Plural, Innovative and Novel Evidence (PINE) in Debate and Action
A guest post by Dr Claire Craig. Dr Craig has worked across academia, government, and the private sector, and helped establish Foresight, the UK government’s science-based strategic futures programme. She is now collaborating on new ways to ensure public reasoning is informed by evidence from the humanities, as well as science and social sciences.
Some time in the near future (timing being one of the hardest areas for futurists to get right) a shift has taken place. That shift is towards knowing that any public question can and must be informed by multiple types of evidence and by multiple models of reasoning. Instead of thinking “finance” and reaching only for economists, or “volcano” and reaching only for geophysicists, the common assumption is that there is always more than one source of evidence and that the far side of quantification is not inevitably unreason and public chaos. This incipient realisation does not cause paralysis, because the shift is also towards acknowledging that it’s in the nature of all forms of knowing to be incomplete, uncertain, contestable at least in part and…and… still to be useful or even essential.
Why one lens is not enough
Scientific and quantified evidence, such as climate or Covid models, are necessary but not sufficient. Standing alone, they risk acting as lightning rods that hold back the examination of other forms of evidence that are also necessary to achieving the best possible outcomes. Once the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] had used natural sciences to demonstrate the urgency of climate change to a certain degree of rigour, other forms of knowing and of anticipating both the challenges and the solutions could have been developed faster with more investment and with greater weight given to their insights. The historical, geopolitical, anthropological, economic, literary and other forms of rigorous evidence could have been brought in to enhance the scientific evidence, expanding the framing, developing new forms of modelling and anticipations, and connecting different groups of humans to the issues, including on scales from local to global.
The role of lived experience and story
The forerunners making shifts in what can be included as evidence are now increasingly visible. They include greater accommodation of lived experience as a form of knowing, in contexts from the UK’s enquiry into its responses to Covid, to the many and imaginative ways in which different peoples and communities are included in futures work. This (re)classification is not without its challenges when it comes to dealing accurately and differently with different forms of knowing and of anticipation. When someone says something, it may reflect their truth about their relationship with the world, but it may be in conflict with other forms of evidence (not just other people’s views). And public reasoning has a complicated relationship with stories by or about individuals: the most heart-rending, or that told by the most charismatic or powerful person or group, may not be the most robust or most relevant. In particular, for public reasoning lies the challenge of scaling: one person’s account of, say, their mother’s experience in a care home during Covid, provides a proof-of-concept, and it may help frame or inform the models considered. It does not provide the whole picture nor model the whole system, although it might, thoroughly considered, provide a perspective and a way into reasoning about the collective pictures. At the other end, national or global population-level statistics, while also valuable, are rarely the quickest route to understanding systems at the scales that may be needed: the street, the river catchment, or the zero-waste supply chain.
When it comes to futures and anticipations, there is in some senses a double challenge: not only is it necessary to work out how to deal with different types of evidence, it is also necessary to deal with the different ways these types of evidence (always based on past observation or experiment or experience) should inform possible futures.
Some areas of public policy are more experienced at assessing and using very different sources of evidence: defence, security, foreign and international development policy use human intelligence, alongside quantified and other sources. So does the law and, increasingly, parts of health policy and practice. This trend can be expanded and shaped by considering a full range of academic practices, including the humanities, in the context of public policy questions.
“It’s in the nature of all forms of knowing to be incomplete, uncertain, contestable at least in part and… still to be useful or even essential.”
PINE in practice
The potential enrichment and increased robustness of futures thinking informed by PINE can be illustrated through the use of narrative evidence, including practices from ethnography to literary criticism. In a short piece of work on UK space policy carried out in 2023 with practitioners and academics, a team* created evidence of the extent to which popular national coverage undersells UK strengths (partly by framings based on the wider “noble failure” story); how anticipatory stories highlight the need to consider and model networked sovereignty models to a much greater extent than currently the focus of national policy; and how small communities at a distance from their parent societies rapidly form independent group norms, from the ways in which warring nations’ citizens may share enclosed spaces on boats or space stations, to the stories of colonialism and independence in future explorations of space.
Similarly rapid evidence synthesis on British nuclear policy raised questions about the roles of the charismatic narratives of the 20th century (nuclear as strategic and based on stable nation state boundaries, distinct from other growing risks such as climate change, and with practices handed down through relatively fixed accounts of single moments such as the Cuban Missile Crisis) in a relatively closed community of academics and practitioners, and in an area of policy largely unexamined in general political or public debate for several decades preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What’s needed next
An urgent next step is better to understand the practices that enable communities of practitioners, academics and advisors fully to engage with findings that disrupt or nudge existing framings and assumptions, and in turn develop and test new evidence and experiment with new practices.
More academic knowledge is being created, by more academics, than ever before. Most nations and, increasingly, supernational and local governance arrangements include provision for academic knowledge to be communicated and acknowledged, sometimes even requested. To differing extents across place, discipline and sector, dialogue between publics, decision-makers and academics shape the questions studied and the framing of knowledge-seeking. But it is still the case that arrangements for bringing together different forms of evidence are sketchy or non-existent beyond national academies and small pockets of government; incentives for academics to engage remain weak; funding and rewards for risky inter-disciplinary approaches are shifting slowly, if at all; and evidence that is not considered novel in one context, may be rejected in another. Relative to the total investment in research, and to the sums and extent of human and planetary impacts at stake, small investments in connecting and nurturing existing experiments in science advisory systems to better incorporate plural, inter-disciplinary and novel evidence could change the course of future histories.
*(Professor Sarah Dillon, University of Cambridge; Dr Alex Tasker, University of Bristol; Dr Claire Craig, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford).