Science- The Business of

Practice of Science Friday: The hitchhiker’s guide to co-production- Six ways to link knowledge and action for sustainability

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Fig 1 from the Nature paper. Note that FAC-Net is one of the case studies (#20)

 

It’s always interesting to take our US-western federal lands-collaborative governance experience and relate it to other countries. I like that the authors wrote a user-friendly intro to their study.  There’s a bit of academic-ese to wade through but the diversity of approaches and the categories give much to think about.

How can humanity address the vast sustainability challenges that we face? Today there is no shortage of ideas and recommendations. Yet, what do they actually do for society? In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer is famously tasked with calculating the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything. After 7.5 million years, it answers “42”. An answer of little use to anyone when the original question remains a mystery.

This metaphor is apt for the state of many academic disciplines: research churns out advice, yet often with poor connection to the world beyond academia, where progress is at best incremental. One response to this is “co-production” – processes that connect researchers and diverse societal actors to grow critical insights in ways that promise to spur direct action. Instead of a single lead researcher (or computer), co-production entails collaborative work to navigate often contrasting views regarding what questions matter, and how their exploration can generate societal change.

Co-production is widely applied to address sustainability challenges, and action is urgently needed. Yet, questions remain around the many proliferating concepts and methods that make up co-production. In response, our initial answer was also 42 – in this case, 42 scholar practitioners deeply engaged in co-production. Together, we mapped out commonalities and differences across 32 initiatives that designed to connect diverse sectors and sustainably develop ecosystems at local to global scales in six continents. We asked ourselves: How do our approaches differ? Why? What are the implications?

In our new study, “Six modes of co-production for sustainability”, we share our collective insights via a heuristic tool designed to support diverse change agents – researchers, policy makers, activists, community leaders, and CEOs – to reflect on how they attempt to link diverse knowledge and action. The six modes we identify vary in their purpose for using co-production – to solve predefined problems, or to reframe problems; understanding of power – focusing on changing people’s behaviour, or more systemic issues; approach to politics – empowering marginalized actors, or influencing powerful actors to yield power; and pathways to impact – by primarily producing scientific knowledge, or through more integrated forms of knowing, relating and doing. These differences influence the kinds of outcomes that are possible, as well as the critical risks they pose. Here we offer a brief tour of six such initiatives.

Collaborative Research: Avoiding Helicopter/Parachute/Neo-colonial Approaches

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I couldn’t find a photo of a researcher helicoptering in.. so..

Thanks to Peter Williams for this piece in Nature Career Column to add to our collection of “similarities between less-developed countries and less developed parts of more-developed countries.”

The practice of scientists from wealthy nations visiting lower-income countries, collecting samples, publishing the results with little or no involvement from local scientists, and providing no benefit for the local community is referred to as neo-colonial, helicopter or parachute research1. T

 

From these experiences, I have made my own set of rules to follow to form meaningful collaborations and avoid helicopter research:

1. When you start a project in a new location, take the time to learn who is working or living at the site. These people could be an Indigenous group or scientists from another university, government agency or non-governmental organization. Contact them before you start your project and invite them to a meeting to introduce yourself.

2. In the field, take the time to meet as many people as you can, even if it’s just for coffee. Discover what you have in common. Maybe they have long-term data they want to share or they can provide advice for choosing one field site over another one.

3. Offer to collaborate and provide something in exchange, such as information, sample analysis, and, later, co-authorship.

4. Involve everyone throughout the process. Share your data and ask for advice and feedback as soon as you get some results. Don’t wait for the project to be finalized or the paper to be published. Send a report of your results, even if it’s just a graph and some pictures.

5. If they agree to collaborate, recognize the input that they have already had. Perhaps without you noticing, they could have improved your sampling design (by helping you choose your field sites) or helped with data collection (by taking you to a location or helping you to arrange entrance to a farm or a protected area, for example). And their local knowledge will be extremely valuable for interpreting the results.

