Six ways to put the public at the heart of science and policy

Many pressing issues facing society relate to science and technology: from artificial intelligence and pandemic preparedness to the transition to clean energy. Governments, advised by scientists, will decide how countries respond. Yet, the public is rarely consulted on decisions that shape many people’s lives.

Mechanisms for public input into science policy exist in some nations, but remain the exception rather than the rule¹. Communication runs mainly between policymakers and academics^2,3.

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Inside academia, the picture is similar. Ways to involve citizens in policy-relevant research are well studied, but under-resourced and under-practised⁴. And the methods that turn research into forms of evidence that are useful for policymaking — including systematic reviews and analyses — rarely involve the public⁵.

At a time when trust in governments is falling across many democracies⁶ and populists are casting scientists and academic institutions as untrustworthy ‘elites’⁷, it’s crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy. This would foster trust and make academic research and government policies seem more legitimate. People are more likely to support — and champion — science advice that they helped to generate⁸.

Democratizing research and science-policy processes will mean rethinking how scientists, citizens and policymakers interact. Here, we highlight six steps that governments and academic institutions can take to put the public at the heart of their work, reflecting outcomes of a workshop in Fairfax, Virginia, in September 2025. (Other attendees at the workshop, who contributed to this article, are listed as co-signatories in the supplementary information).

Involve the public in research

Research produced jointly with the community is more likely to be aligned with real-world policy priorities, increasing its salience. For instance, between 2015 and 2018, the European Union invited citizens across 30 countries to co-create research priorities for its Horizon 2020 funding-programme agenda. Whereas 16 expert-led foresight reports recommended prioritizing technological advances, citizens placed higher value on strong communities, health and well-being, education and local economies⁹.

Public involvement can also make technical evidence more readily interpretable and thus potentially more trustworthy. In 2016, for instance, UK researchers and the London-based charity Sense About Science worked with parents to co-design a website that explained in simple terms why hospitals cannot be easily compared with one another when it comes to survival rates for congenital heart surgery. This helped to overcome previous misinterpretations and alarm around the publication of crude league tables.

The complex truth about trust in science

Yet few funders require participatory research as a condition of grants. Most promotion criteria do not reward it. And few universities maintain dedicated community-liaison staff or citizen panels. It’s easy to understand why — this work is difficult, slow and expensive. It requires sustained relationship building and repeated rounds of consultation with citizens. It also demands skills that most researchers are not trained in, such as navigating power imbalances that arise when community members lack technical vocabulary.

To move forwards, universities should establish units that provide methodological support, relationship building and logistics for participatory projects. Funders should make public involvement an expected part of research proposals and projects, from setting the agenda to disseminating the outcomes, and they should properly finance it. Not every project needs participatory methods, but public involvement should be the default expectation, with reasons given when it is not included.

Momentum is building in this area: members of the Impact Funders Forum, a global network of philanthropic and public funders formerly called the Transforming Evidence Funders Network, are already adapting their grant criteria and evaluation metrics to promote research done in partnership with the people it affects¹⁰. These efforts deserve to be expanded — and emulated.

Make advisory bodies participatory

Governments should also build community participation into science advisory committees. Public deliberation should be included early, rather than being at the end or ignored entirely, as it often is currently.

This can be achieved in several ways. Citizen panels suit complex and value-laden questions. Consensus conferences (in which randomly selected citizens deliberate over days and produce recommendations) can help to define the problems that science and government should prioritize. Online consultations with citizens offer broad reach, although usually with weaker deliberative quality.

For example, since the mid-1980s, the Danish Board of Technology (now Democracy x), a non-profit foundation in Copenhagen, has run more than a dozen consensus conferences on issues such as gene technology and the marine environment to help shape Danish legislative agendas¹¹. Following a citizen consultation in 2014, NASA opted to pursue a mission that the public judged to be useful for deflecting hazardous asteroids away from Earth¹². And in the United Kingdom, public dialogue raising concerns over animal welfare and responsible use of genome-editing technologies in farmed animals helped to inform the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023, which allows and regulates precision breeding of plants and animals.

In each case, citizens clarified the values that should guide policy. All governmental science-advisory bodies should define these values early to ensure that advice is socially grounded, legitimate and more likely to shape decisions.

Embrace diverse knowledge

Communities outside academia and government also have valuable knowledge. Trust is built when people recognize that their expertise has been taken seriously. Researchers, science advisers and policymakers should empower people to voice their questions, values and concerns — and not dismiss ones that they disagree with.

Effective approaches start by recognizing that the public and scientists each bring their own knowledge, and by testing it through joint inquiry. Community-based restoration of mangrove trees in the Philippines illustrates this. In Kalibo, scientists’ guidance on planting a resilient mix of species was blended with the community’s knowledge of the local coastline, and lasting success came only once a local people’s organization was granted a long-term right to manage the forest — now the Bakhawan Eco-Park¹³.

Many countries are working to incorporate broader forms of expertise into policy — particularly Indigenous knowledge. The lessons emerging are consistent: formal institutional channels, such as legal frameworks and mandated co-governance bodies, are needed for lasting change; goodwill is not enough. Knowledge holders need genuine decision-making power, and bridging diverse knowledge systems requires skilled cultural intermediaries.

Universities should set requirements to make inclusive knowledge practices the norm, rather than the exception. They should change their promotion criteria to recognize co-produced research. And grant funders should require co-production plans for projects, with community partners listed as co-investigators. The University of Victoria in Canada is a good example: it insists that research involving Indigenous groups must follow protocols defined by those communities to ensure that they own and control the data.

Be humble, honest and transparent

Transparency is crucial in cases in which policymaking is urgent and tough choices need to be made quickly. Without it, narratives about back-room science can flourish.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in the UK government’s science-advisory group for emergencies was damaged by its initial opacity — it did not initially publish the minutes of meetings, for instance. By contrast, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation routinely published its minutes and the reasoning behind contested recommendations, such as why it did not initially recommend universal COVID-19 vaccinations for healthy 12–15-year-olds. This transparency did not resolve every disagreement, but it gave journalists, clinicians and the public a visible trail of reasoning to scrutinize.

Scientists should recognize their own political biases to build public trust

Similarly, scientists should be open about their methods, data and uncertainties, including when advising informally. And they should acknowledge the values that shape their recommendations — a rare occurrence in current science advice. This might mean stating that they prioritize precautionary approaches to safety over reducing regulation; or value individual liberty over collective-risk reduction.

Finding common ground can be powerful. Everyone holds identities beyond their professional ones — as members of faith communities, cultural groups and local neighbourhoods. For example, Christian organization BioLogos in Grand Rapids, Michigan, promotes both faith and science as a way to engage Christian audiences on evolution, vaccination and climate change.

Similarly, the non-profit organization Ciencia Puerto Rico in San Juan shows how culturally grounded engagement can reach communities that top-down messaging cannot. The organization co-designs public-health campaigns with local community organizations and health-care workers, presented in everyday language and distributed through a community-ambassador programme that supports trusted local leaders.