Work Package 3

Work Package 3 will produce the means to construct alternative accountability systems incorporating the needs of the disadvantaged. Systems of accountability are central to potential impact on policy because they are the means by which the potential distributional consequences of science and policy and practices can be recognised and assessed – and potentially incorporated – by formal elements of the political system.  The work package will examine the construction of such alternative accountability systems in two very different contexts:

-         experimental initiatives of a variety of kinds in S&T capacity building and priority setting with the aim of remediating inequality.  Some of these will be top down – such as the current attempts to persuade the World Health Organisation of the value of new coalitions of public and private interests in the production and delivery of vaccines for the poor – but the majority will be ‘bottom-up’,

-         redistributional issues associated with the design, development, access to and use of mundane, everyday technologies. Cutting edge technology plays a far smaller role in day to day existence than such mundane technologies which are taken for granted by many in the developed world.

The promised impact of this work package lies in the centrality of accountability systems for scientific governance, and in the subjects under analysis: phenomena which have wide significance for the social distribution of technological risks and benefits but which are often neglected or taken for granted.  In this it contrast with and complements institutional arrangements in work package 1 which are identified with distributional and development issues.