An immediate solution to stop helicopter research is to recognize that knowledge comes in many forms, and diversity of understanding improves research. As a field scientist who works in many locations around the world, my knowledge of the natural world is limited to what I can gather on my relatively short field trips.

Without the knowledge of local people and their traditional culture that can span thousands of years, my conclusions could be misinformed or simply wrong. I have learnt that working with local people is not about charity, but about respecting the knowledge that does not follow the conventional rules of colonial science. Importantly, it is about ensuring research has an impact on and is valuable to the places we are lucky enough to study.

I’d only add to “who is working” perhaps federal and state professional resource specialists; who might not call themselves “scientists” but still know many things. And folks from any collaboratives in the area and…. I wish this approach were encouraged in researcher training.. perhaps it is today. Maybe all federal agencies could require evidence of this in their grant programs?

Practice of Science Friday: The Structure of Scientific Disagreement- Fish Behavior and Ocean Acidification

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There’s a fascinating article in Science that delves into a scientific controversy around fish behavior and ocean acidification.  Martin Enserink is a journalist with Science who  wrote the article and sent me a link, so hopefully you can access it. It raises some questions about the science biz, how it works, and how it might work better.

The fight, between two groups united by their passion for fish, isn’t just about data and the future of the oceans. It highlights issues in the sociology, psychology, and politics of science, including pressure on researchers to publish in top-tier journals, the journals’ thirst for eye-catching and alarming findings, and the risks involved in whistleblowing.


Should extraordinary claims get closer scrutiny?

The paper has proved so polarizing in the field, “It’s like Republicans and Democrats,” says co-author Dominique Roche of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Some scientists hailed it as a stellar example of research replication that cast doubt on extraordinary claims that should have received closer scrutiny from the start.

and

Not long after that paper was published, Science received a “technical comment” from JCU reef ecologist Andrew Baird, who noted several problems, including the fact that the water flow quoted for Dixson’s flume was much faster than any coral larvae have been reported to swim, meaning larvae would be washed out of the back of the flume. Science’s review process deemed the comment “as low priority for publication,” says Deputy Editor for Research Sacha Vignieri. (Science’s news and editorial departments operate independently of each other.) Baird published it as a preprint instead, but it drew little attention.

Maybe there should be a screen for “extraordinary claims” and/or “high degree political and policy implications,” that would invoke an open peer review process? Would this story have been different if that had been the case? I think much of the interpersonal drama might have been avoided, and of course, better research accomplished.

When Scholarly Discussion is Not Enough: Give Up or Blow Whistle or ???

The group learned some painful lessons. After a preliminary inquiry, a UU panel dismissed the request for an investigation in a terse report and berated the team for failing to discuss its concerns with Lönnstedt and Eklöv in a “normal scholarly discussion.” Lönnstedt said the group was simply jealous. The accusers spent many months gathering additional documentation, at the expense of their own research. In April 2017, Sweden’s Central Ethical Review Board concluded there had indeed been “scientific dishonesty” in the research, and Science retracted the paper; 8 months later, a full UU investigation concluded the data had been fabricated. (Eklöv blamed Lönnstedt; Lönnstedt maintained her innocence.)

The brazenness of the apparent deception shocked Jutfelt. “It really triggered my skepticism about science massively,” he says. “Before that paper, I could not understand how anyone could fabricate data. It was inconceivable to me.” Now, he began to wonder how many other papers might be a total fantasy. The experience also taught the group that, if they were ever to blow the whistle again, they would have to bring a stronger case right from the start, Clark says.

On the other side of the globe, the group’s accusations had Munday’s attention. “It seems that Clark and Jutfelt are trying to make a career out of criticizing other people’s work. I can only assume they don’t have enough good ideas of their own to fill in their time,” he wrote to Lönnstedt in a June 2016 email that she used in her defense to the ethics board. “Recently, I found out they have been ‘secretly’ doing work on the behavioural effects of high CO2 on coral reef fishes, presumably because they want to be critical of some aspects of our work.”

