macnaghten |
| SIGNATURE | MACNAGHTEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wageningen University & Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6611-4583 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 683 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Epistemic diversity and the politics of knowledge in plant disease management: Insights from the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic in southern Italy
Societal Impact Statement Xylella fastidiosa is a major plant pathogen affecting crops such as grapes, citrus, almonds, and olives, with potentially severe consequences for agricultural production and rural livelihoods worldwide. This paper examines the conflict around the management of the X. fastidiosa outbreak affecting olive trees in southern Italy. We show that the conflict cannot be reduced to a confrontation between science and “science de…
Anticipatory alignment work: The politics of anticipation in an emerging innovation ecosystem of neuromorphic computing
The alignment of science, technology, and innovation with societal values and concerns is a key objective of governance approaches that include technology assessment, responsible (research and) innovation, and anticipatory governance. Such alignment is supposed to take place, inter alia, in anticipatory practices involving technoscientific experts, stakeholders, and publics, whose views are then integrated into research and development. However, …
Imagined futures for livestock gene editing: Public engagement in the Netherlands
Gene editing is an emerging technology with diverse applications in the making, including in livestock. While the technology is commonly represented as offering unbounded possibilities and societal benefit, it remains unclear how to characterise public views and the process through which responses are developed. Rather than simply being about individual attitudes, beliefs or preferences, we explicate an interpretative approach that seeks to under…
The Dutch see Red: (In)formal science advisory bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic
We analyse the roles, dynamics and logic of science advice in structuring the Dutch response to the COVID-19 pandemic, from January 2020 to December 2020. We address how the Dutch government responded by paying attention to styles of governance and expert advice. We argue that the Dutch response was shaped by the interplay of corporatist, deliberative and neoliberal forms of governance, in particular, how early corporatist tendencies seemed to cr…
Implementing Responsible Research and Innovation: Organisational and National Conditions
This open access book offers a unique and practically oriented study of organisational and national conditions for implementing Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) policies and practices. It gives the reader a thorough understanding of the different aspects of RRI, and of barriers and drivers of implementation of RRI related policies. It shows how different organisational and national contexts provide unique challenges and opportunities for bri…
The complexity of the gene and the precision of CRISPR
The rapid development of CRISPR-based gene editing has been accompanied by a polarized governance debate about the status of CRISPR-edited crops as genetically modified organisms. This article argues that the polarization around the governance of gene editing partly reflects a failure of public engagement with the current state of research in genomics and postgenomics. CRISPR-based gene-editing technology has become embedded in a narrow narrative…
Gene editing of livestock
Gene editing technologies allow users to make in vivo (live) changes to an organism’s DNA. Advances in the field of gene editing have made it arguably more precise, efficient, flexible, and cheaper compared to previous technologies. This has generated an upsurge of interest in gene editing and its governance, including in livestock applications. Although gene editing in livestock promises benefits, it also raises technical, ethical, and societal …
What’s wrong with global challenges
Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous an…
An unfinished journey? Reflections on a decade of responsible research and innovation
We reflect on a decade of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as a discourse emerging from the European Commission (EC) 10 years ago. We discuss the foundations for RRI, its emergence during the Seventh Framework programme and its subsequent evolution during Horizon 2020. We discuss how an original vision for RRI became framed around five so-called ‘keys’: gender, open access, science communication, ethics and public engagement. We consider…
Towards an anticipatory public engagement methodology: Deliberative Experiments in the Assembly of Possible Worlds Using Focus Groups
Against the background of critique in public engagement scholarship on new and emerging science and innovation, this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making anticipatory knowledge. Adopting a science and technology studies perspective, a public engagement methodology is presented aimed at anticipating the kinds of possible and plausible worlds that novel science and technology bring into being. Drawing on six e…
Narrative as a resource for inclusive governance: A UK–Brazil comparison of public responses to nanotechnology
In this article we examine the role of narrative as a resource for developing inclusive governance frameworks, principally through an examination of two public deliberation experiments, conducted concurrently in the UK and Brazil, that took place prior to the rise of interest in responsible innovation. While in the UK we witness a (partial) rhetorical move in science governance, from a top-down technocratic model to a more deliberative model in w…
Opening up’ science policy: Engaging with RRI in Brazil
This article presents initial results from the Brazilian team in the Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice (RRI-Practice) collaboration, concurrently running in 22 countries. The project invites reflection from institutional actors through a variety of participatory exercises that focus on RRI’s potential for ‘opening up’ and impacting national science and innovation policy. After summarising the operational challenges faced during the …
The design and testing of a tool for developing responsible innovation in start-up enterprises
Innovation leads to new products, business models and even changes to socio-economic systems. However, it is important that innovation has the ‘right impacts’. Responsible innovation can help to achieve this; however, it is unclear how to introduce responsible innovation to real-world, competitive, industry settings. We explore this challenge in the context of sustainability orientated start-up enterprises, developing innovations within agricultu…
