Revealing a paradox in scientific advice to governments: The struggle between modernist and reflexive logics within the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

Abstract

While governmental scientific advisers attempt to innovate their practices to become more reflexive and interactive, they cannot escape the modernist fundaments that constitute these practices. How do governmental scientific advisers make sense of this paradoxical situation? Using the transition process in the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency as a paradigmatic case, this article explores how four actor groups—the PBL management team, clients, PBL practitioners and external peers—involved in PBL’s transition process disclose their views on institutional redesign and, while doing that, express their beliefs on what they think scientific advice “is” and “should do”. Frame analysis identifies three coexisting frames of PBL’s (future) role and identity—PBL as integrated assessment specialist, PBL as think tank and PBL as trustworthy expert. Implicated in these frames are reflexive beliefs in a “professional culture of humility” that seem to replace the modernist “science speaking truth to power” mode of advising in the PBL organization. At the same time modernist beliefs in the science/politics demarcation, objectivity and scientific privilege persist, in part by revisiting them in view of the newly found reflexive principles of humility, transparency and deliberation. In conclusion, this empirical work illustrates how questioning and deliberating about the role and identity of one’s own organization is the first step to advance institutional redesign in scientific advice to governments. The challenge for governmental science advisers is to “translate” processes of institutional redesign into concrete social and cultural changes, bringing about a transformation in conceptions of what scientific advice is and should do all along. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on scientific advice to governments.