Others defended Munday and Dixson more diplomatically. Four “grandfathers in the field,” as Bruno calls them, criticized the replication in a paper in Biogeosciences. One author, Hans-Otto Pörtner of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, says his own work had been on the receiving end of criticism from the “youngish group” in the past. “Building a career on judging what other people did is not right,” says Pörtner, who co-chairs one of IPCC’s three working groups. “If such a controversy gets outside of the community, it’s harmful because the whole community loses credibility.”

So.. according to Pörtner, criticism should stay within the community because otherwise the community would lose credibility. So people shouldn’t criticize each others’ work in public? Only via blind peer review, or publishing papers that disagree (given that the journal would publish them, because “not finding something” isn’t all that exciting). Leaving the rest of us to ponder “why did they come to different conclusions?”. I would actually trust the community more if their disagreements were in the open. I wonder whether that might be a role for the relevant scientific society.

Dr. King and the Role of (Social) Scientists in the Civil Rights Movement

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From the Honest Broker Newsletter.
In Roger Pielke, Jrs.’ , Honest Broker Newsletter, he talks about Dr. King’s encouragement for folks working in the behavioral sciences at a speech he gave to the American Psychological Association in 1967.

Dr. King observed, astutely, that the social sciences often deal in uncomfortable knowledge: “These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”

In a clear understatement, he noted that there were many opportunities for social science research “to assist the civil rights movement.” Three examples he cited were research on leadership in the Black community, the effectiveness of political action of the civil rights movement, and psychological and ideological changes within the Black community as societal change occurs.

Ultimately, Dr. King asked social scientists to help gauge progress, including assessments of direction and pace: “Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.”

Roger adds “Such questions are fundamental to all policy research.”

If we thought that justice for disadvantaged communities is one of the most important needs of our country, what would that budget and research priorities look like? What would it take to make sure that research is co-designed and co-produced with representatives of those communities?”

It’s not that hard to imagine. When I worked on the Fund for Rural America, we gave a research grant to a rural community group to do exactly that. This was highly unpopular with the Science Establishment and the universities. Can we imagine, say 100 million to start, each for representatives of Black, Native American, Latino/Hispanic and Asian-Americans to co-design and co-produce social science research? I’d think we could afford it, simply by establishing coordinating groups for policy-relevant research that would ride herd on duplication across agencies and downright “not all that useful for policy but claim to be” proposals.

Fifty years ago, perhaps we thought “if we just hired more diverse people, the research would naturally change to their interests.” Well, it seems to have been harder than we had thought to hire more diverse people, and federal research priorities and budget have their own momentum and vested interests.

While the social sciences have diversified significantly since the 1960s in terms of both scholars and scholarship, the various disciplines that comprise the social sciences still have a long way still to go. For instance, top university social science departments continue to be overwhelmingly populated by white males, and Black and Latino students continue to be under-represented on our leading campuses.

And while we can look at the Forest Service and see that females are heavily represented among researchers and practicing social scientists, this study from 2019 says:

Most faculty are male, although there appear to be critical masses of women in political science and sociology. Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented among faculty relative to their shares of the population. Within each racial-ethnic group examined, there are more male than female faculty members, with a smaller gender gap for Blacks than for other racial-ethnic groups. In general, the higher the rank, the greater the proportion of males than females, especially for Whites and Asians.

According to this January 16 AP Story, President Biden announced his appointment of a Science Advisor and others.

The president-elect noted the team’s diversity and repeated his promise that his administration’s science policy and investments would target historically disadvantaged and underserved communities.

I hope President-Elect Biden means “co-create” a new body of scientific information with underserved communities as full partners in funding, design, and production, with open peer review and open access to research results.

Practice of Science Friday: How To Make Fire Science More Useful in the Real World

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There’s much talk of what people need to do to live with fire, but so far I haven’t seen many social scientists quoted in the press, even though I know they have developed a substantial body of literature on the subject. In my digging into this, I ran across this workshop report from a National Academy workshop. “Living with Fire: State of the Science around Fire-Adapted Communities.” National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. A Century of Wildland Fire Research: Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Kevin Hiers, a fire scientist at Tall Timbers, wrote this section and I agree with many of his ideas. I even think that many are applicable outside of fire science. I’ve bolded a few of his statements.