Translation, transduction, and transformation: Expanding practices of responsibility across borders
This special section addresses Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as an increasingly global concept that is translated and transformed in heterogenous national contexts. Based on seven national perspective articles from the RRI-Practice project, this introduction outlines a framework of transduction through which RRI becomes contextually negotiated and reconfigured. Read together, the national explorations of the special section make visib…
Traditional ecological knowledge in innovation governance: A framework for responsible and just innovation
Change in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is not easily understood in terms of Western innovation discourses. In fact, innovations in the sense of modern and growth-oriented technologies are common sources for the erosion of TEK. This article brings together current literatures on TEK and innovation studies in addressing questions about the governance of socio-ecological change. First, we connect TEK to shifting meanings of ‘innovation' th…
Geoengineering/Climate Intervention
The term “geoengineering” is used to refer to a range of techniques for deliberatively intervening in the global climate to counteract global warming. Solar radiation management techniques are a class of geoengineering methods designed to reflect some of the inbound sunlight back into space with the intended effect of arresting further warming of the planet and thus counteracting global warming. Carbon dioxide removal techniques, by contrast, aim…
Framing ‘fracking’: Exploring public perceptions of hydraulic fracturing in the United Kingdom
The prospect of fracking in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by significant public unease. We outline how the policy debate is being framed by UK institutional actors, finding evidence of a dominant discourse in which the policy approach is defined through a deficit model of public understanding of science and in which a technical approach to feasibility and safety is deemed as sufficient grounds for good policymaking. Deploying a delibera…
Responsible innovation and the reshaping of existing technological trajectories: The hard case of genetically modified crops
In this article, I argue that if frameworks of responsible innovation are to prove successful in aligning innovation dynamics with societal values, they will have to demonstrate their capacities to shape existing technological trajectories, alongside those that remain ‘in-the-making’. Reporting on a major research project as written up in the edited volume, Governing Agricultural Sustainability, I outline the dynamics of and responses to genetica…
Inovação responsável através de fronteiras: Tensões, Paradoxos E Possibilidades
Este artigo explora as tensões, paradoxos e possibilidades da inovação responsável em contextos transnacionais. Argumenta-se que a inovação responsável, embora apresente um potencial transformador, enfrenta desafios significativos quando aplicada em diferentes culturas e sistemas de governança. O artigo destaca a importância de considerar as especificidades locais e a necessidade de abordagens flexíveis e adaptativas para promover a inovação resp…
The Future of Science Governance: Publics, Policies, Practices
In this paper we develop new insights on science governance at a time when an emphasis on public engagement in responding to questions of trust in science is giving way to a more systemic and networked perspective. In a meta-analysis across seventeen UK public dialogue processes we identify five spheres of public concern about the governance of science and technology relating to: the purposes of science; trust; inclusion; speed and direction of i…
Responsible innovation across borders: Tensions, paradoxes and possibilities
In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible innovation from a cross-cultural perspectiv…
Narrative, Nanotechnology and the Accomplishment of Public Responses: A Response to Thorstensen
Responsible scientists and a citizens' panel: New Storylines for Creative Engagement Between Science and the Public
Uncertainties over emerging technologies and their potential effect on society and the environment often lead to controversy between scientists, policymakers and the public. Opening up the debates and involving citizens and social scientists early in the process of developing new technology is one way of responding to this issue of governance. By doing so, the hope is that the ethical implications and acceptability of new science can be more care…
Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
Responsible research and innovation: From science in society to science for society, with society
The term responsible (research and) innovation has gained increasing EU policy relevance in the last two years, in particular within the European Commission's Science in Society programme, in the context of the Horizon 2020 Strategy. We provide a brief historical overview of the concept, and identify three distinct features that are emerging from associated discourses. The first is an emphasis on the democratic governance of the purposes of resea…
Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences
In this article we argue that nanotechnology represents an extraordinary opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in a technology that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage of development. We examine policy dynamics in both the United States and United Kingdom aimed at both opening up, and closing down, the role of the social sciences in nanotechnologies. We then set out a prospective agenda for the social scienc…
Contested Natures
Towards a Sociology of Nature
This paper is concerned with the relationship between sociology and nature or the environment. We briefly summarise the various ways in which historically 'nature' has been conceptualised, including the connections between the 'natural' and the 'market'. We suggest that there are many 'natures' and then proceed to develop an agenda for a sociology of such natures. This comprises four elements: a sociology of environmental knowledges; social varia…
Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance
Animals in their Nature: A Case Study on Public Attitudes to Animals, Genetic Modification and ‘Nature’
