Professor Sir Charles Godfray ‘What does it mean to be an honest broker?’
The Green Templeton Lecture series was concluded by Professor Sir Charles Godfray on Thursday 17 February. The series focused on science and the media and was held in conjunction with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Also read more and watch the lectures given by Wolfgang Blau on climate change and Barkha Dutt on the road with the pandemic.
Isabelle Rocroi, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (2021) reports:
Professor Sir Charles Godfray’s lecture entitled ‘What does it mean to be an honest broker?’ explored the ways in which scientists interact with the government, media and the public. As Professor of Population Biology, Godfray holds wide-ranging interests in taxonomy, epidemiology, and the global food supply. As Director of the Oxford Martin School, Godfray leads, along with epidemiologist Angela McLean, the “Restatements” Project, which develops summaries of the scientific evidence on policy-relevant and contentious scientific topics, such as bovine tuberculosis (TB) and the biological effects of low dose radiation. In 2017, Godfray was knighted for his contributions to scientific research and services to government. Godfray’s talk was broken into three main sections, starting with scientists’ different roles in contributing to policy-making. After this, Godfray walked the audience through the process of writing a Restatement, using the example of the Oxford Martin School’s Restatement on control of bovine TB. Finally, he discussed the wider issues of the use of scientific evidence prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Role of Honest Broker in Contributing to Policy-Making
Godfray introduced Roger Pielke’s taxonomy of scientists’ roles, noting that very often, scientists are not sure what role they are playing. The roles include Pure Scientist, Arbiter, Advocate and Honest Broker. In their role as honest broker, the scientist’s task is to set forth an evidence base on a particular topic with policy relevance in a dispassionate way that is neither advocating for or against any particular policy. There is a key difference between the honest broker and the advocate, in that the advocate’s actions are geared toward promoting a specific policy. The most important characteristic of an honest broker, Godfray stressed, is the commitment to being policy neutral, which necessarily involves being transparent about the difficulty of achieving this.
The Oxford Martin School Restatement Project
Godfray introduced the Oxford Martin School Restatement Project with a question posed by his colleague, Dame Angela McLean: why haven’t the issues in environmental science relevant to policy gotten the same systematic review treatment as issues in medical research? McLean and Godfray started the Restatement Project to try to independently summarise the natural science evidence base. The target audience of these Restatements are informed policy makers and other stakeholders. They aim to be policy neutral and to state clearly where the uncertainty of evidence exists.
Godfray illustrated the process of researching and writing a Restatement by way of example of the project he worked on to restate the evidence base on bovine TB, published in 2013. Bovine TB is a particular issue in the West Country and Wales, and plagues livestock directly, having an indirect negative impact on trade. From an epidemiological point of view, bovine TB had been getting steadily worse since the mid-1980s, with seasonal peaks and troughs in outbreaks. It is a difficult disease to study in animals due to its complex biology and transmission. The main reservoir of bovine TB in the UK is the badger, which introduces a layer of political complexity, as the badger is an iconic member of UK fauna. To begin, Godfray and his colleagues assembled a group from experts with various advocacy positions on the topic to assess the evidence, identifying areas of uncertainty. The greatest area of contention the group identified was the question of whether or not to cull badgers. There has been considerable media attention on this issue over the past few decades in the UK, pushing the issue into the policy arena. In the 1990s, Lord John Krebs was asked to weigh in on the debate. He designed the Randomised Badger Control Trial, a large-scale replicated experiment conducted in the UK. The results of the trial showed a moderate reduction in bovine TB cases in the areas where culling occurred. The most surprising finding, Godfray emphasised, was that the areas around the culling areas saw a small increase in infections, most likely because the culling disturbed the badgers and caused them to disperse to adjacent areas, further spreading bovine TB. Overall, culling led to a modest but significant reduction in infected herds. The evidence summarised in the Restatement has been used in the advocacy space to argue both culling (it reduces infections) and against it (the effects are small).
The reception of the Oxford Martin School’s bovine TB Restatement has generally been positive, with both ‘sides’ of the debate accepting the findings. The issue continues to engender debate, with some evidence that the problem of bovine TB is stable or waning slightly, but that its geographical spread is increasing. The current policy landscape involves considering the future of farming in the UK, especially in light of the UK’s departure from the European Union.
Godfray shared some lessons learnt from the restatements that the Oxford Martin School have produced on issues including: neonicotinoids and pollinators, endocrine disruptors, and fluvial flood risk management. He expressed his view that there does seem to be a real need for restatement-like efforts, but warned that in order for an organisation to produce an effective restatement, they must maintain policy maker’s trust in their role as neutral honest broker. Godfray distinguished between true neutrality and the phenomenon of ‘cryptoadvocacy’, by which people or organisations act in the role of honest broker but either deliberately or accidentally act as an advocate instead. For this reason, Godfray stressed, the Martin School refuses financial support for Restatements from affected stakeholders that might appear to compromise its neutrality on these far-ranging issues. The problems that arise in restatement production, Godfray shared, were difficulties in scaling up the work and keeping it up-to-date. A criticism of restatement-like efforts is that expert judgement inevitably includes an element arbitrariness. The most effective way to address this, Godfray argues, is to be transparent with stakeholder groups that the restatement group is endeavouring to fulfil the role of honest broker, and feedback from these groups can help to maintain this balance.
Scientific Advice During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Finally, Godfray addressed the successes and shortcomings of science advice over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. For his part, Godfray was not involved in the scientific advice during the pandemic, and holds the view that although there were ups and downs, the overall quality of the science advice for COVID has been a “great success”. He expressed his view that both of the popular phrases ‘follow the science’ and ‘on tap not on top’ are flawed, and that a evidence feeds into policy through a more complicated process of co-creation. Godfray argued that the difficult balance between confidentiality and transparency was, on the whole, achieved in the UK, leaning more on the side of transparency, due to the dramatic measures that the government was asked to take. Godfray warned of the dangers of ‘group think’ in any advisory process, and pointed to ideas from the military to avoid this problem: one solution is to set up a group to constructively criticise the advice received by the organisation, to hopefully mitigate this effect. Godfray also warned against ‘epistemic creep’, or the temptation to prognosticate outside of one’s own field of expertise (admitting he often found it a difficult temptation to resist!). He also applauded the traditional media in the UK , congratulating them for the majority of the reporting that took place during the pandemic, making the complicated material accessible to the general public. He was encouraged by the casual discourse on difficult scientific issues that the pandemic encouraged between members of the lay public, and is hopeful that we have all taken this as a positive lesson. The silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic, Godfray concluded, was the open discourse about uncertainty that we watched unfold at various points of the pandemic. Godfray finished his talk with the hope that this honest discourse will continue going forward.
Green Templeton Lectures 2022
The Green Templeton Lecture series 2022 focused on science and the media. It comprised of a series of three lectures given by Wolfgang Blau, on Climate Change and Barkha Dutt on the road with the pandemic.