Fire scientists are a diverse group as well and come from disciplines as varied as meteorology, physics, forestry, ecology, and, increasingly, the social sciences. In an attempt to be relevant, fire scientists often are tool-focused and recommendation-focused so that they can tell managers how to better manage their land. The unintended consequence is that decision space is often constrained in this increasingly complex world. When mistakes are made by quantifying the obvious rather than focusing on what managers need to know, little science is translated into management actions.

Because Hiers has spent much of his career on this border between fire science and fire management, he emphasized a few characteristics that are important barriers to overcome. First, managers rely on experience as the currency of credibility. This experiential learning is different from structured learning. The scientific community, with its incentive to publish papers, has dialogs and arguments in the peer-reviewed literature; however, that conversation does not always translate well to on-the-ground experience. Second, managers have specific circumstances to deal with—the fire of the day that has a particular set of management objectives, topography of fuels, and atmospheric conditions—whereas scientists seek generality in their world view. Generalization changes scientists’ understanding of managers’ risks. Third, the complexity in fire management versus the orientation of fire science around specific disciplines increases the challenge of applying science to management. For example, when a prescribed fire is set in the WUI, the manager’s job is on the line and he or she has to integrate all of the different disciplines of fire science into that day’s burn. As fire scientists dive deeper into the depths of particular disciplines, the ability of managers to integrate the findings of research from these different areas of expertise and apply them to a specific burn becomes more and more difficult.

A different approach is needed. First, translational fire science, which is process-oriented not tool-focused, is needed. Hiers posited that solutions to the United States’ fire problem will come from long-term, shared experiences where scientists are on the fires with managers, providing the circumstances for each group to become fluent with the other. Second, fire science outcomes must begin to address uncertainty, he said, rather than what is already known, and focus on fires that can be controlled, like prescribed burns. Even for prescribed burning in the Southeast, tools are still needed to develop objectives and prescription parameters. Third, the disciplinary breadth of fire science needs to be expanded to social scientists. Many of the solutions discussed at the workshop were outside of the traditional realm of fire science expertise. Hiers commented how important it was to have social scientists present at the workshop and how their participation in fire science and management is absolutely critical. More incentives need to be provided for social scientists to participate in and contribute to solutions.

Many building blocks exist for moving toward this new approach, including prescribed fire councils, regional fire exchanges through the Joint Fire Science Program, and the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium. Hiers emphasized that when managers and scientists burn and manage fires together, they learn together. One of the premier National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center courses is an agency administrator course, which brings the line officers into a context where they see what managers face every day. Shared experiences like the one provided in the course are key, but such mentorship programs are lacking. Formal adoption of shared experience as a strategy has yet to occur, and agency leadership is needed to provide incentives for scientists to participate in an experiential way.

In my words:
Splinterizing disciplines leaving managers to synthesize in real time
Scientists rewarded for generalization, people encounter specific situations
Lack of shared experiences- real world experiential and discussion opportunities between scientists and managers
Management involves people ergo social science is critical

Practice of Science Friday: Reflections on “Science and Scienciness” from 2010 and the 2020 Fire Season

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This is from the JFSP Fact Sheet. https://www.firescience.gov/documents/Fact_Sheets/FuelTreatment_Fact_Sheet.pdf

In the interests of “how I would change what I wrote in the past given the 2020 fire season”, I remembered a series of posts from 2010 (many readers were not with us then) called Science Situations That Shout Watch Out. Here’s a link to 1-3, there is also 4, when scientists speak for nature 5 Sleight of Science, 6 and 7 Warm Lake Fire Excerpts. Looking back, they are almost identical to some of the discussions we’re having today re fuel treatments. For new readers, we also did a series on “Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatments” that you can search for in the search box.

