As in many other policy areas, there is a rising concern about how to involve the general public in heritage management and preservation. We analyse attempts made by Swedish cultural heritage authorities to initiate new participatory devices. We ask: How is storytelling used as a participatory device? What are the implications of this in terms of how legitimate concerns are reconfigured? Storytelling has a capacity to transform dominant discourses and result in new objects of care. We conclude that even storytelling itself is reconfigured in these practices, resulting in the collection of narratives, with limited transformative effects.

This report analyses mediation and mediators in Swedish nuclear waste management. Mediation is about establishing agreement and building common knowledge. It is argued that demonstrations and dialogue are the two prominent approaches to mediation in Swedish nuclear waste management. Mediation through demonstration is about showing, displaying, and pointing out a path to safe disposal for inspection. It implies a strict division between demonstrator and audience. Mediation through dialogue on the other hand, is about collective acknowledgements of uncertainty and suspensions of judgement creating room for broader discussion.

In Sweden, it is the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co. (SKB) that is tasked with finding a method and a site for the final disposal of the nation’s nuclear waste. Two different legislative frameworks cover this process.

In accordance with the Act on Nuclear Activities, SKB is required to demonstrate the safety of its planned nuclear waste management system to the government, while in respect of the Swedish Environmental Code, they are obliged to organize consultations with the public.

How SKB combines these requirements is the main question under investigation in this report in relation to materials deriving from three empirical settings: 1) SKB’s safety analyses, 2) SKB’s public consultation activities and 3) the ‘dialogue projects’, initiated by other actors than SKB broadening the public arena for discussion. In conclusion, an attempt is made to characterise the longterm interplay of demonstration and dialogue in Swedish nuclear waste management.

Since the 1970s, the template for Swedish nuclear waste management has been for industry to deliver “nuclear fuel safety” after first demonstrating to government authority how and where it can be achieved. In other words, nuclear fuel safety has been something to be publicly witnessed before it is decided whether or not industry should be allowed to carry on implementing its plans. From the outset, these industry plans encompassed the completion of the Swedish nuclear power programme itself, as this was made contingent upon a demonstrated solution to the waste problem. However, after a national referendum on the future of nuclear power in 1980, industrial progress in nuclear fuel safety became directly connected with a safe phase out of a 12-reactor programme within 25 years of its completion. As plans for such a phase out have in turn grown subject to indefinite postponement, and as opposition to nuclear power has progressively mellowed, so the nuclear industry's highly resilient nuclear fuel safety programme appears set again today to validate nuclear new build both at home and abroad. Drawing on studies of three specific management tools - safety analyses, EIA consultations and alternative “dialogue projects” - this article seeks to chart the unremitting and indomitable Swedish commitment to the mediation of nuclear waste management through industrial demonstration as this has withstood various attempts to introduce a greater element of public dialogue into the policy process in response to both siting conflicts and new environmental legislation.

The new centrality of “the public” to the governance of science and technology has been accompanied by a widespread use of public consultation mechanisms designed to elicit from citizens relevant opinions on technoscientific matters. This paper explores the configuration of legitimate constituencies in two such exercises: the UK “GM Nation?” public debate on food biotechnology, and a Swedish “Transparency Forum” on the risks of mobile telephones. We consider the apparently paradoxical combination in these two examples of a tendency to produce static images of the public with a high valuation of mobility—of citizens and their opinions—as the key outcome of deliberation. We discuss the organizers' careful delineation of a distinction between “stakeholders” and the “general public,” and their aversion to any sort of “eventfulness” in public deliberations. Finally, we introduce the classical notion of the “idiot”—the individual who minds exclusively his or her own private affairs— and argue for the need to develop a new vocabulary to evaluate the politics of “listening to the public.”

