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Emerging technologies are increasingly being sought as interventions to intractable environmental and public health issues that promise to intensify on our warming planet. Genetically engineered mosquitoes could curb the impacts of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. Solar geoengineering could use cloud thinning or aerosol scattering to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet. Adequate regulatory and governance mechanisms do not yet exist for these technologies, the impacts of which span international boundaries, and have the power to irreversibly alter environments. There is wide recognition from national and international bodies that decision-making processes surrounding these technologies must engage local and Indigenous communities whose lands and resources would be impacted by their trial and deployment. In response, public, community, and stakeholder “engagement” has taken center stage in the discourse on emerging environmental technology governance. Scientists and technologists are now compelled to engage publics and communities, as they recognize that some form of engagement or authorization will be requisite to the application of their technologies outside the laboratory. The language of participatory engagement abounds in scientific and governance literature on environmental technologies. These texts espouse the importance of co-design, relationship-building, shared decision-making, and mutual learning, and recognize the uneven power relations in which environmental decisions have historically been made. Yet, emergent practices of engagement leave much to be desired in terms of realizing their stated aspirations. Deficit model approaches frame publics and communities primarily as “lay people” needing to be educated before weighing in on decisions. In my fieldwork on one Pacific island where genetically modified mosquitoes are being considered for endangered bird conservation, I observed a focus group in a market research firm in which local and Indigenous residents were tested on their knowledge of invasive species biology and asked to rank radio advertisements and slogans about the modified mosquitoes. The conflation of engagement with marketing strategies and public relations campaigns prioritize the management of public perception over genuine dialogue or mutual learning. In theory, all the interest in engagement promises to open up meaningful possibilities for local and Indigenous communities to realize their rights to self-determination. In practice, strategic and instrumental approaches instead subdue opposition and manufacture consent. Legal mechanisms are needed to codify Indigenous rights in decision-making processes. Alternative approaches are needed that widen the focus beyond a single technofix to let communities define environmental challenges and collectively imagine solutions. Opposition should be read not as a barrier but as a generative site for inquiry, as often it is not the technology itself being refused but the exclusionary processes that surround its use. The most just solutions are likely to emerge from those very refusals. 

Taitingfong, Riley. 2023. "It’s all talk: how community engagement is failing in environmental technology governance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.

The main argument is supported primarily through interviews with many individuals living in Ankara, through which they describe the first presentation of their seizures and in many cases the steps they tool to attempt a cure. Along with the interviews, statistics of the individuals interviewed and their diagnoses is used to provide a reference point to better understand their stories. Finally the article includes an analysis of narratives in a more general sense that can be applied to the narrative of an illness.

• “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
• “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
• “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

The article provides statistics and excerpts of interviews to support its analysis of the narrative of illness. There are also several quotes from other works that analyze story and narrative to support the claims of the importance of emotion as a method of sharing the plot.

Emergency response is not addressed in this article however it does provide emergency responders with insight into the stories those suffering from illness will have to explain their suffering. As emergency responders will often be working in societies and cultures very different form their own in the case of disaster response, it is important to understand that what may seem like fiction in a story cannot be dismissed without considering the deeper cultural significance of those elaborations.

This article has not been references extensively, it appears to have been used in further research done by the author but I could not find other articles that referenced this one.