Situation 3. When Scientists Frame the Issue. This is a situation that occurs more frequently than desirable, and is actually the source of unnecessary tension between scientists and managers. Here is the way this dysfunctional cycle operates. First, there is a pot of money, to be distributed through a competitive process with a panel of other scientists. A scientist writes a proposal with a certain framing (e.g., fire protection of people and their communities is the same as protecting houses). Since none of the communities involved are at the table, and the framing sounds plausible to the other scientists, the proposal is funded. Then the scientist does the work. When they hear about the research results, managers then ignore the results, or only partially use them, because the results aren’t relevant to their framing of the issue. The last step of the cycle is that the managers are accused of “not using the best available science.” I have seen this cycle play out many times.

The scientific evidence is clear that the only effective way to protect structures from fire is to reduce the ignitability of the structure itself (e.g., fireproof roofing, leaf gutter guards) and the immediate surroundings within about 100 feet from each home, e.g., through thinning of brush and small trees adjacent to the homes (www.firelab.org–see studies by U.S. Forest Service fire scientist Dr. Jack Cohen)

In this case, the difference in framing is as simple as it’s not about the structures- it’s about the fact that people don’t want fire running through their communities. It is about all kinds of community infrastructure, stop signs and power poles, landscaping, fences, gardens, trees and benches in parks, people and pets and livestock having safe exits from encroaching fires. It is about firefighter safety and about conditions for different suppression tactics. That’s why fire breaks of some kinds around communities (not just structures) will always be popular in the real world. Of course, people don’t actually fireproof their homes either in the real world. “How can we best keep wildfires from damaging communities and endangering people” would be a more complex, but more real framing of the question. Note that one scientific discipline can’t provide the answer to this framing- there are elements of fire science, community design, fire suppression practice, sociology, political science and economics.

I think my bolded statement stands the test of time. Check out this link from Newsweek where you can see the before and after of communities in Oregon from satellite photos.

Since fires happened in California, and can be blamed on anthropogenic climate change, (as of summer 2020) we no longer have to debate that Bad Things Can Happen with Wildfires. We’ve only added more- problems with air quality, bad chemicals being released, damage to power infrastructure (possibly located in “the backcountry”) and so on. Looking back, I think we would have had much more helpful scientific information if in fact stakeholders had framed the issue and determined relevance- then written up an RFP. And yes, I appreciate greatly the efforts of the Joint Fire Science Program (see link in the image above). I also wonder why folks think it’s better to have splintered by agency (USDA NIFA, FS, USGS, NSF) and investigator-driven research than a coordinated and focused approach, with stakeholder involvement in prioritization and design.

In fact, if any grad students are interested, it would be fascinating to look at funded wildfire studies across agencies, develop a landscape of the different topics (from physical fire models to social studies of landowners). I see a potential committee of stakeholders, scientists and research administrators developing recommendations to 1) stop duplication, 2) fund gaps and 3) have practitioners and stakeholders interrogate the utility of each study. And maybe for communities, we don’t need more research as much as sharing of best practices. But researchers might not arrive at that conclusion on their own. That’s why I think we need to rethink our institutions and decision-making processes.

Practice of Science Friday: Challenges of Ideological Diversity in the Science Biz

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I ran across this opinion piece from October in EOS (the science news journal of the American Geophysical Union or AGU). It’s called “Does our Vision of Diversity Include Social Conservatives?” and is authored by three professors at Brigham Young University.  The original controversy deal with whether professional science societies should handle ads for private universities with honor codes and hiring preferences to members of its religion as discriminatory. But what I thought was valuable, and related to The Smokey Wire, were their arguments for the practice of dealing with those with whom we disagree. Which is what we do here, and sometimes it’s difficult (at least for me)  to explain to others why we think it is important work. They also have some interesting citations on the social science of ideologies and political differences.

Their argument is that if people practicing science are not diverse (and people who decide funding what topics are researched), then scientific information is not as useful or trustworthy as it could be.

