This presentation focuses on the relationship between public engagement with science and the environment, and larger discussions of globalized and decentred democracy. Certainly, one can ask whether public engagement on very specific issues and in the form of carefully-planned exercises represents a compartmentalization of democracy or else an undermining of traditional democratic structures.
More specifically, it will be argued that we cannot address these issues of engagement and democracy without considering the wider challenges of governing what are very often globalized, socio-culturally complex and generally-wicked problems. There is a tendency for engagement initiatives to operate at the regional or national levels. But what happens when the issues themselves cross borders and boundaries, and when the traditional centres of power seem sidelined by the need for global governance? Going further, issues of science and technology governance often involve a special concern with the future or, more specifically, the multiple futures suggested by science, technology and innovation and their relationship to our sense of the present. I will suggest that the heterogeneous and future-oriented practices of scientific governance represent both a challenge when it comes to issues such as climate change and global food security but also an important focus for STS scholarship.