This article seeks to engage with contemporary debates on the social and ethical dimensions of genetically modified (GM) animals. Dominant policy ethical approaches and frameworks are criticized for failing radically to accommodate some of the most important dimensions of concern. Drawing on primary empirical data emphasizing existing embodied relationships to animals, the article analyses how people express ethical concern over GM animals, inclu…
Public identification with sustainable development
Bodies in the Woods
In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space…
From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy
In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the fu
Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices
This paper suggests ways in which 'the environment' needs to be reconfigured so that it better resonates with how people are experiencing politics, nature and everyday life. Through empirical research on environmental concerns and everyday practices, this paper sketches a framework through which the values associated with contemporary environmentalism might be developed in a more reflexive relationship to wider transformations in society. In part…
Why Solar Radiation Management Geoengineering and Democracy Won't Mix
In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging 'social constitution' of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institu…
Rhetorics of Environmental Sustainability: Commonplaces and Places
Although a rhetoric of sustainability is now widely used by government, nongovernmental organisations, and business in addressing the public, there is no evidence of a broad shift of behaviour in response to it. Yet most sustainability programmes at international, national, and local levels require broad public participation if they are to reach their goals. We argue that organisational communication with the public is central to defining the for…
Public attitudes to countryside leisure: A case study on ambivalence
Narratives of Mastery and Resistance: Lay Ethics of Nanotechnology
Towards an anticipatory public engagement methodology: Deliberative Experiments in the Assembly of Possible Worlds Using Focus Groups
Against the background of critique in public engagement scholarship on new and emerging science and innovation, this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making anticipatory knowledge. Adopting a science and technology studies perspective, a public engagement methodology is presented aimed at anticipating the kinds of possible and plausible worlds that novel science and technology bring into being. Drawing on six e…
All things weird and scary’: Nanotechnology, theology and cultural resources
Nanotechnology is widely suggested to be fast becoming a defining technology of the twenty-first century. This ‘science of the very small’ has applications in areas from medicine to materials, and is predicted to have profound effects on social life. In this paper, we draw on a study of lay people's reflections on the ethics of nanotechnologies to focus on the talk of one group of participants, from a UK church. While we identify key themes which…
Researching Technoscientific Concerns in the Making: Narrative Structures, Public Responses, and Emerging Nanotechnologies
In this paper I engage with debates on technoscientific governance, narrative, and emergent public attitudes. Building on a piece of social research addressing public responses to the social and ethical dimensions of emerging nanotechnologies, I develop a methodology and mode of analysis designed to take into account four distinctive features of nanotechnology discourse and its constitution in the public sphere, namely: its unfamiliarity; its pro…
Introduction: (Re)Imagining Nanotechnology
For its proponents nanotechnology offers so much—unlimited and clean energy, targeted pharmaceuticals, intelligent textiles and self-organizing molecular machines. Bottom-up or top-down, the promis
Engaging Narratives and the Limits of Lay Ethics: Introduction
Nuclear Futures: Assessing Public Attitudes to New Nuclear Power
The nuclear debate has become once again a ‘live’ policy issue in UK national politics, with far-reaching implications for a diverse range of stakeholders. There is now a new policy rationale for the consideration of new-build nuclear power in the context of climate change and a low carbon economy. \nIn a rapidly evolving public policy context there is a strategic need for a clearer picture of public and community perceptions of nuclear power and…
On the nature of nature: Experimental studies in the power of rhetoric
This paper reports two studies which investigate the effects of different definitions of the natural upon human preferences. The first study is designed to show that items are deemed more acceptable when defined as natural than when defined as non‐natural. Subjects rated the acceptability of cannabis use after reading a text which either described it as a natural herb or as a drug. Acceptability ratings were significantly higher in the former con…
Nature
Narrative, Nanotechnology and the Accomplishment of Public Responses: A Response to Thorstensen
On the nature of nature: Experimental studies in the power of rhetoric
This paper reports two studies which investigate the effects of different definitions of the natural upon human preferences. The first study is designed to show that items are deemed more acceptable when defined as natural than when defined as non‐natural. Subjects rated the acceptability of cannabis use after reading a text which either described it as a natural herb or as a drug. Acceptability ratings were significantly higher in the former con…
Public attitudes to countryside leisure: A case study on ambivalence
Towards a Sociology of Nature
This paper is concerned with the relationship between sociology and nature or the environment. We briefly summarise the various ways in which historically 'nature' has been conceptualised, including the connections between the 'natural' and the 'market'. We suggest that there are many 'natures' and then proceed to develop an agenda for a sociology of such natures. This comprises four elements: a sociology of environmental knowledges; social varia…
Public identification with sustainable development
Rhetorics of Environmental Sustainability: Commonplaces and Places
Although a rhetoric of sustainability is now widely used by government, nongovernmental organisations, and business in addressing the public, there is no evidence of a broad shift of behaviour in response to it. Yet most sustainability programmes at international, national, and local levels require broad public participation if they are to reach their goals. We argue that organisational communication with the public is central to defining the for…
Can Focus Groups Be Analysed As Talk?