Diversity supports our moral values and practical goals. It gives us a glimpse into ways of living and thinking that were invisible or inaccessible to us. It humanizes our ideological and practical competitors and encourages compassion and concern. It ratchets down identity divisions that otherwise short-circuit exchange of ideas and values. It improves the accuracy and innovation of formal and informal research on political, social, and scientific issues [Duarte et al., 2015; Shi et al., 2019]. Liberals and conservatives alike have been shown to dismiss scientific evidence based on political allegiance, meaning that our public credibility depends on good science from diverse scientists [Ditto et al., 2019]. Perhaps most important from a community perspective, diversity favors equal representation and creates crucial opportunities for disadvantaged and discriminated-against individuals.
However, diversity is more than just looking different or even being different. Tolerance at arm’s length will not bring about the many benefits of diversity. Active relationships among deeply different individuals are needed to unlock the power of diversity to improve our science and our society [Holvino et al., 2004; Stevens et al., 2008]. Diversity is difference and disagreement in a context of community and collaboration.
LDS folks, like other religious folks, have great goals that are difficult to live up to:

An alternative response is to engage in discussions and develop relationships with those we perceive as adversaries. In our religious tradition, this diplomatic approach to enforcing norms and influencing others is required by a 19th century scripture: “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of [authority or majority], only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile.” Though our faith community falls short of this ideal often, it suggests that the way to persuade people of the validity of our worldview is not to silence theirs.

Practice of Science Friday: The Roles of Researchers and Extension-Like Science Experts

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The main role for researchers in applied science is to provide papers and other information that people can use.  In my analogy, they produce information to be used by someone- they blow out information and can’t necessarily control where it lands or how, or if it is used.

The main role for what we might call Extension-like activities, Forest Service folks in State and Private (nurseries, pathology and entomology), and experts in the National Forests (from fish and wildlife bios to social scientists)  is to sift through piles of research provided by researchers and use that to advice landowners or others making decisions about forests.  They search out  information and try to make sense of all the different studies and approaches, in light of the needs of the people they work for.  For the lack of a better term, I’ll put them all into one category- SSME’s or science subject matter experts. They vacuum up information from a variety of sources, as opposed to producing it.

Their roles are equally important, and complementary.  You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out, though, that there might be disagreements and tensions (turf battles) between people in these somewhat overlapping roles. In some federal organizations, it has led to frustration as practitioners sometimes want to find out things, but they are not allowed to do research (based on their funding) and whatever they want to test looks like research to someone, so they are told they can’t do it. Basically they are told that their questions are not important enough to be funded as research, but are too “researchy” for the practitioners to do. Like any other field of activity, overlapping roles works well when people see eye to eye- not so much when they don’t.

Both groups are trained in their field. Many in the SSME world have Ph.D.’s and most have master’s.  Many researchers also, through their own personalities, or with some encouragement from their institutions, also do this kind of extension-like work.  In the past, there has been a tendency for people funded to do research to look down on people doing extension-like activities.  In fact, some folks don’t even seem to know that they exist.

Here’s one story- in the mid 90’s I worked in Forest Service Research and Development and I was one of a team working on improving the linkages between science and management.  Here’s a link to a copy of the report from 1995- “Navigating into the Future: Rensselaerville Roundtable: Integrating Science and Policymaking.”

As hard as I tried – my experience showing that SSME’s were the critical people to getting the best science into management- SSME’s were basically invisible in this document (I did get two paragraphs, titled Technical Specialists, on page 9. It was all about how researchers and decision-makers needed to work together- guidelines  for improving the institutional coordination.   you will understand how perhaps the emphasis on researchers doing SSME work left a gaping hole in acknowledging support for “real” SSME’s.

