Ethics and Principles for Science and Society Policymaking: The Brussels Declaration

This talk unveils the Brussels Declaration, a 20-point blueprint for a new set of ethics & principles to inform work at the boundary between science, society and policy. It makes the case for a multi-disciplinary approach encouraging greater integrity and accountability among stakeholders. It brings together the findings from a series of 5 consultation events and symposia at global conferences from 2012-16, in which more than 300 individuals from 35 countries examined the science of science-policy-making. Taking a bottom-up approach involving the grass-roots with politicians, science advisers, chief scientific officers from industry, civil society leaders, medical doctors, social scientists, academia and science editors, it will boost understanding of how power operates in science & society and explain why evidence plus dialogue rarely equals good decisions & laws. Most policy decisions are informed by evidence provided by experts. All too often, who those experts are, how they are chosen and how reliable their advice really is, is open to question. The key to promoting public dialogue and better understanding is not only greater transparency and scrutiny, but genuine inclusivity. We offer this Declaration for public comment as an attempt to provide guidelines for incorporating scientific progress into the policy-making that affects all our lives. It is in all our interests that we benefit from ‘evidence-based policy-making’ rather than suffer ‘policy-biased evidence’.