Contested Natures
Contested Natures
Contested Natures
Bodies of Nature: Introduction
This issue of Body & Society was assembled to extend the interest in the embodied nature of people's experiences in, and of, the physical world. It thus seeks to develop further the emergent sociology of the body that has provided extensive insight into the embodied character of human experience. Such a sociology has, though, dealt less systematically with the various social practices that are involved in being in, or passing through, nature, the…
Bodies in the Woods
In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space…
Bodies of Nature: Introduction
Bodies of Nature
Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices
This paper suggests ways in which 'the environment' needs to be reconfigured so that it better resonates with how people are experiencing politics, nature and everyday life. Through empirical research on environmental concerns and everyday practices, this paper sketches a framework through which the values associated with contemporary environmentalism might be developed in a more reflexive relationship to wider transformations in society. In part…
Animals in their Nature: A Case Study on Public Attitudes to Animals, Genetic Modification and ‘Nature’
This article seeks to engage with contemporary debates on the social and ethical dimensions of genetically modified (GM) animals. Dominant policy ethical approaches and frameworks are criticized for failing radically to accommodate some of the most important dimensions of concern. Drawing on primary empirical data emphasizing existing embodied relationships to animals, the article analyses how people express ethical concern over GM animals, inclu…
Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences
In this article we argue that nanotechnology represents an extraordinary opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in a technology that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage of development. We examine policy dynamics in both the United States and United Kingdom aimed at both opening up, and closing down, the role of the social sciences in nanotechnologies. We then set out a prospective agenda for the social scienc…
Nature, embodiment and social theory
Nature, embodiment and social theory - 1
Introduction: (Re)Imagining Nanotechnology
For its proponents nanotechnology offers so much—unlimited and clean energy, targeted pharmaceuticals, intelligent textiles and self-organizing molecular machines. Bottom-up or top-down, the promis
From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy
In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the fu
Nuclear Futures: Assessing Public Attitudes to New Nuclear Power
The nuclear debate has become once again a ‘live’ policy issue in UK national politics, with far-reaching implications for a diverse range of stakeholders. There is now a new policy rationale for the consideration of new-build nuclear power in the context of climate change and a low carbon economy. \nIn a rapidly evolving public policy context there is a strategic need for a clearer picture of public and community perceptions of nuclear power and…
Nature
All things weird and scary’: Nanotechnology, theology and cultural resources
Nanotechnology is widely suggested to be fast becoming a defining technology of the twenty-first century. This ‘science of the very small’ has applications in areas from medicine to materials, and is predicted to have profound effects on social life. In this paper, we draw on a study of lay people's reflections on the ethics of nanotechnologies to focus on the talk of one group of participants, from a UK church. While we identify key themes which…
Engaging nanotechnologies: A Case Study of 'Upstream' Public Engagement
This paper develops an analysis of the factors likely to shape future public responses to the social and ethical dimensions of emerging nanotechnologies. The research was designed to offer insight into the following: what sorts of issues are likely under current circumstances to shape public attitudes towards nanotechnologies; what narrative resources do people draw upon to develop their thinking; how do public attitudes evolve through social int…
Narratives of Mastery and Resistance: Lay Ethics of Nanotechnology
Engaging Narratives and the Limits of Lay Ethics: Introduction
Political science (37 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Public relations (21 works) · Corporate governance (20 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Economics (14 works) · Management (14 works)