I don’t know that this is general or my own experience. When I started with the Forest Service in the late 70’s, my expertise was supported to the tune of financial support for a post-doc at North Carolina State.  By the end of my career (when I was Planning Director) I was told that I could not be on government time, nor give a government affiliation in the program, to give a talk at an SAF meeting when the invitation came with travel. I don’t think it was all intentionally against the Forest Services being better at science, there was just a “shouldn’t travel” factor that rose and fell in importance randomly.  Of all the Chiefs, Jack Ward Thomas was the one who really cared about promoting that kind of expertise. I couldn’t find a link to his idea of promoting professionalism by leaving experts in place and able to increase their pay.

Next post: The Land Grant Model and the Key Role of Extension

Practice of Science Friday: The Turn Toward Investigator-Initiated Research in the US, is it Too Late to Turn Back?

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Years ago, I worked on the Research Committee of the 7th American Forest Congress.  There was a “communities” member on the committee (I believe it was Carolyn Daly) who said from the perspective of forest communities “Why are scientists always telling us what we can’t do? Why don’t they help us figure out what we can do?”

For many of us, our scientist heroes were folks like George Washington Carver, who used science to help make people’s lives better.  Today there are many scientists who carry on that tradition just fine in all disciplines. However, it has happened that even within my lifetime, the reins of the science budget have drifted farther away from people who want problems solved.  You’d think that Congress could fix that, and they have tried, but the inertia of investigator-initiated research and science community control is very strong.

Here’s a study by Kyle Myers of the Harvard Business School who studied how much money it costs to get a scientist to change their topic.

But, how should we decide what types of research to fund? What diseases, what populations, what methodologies should we focus on? We could leave this up to the scientists themselves. And in the United States, this has become a popular choice. The “investigator-initiated” grant, where scientists propose their own ideas to be evaluated by their peers, is commonplace. This is especially true at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the single largest funder of biomedical research in the world.

This investigator-initiated approach makes sense. Scientists are, after all, the people who should know the most about what ideas are the most promising. But the incentive structure of science, with its emphasis on priority and prestige, may not lead scientists to prefer the same things as society would like. And, like the rest of us, scientists may be influenced by certain preferences, biases, or other constraints that could prove misaligned with social goals. It is not surprising then that many countries, and notably the EU’s Horizon Europe research framework, rely on more “top-down” or “mission-oriented” styles where policymakers directly allocate funds to specific topics.

The NIH balances this tradeoff by using a combination of both investigator-initiated grants, as well as a number of “targeted” grant mechanisms that solicit proposals for particular types of research. These targeted mechanisms request ideas that focus on a particular disease, methodology, or population, and have become increasingly popular (see fig.1). But the NIH, and most other scientific funding agencies, have long assumed that scientists will be willing to adjust their research trajectories in response to these sorts of targeted grants or mission-oriented policies. However, whether these adjustments actually occur in practice – do scientists do what policymakers ask them to? — and just how costly they are to induce, has been unclear.

It’s interesting that the EU is apparently more open to these “mission” ideas. An op-ed here from Marianna Mazzucato of University College, London.

The good news is that we don’t have to look very far for tangible lessons. Most of the smart products we have in our bags and pockets came from investments that were more far reaching than a simple “science-push” explanation provides. They came from the ability to connect science to solving concrete problems  –  that is, through “missions”….

Today we have the opportunity to direct innovation in similar mission-led ways, which will be as bold as the moonshot programme was, but will instead be aimed at the multiple social and technological challenges we have. These will be inspired not by Cold War challenges, but by what one could call the war on poverty, the war on climate change and the urgent need to create societies that are more just and sustainable.

Today’s political leaders are not short of societal challenges that they can turn into concrete missions: climate change, ageing populations and rising inequality. I have been advocating a mission-led approach in the European Union and setting out potential missions for a plastic-free ocean, carbon-neutral cities and decreasing the burden of dementia. These are all significant challenges of our time that need bold and inspirational leadership.

Missions are set at the top without being prescriptive on what the innovation required to solve the problem must be. They then facilitate bottom-up innovation to achieve the goal. We need to use the full power of government instruments – from prize schemes to procurement – to crowd in multiple bottom-up solutions. The moonshot, for example, required innovations across different sectors to be successful, including nutrition, computing and clothing as well as spaceflight.
It will also be important not to ignore the humanities and social sciences in missions.