The aim of this report is to analyse representations of time in a particular social setting: how the nuclear waste issue is presented in the PowerPoint slides that the Swedish Nuclear Waste Management Company (SKB) show at its information and consultation meetings. We have chosen to see ‘time’ and ‘expressions of time dimensions’ as a way of framing the nuclear waste issue. The way in which nuclear waste is discussed in relation to time both enable and limit discussions about possible futures. In this study we ask the following research questions: how is time represented in the PowerPoint slides? In what way is time presented in relation to risk and safety? In what way is time presented in relation to environmental impact?

Our empirical material consists of all PowerPoint slides shown at SKB’s information and consultation meetings. We use the material that is available at SKB’s website between 2003 and 2008. The material consists of around 1500 slides. In addition we have conducted participant observations at ten of these meetings between 2005 and 2008.

We conclude that time is visualised in different forms depending on what it is that is shown: safety, risk or environmental impact. We could identify a variety of visualisations, for example time lines, and tables with dates in connection to figures of pollution levels. Taken together they represent different stories about the future as well as about the past. SKB use certain time perspectives to motivate that their suggested method for a nuclear waste disposal is reasonable and possible to implement while other time perspectives are shown in relation to the potential development of society’s capacity to manage the waste and the future development of transports and the impact related to this, for example.

This paper explores the river landscapes and concomitant values resulting from tensions between floodmanagement and visions of a River City. The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the management of urbanwaters as valuation practices. We regard valuation practices as co-constitutive of current and future riverlandscapes. Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, is located next to the sea, and the Göta River, Sweden’slargest water system, runs through it. Our empirical focus is on how this city approaches increasing risks of flooding.We explore three approaches that have been formulated in relation to flood management: defend, retreat andattack. We ask how these approaches are applied in the management of Göta River flooding and in the city’s visionof a future Gothenburg that embraces the river as a genuinely positive aspect of urban life. We present the case asa journey that takes us upstream from the river’s sea inlet port and through Gothenburg. During our kilometre bykilometre journey, the river’s appearance shifts. The varied river landscape mirrors the diversity in how its watersare valuated, both historically and in present times. The perception of urban waters is shaped by practices ofvaluation. These valuations are generative. They connect the value of water to other entities, actors, plans, activitiesand buildings, and they are thus key to the river landscapes that will eventually be realised. By way of conclusion,we identify a number of governance challenges that are particularly relevant to urban rivers.

This article explores processes of articulation in the controversies over third-generation mobile phone transmitters and the interrelated phenomenon of “electrosensitivity.” The argument is that the search to fix public image and public concerns tends to alienate the public from technology discussions. An alternative political epistemology of articulations is suggested to explore the dynamics among prereflexive motives, public engagement, and institutional requirements for public deliberations

This paper explores exhibitions of nuclear waste facilities and their use as a tool for enrolling the public in the Swedish nuclear waste programme. We argue that the planning process for the final disposal of nuclear waste has dual purposes. On one hand, the consultation meetings provide opportunities for dialogue among a broader set of actors – at least to some extent. The goal of the exhibitions, on the other hand, is to highlight the state of nuclear waste management today and the future goals for nuclear waste. Based on our observations of study visits to existing nuclear waste facilities and exhibitions of existing and planned facilities, we analyse the framing of the nuclear waste issue, how experiences are structured, and the type of visitor that is expected to attend the exhibits. The framing of nuclear waste management in the exhibitions should not be seen as separate from the public consultations, but as a critical tool for generating public interest in nuclear waste. Citizens need to be informed about the issue in order to become involved. The fact that the exhibitions are characterised by a ‘see for yourself’ logic, however, can be contrary to the aims of stimulating a dialogue on the future environmental impact.

This accessible book introduces students to perspectives from the field of science and technology studies. Putting forward the thesis that science and democracy share important characteristics, it shows how authority cannot be taken for granted and must continuously be reproduced and confirmed by others. At a time when fundamental scientific and democratic values are being threatened by sceptics and populist arguments, an understanding of the relationship between them is much needed. This is an invaluable resource for all who are interested in the role of scientific knowledge in governance, societal developments and the implications for democracy, concerned publics and citizen engagement.