I’d only argue that the social sciences are more than “not to be ignored.” Many new technologies have foundered on the shoals of cost or public acceptance. Maybe Mazzucato, as an economist was unwilling to toot her own discipline’s horn.

Why Some Things Some People Say Sometimes About Wildfires Are Wrong: Michael Shellenberger in Forbes

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In a small gesture for accuracy in media, I took the liberty of retitling Shellenberger’s November 4 Forbes piece for our TSW post. Here’s the link.

Let’s look at this article in light of what we discussed yesterday. Climate and wildfires both have their own sets of experts and a variety of disciplines, each of which having different approaches, values and priorities. I’m not saying that studying the results of climate modelling is entirely a Science Fad, but listen to Keeley here:

I asked Keeley if the media’s focus on climate change frustrated him.

“Oh, yes, very much,” he said, laughing. “Climate captures attention. I can even see it in the scientific literature. Some of our most high-profile journals will publish papers that I think are marginal. But because they find climate to be an important driver of some change, they give preference to them. It captures attention.

And the marginal ones are funded because.. climate change is cool (at least to “high-profile” journals, which have their own ideas of coolness). And who funds it? The US Government. Me, I would give bucks to folks for, say, physical models of fire behavior,(something that will help suppression folks today)rather than attempting to parse out the unknowable interlinkages of the past. But that’s just me, and the way the Science Biz currently operates, neither I nor you get a vote.

Note that the scientists quoted, (Keeley, North, and Safford) in this piece are all government scientists. Keeley and North are research scientists while Safford appears to be a Regional Ecologist (funded by the National Forests), so if we went by the paycheck method (are they funded by R&D?) Safford would have to get permission from public affairs, while Keeley and North would not. On the other hand, Safford has published peer-reviewed papers, so perhaps he should not have to ask permission? Even with permission requirements, though, they seem able to provide their expertise to the press.

Keeley talks about the fact that shrubland and forest fires are different beasts, and sometimes get lumped together in coverage. Below is an interesting excerpt on the climate question.

Keeley published a paper last year that found that all ignition sources of fires had declined except for powerlines.
“Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous 20 years,” he said.
“Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.”
What then is driving the increase in fires?
“If you recognize that 100% of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add 6 million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.
What about the Sierras?
“If you look at the period from 1910 – 1960,” said Keeley, “precipitation is the climate parameter most tied to fires. But since 1960, precipitation has been replaced by temperature, so in the last 50 years, spring and summer and temperatures will explain 50% of the variation from one year to the next. So temperature is important.”
Isn’t that also during the period when the wood fuel was allowed to build due to suppression of forest fires?
“Exactly,” said Keeley. “Fuel is one of the confounding factors. It’s the problem in some of the reports done by climatologists who understand climate but don’t necessarily understand the subtleties related to fires.”
So, would we have such hot fires in the Sierras had we not allowed fuel to build-up over the last century?
“That’s a very good question,” said Keeley. “Maybe you wouldn’t.”
He said it was something he might look at. “We have some selected watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas where there have been regular fires. Maybe the next paper we’ll pull out the watersheds that have not had fuel accumulation and look at the climate fire relationship and see if it changes.”
I asked Keeley what he thought of the Twitter spat between Gov. Newsom and President Trump.

Sharon’s note: I don’t know Keeley, but I thought he handled this very well, considering it’s not really a question about his research. The above italics are mine.

“I don’t think the president is wrong about the need to better manage,” said Keeley. “I don’t know if you want to call it ‘mismanaged’ but they’ve been managed in a way that has allowed the fire problem to get worse.”
What’s true of California fires appears true for fires in the rest of the US. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled 37 different regions across the US and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables, the scientists explored, “none were as significantly significant… as the anthropogenic variables.”

It’s encouraging to think that research shows that fire suppression has an big impact on fires. Otherwise, we’d have to give it up because fire suppression isn’t “based on science” 😉