Revisiting the social contract: A summary of an Address delivered at the International Science Council Muscat Global Knowledge Dialogue

Published on March 19th, 2025

In a context of tensions and conflict globally and locally, we are seeing polarisation and isolation in our societies, and we can see growing evidence that trust is being eroded.  This tension is clear within the science community (in its broadest definition), and between science and society.  And yet, there is a strong movement within the science and policy communities that holds to the belief that science is a key part to addressing the complex challenges that society faces. 

However, for science to achieve what the science community believes is possible in and for society, we need to consider our science systems and we need to consider whether we need a renewed social contract for science. A renewed social contract for science that enables us to rebuild and regain trust between science and society, so that the value of science is recognised and accepted in society but also infused into decision making that will lead to the solutions we need.

Persistent societal challenges

Over the last three years we’ve built a multidisciplinary research team that sits in spaces at the intersections of disciplines and at the intersections between universities, business and government.  We’re experimenting with developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to some of the knotty complex challenges we see in society, like the impact of AI, inequality, and conflict.

What has emerged from our research is that there are many complex challenges where we are making real progress.  However, at the same time there are also some of these so-called wicked challenges that are really persistent, and we are not making the progress at the pace and scale we’d like to.

These persistent challenges are rather distinctive. What we’re seeing in our research is that to tackle these wicked challenges it is often less a case of needing to generate more knowledge.  There is a wealth of existing deep knowledge that exists in our disciplines, universities, and learned societies, and finding ways to bring existing knowledge together in new ways is the key to finding ways through.

At the same time, it’s also really clear that doing this kind of transdisciplinary research that’s seeking to engage meaningfully in society, is really difficult to do. It doesn’t fit neatly or easily into our existing categories, or into our institutional infrastructures or our existing funding infrastructures. and it’s hard to build bridges in an increasingly fractured and polarised landscape that is so dynamic.

As we’ve been wrestling with this, as many of us are, what’s emerged is that a really important part of this story to date is the social contract for science and how that social contract has evolved and changed over the last 80 years.

A changing social contract for science

The social contract that emerged after the second World War was a framework of a broadly transactional relationship between science and society where scientists took responsibility for high quality research and society committed to providing funding and autonomy to researchers to do that research. This was done in the belief that the outputs of the research would create benefits for society through new discoveries and applications.  The importance of freedom within that framework to pursue so called basic research was clear, and it is possible to argue that this context created fertile ground for scientists to explore, experiment, take risks, innovate and make discoveries.

Over time throughout the mid to late 20th Century, the impact of science applications gained visibility. There were some positive outcomes like the science that got humans to the moon, but at the same time, there were problematic outcomes like the impact of pesticides in the environment, or the safety of nuclear energy. This led to a shift in the social contract for science.  It became increasingly expected that publicly funded science needed to have outputs that were clearly relevant to society, and there was a move toward ensuring that publicly funded science, like other publicly funded services, was accountable and could demonstrate value for money.  Increasingly in the last 25 years, it is possible to observe that demonstrating clear and measurable impact has become really important, and this has arguably led to a lot of excellent science focussing on addressing more immediate term challenges, and often in ways that reduce risk.

So we are now in a situation where the social contract for science in its current form is no longer characterised by the level of trust and autonomy that was evident in its earlier incarnations. Instead, science is increasingly finding itself in a customer-contractor relationship.  In this context the outputs of science are increasingly being decided on at the outset of research, and in some situations, this means there is less space for basic research as science becomes increasingly valued on the basis of its level of (or potential for) commercialisation

Therefore, it is possible to argue that we are now in a time where we have never been more connected, we have never had so much accessible knowledge and insight, and at the same time we are in a time where trust has been eroded to the point that we are doing science in the context of a social contract that is arguably restricting the full capabilities of science. Trust lies at the heart of this.  The social contract has changed as trust has been eroded.

Where does that leave us?

There are no easy answers of course, this is incredibly complex, nuanced, and always context dependent. However, it is possible to sow two seeds that with some nurturing offer a way forward. 

1.      Diverse dialogue asking big questions

Relationships are about trust, and relationships are built and survive on dialogue; dialogues within our communities, across the traditional boundaries of discipline, sector, generation, culture, and dialogues that bring the usual suspects together with the less usual suspects.  This is not a particularly controversial point, but how we actually do it is not trivial.

To have these kinds of meaningful diverse dialogues at the scale that is needed, we need to continue to create opportunities for people to come together to discuss, listen and learn. However, that is not enough.  We need to find ways for the dialogue that starts in the formal settings to go beyond them, to be ongoing, open-ended and informal. 

In our dialogues we also need to be asking big questions. We need to ask big questions around our funding structures - how do we create opportunities to think beyond established categories and disciplines? how do we create opportunities to ask difficult questions, take more risk, and be able to listen to the difficult answers that might emerge?  We also need to ask big questions around our recognition and reward structures for scientists and policy makers because dialogue takes time. It takes time to become good at it, and time to build relationships to the point where meaningful, boundary crossing, open ended, cooperative and informal dialogue can happen.  Critically we need to enable our leaders of tomorrow to be able to build relationships at the start of their careers so that those relationships and dialogues can bear fruit in mid and later career.

2.      Diverse thinking asking different questions

There was a fascinating study by Park et al. (1) that came out in Nature in 2023. They looked at 45m papers and 3.9m patents from the last 60 years. They found that in every field, papers and patents were increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. They linked this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing of the use of previous knowledge.

It is of course easy to say we need to ask different questions – but it’s really challenging to make a reality. There is rarely a one size fits all approach, and we need to be sensitive to different contexts. However, within these caveats, we need to pause, and we need to learn the lessons of the past where we had great revolutions in our thinking and understanding.  When those breakthroughs happened, whether it was from a team or an individual, they broadly came about by the researchers bringing a very varied set of inputs together that spanned the sciences/social sciences/arts and humanities. 

As we look forward, we need to make sure we’re making opportunities for diversity of thought; diversity that comes from different disciplinary backgrounds, different philosophies, and different methodologies.

We know this is not easy, there are hurdles of language, approach and perspective to contend with.  However, we are only going to make progress and make breakthroughs if we are prepared to be more omnivorous in the knowledge and insight that we bring to challenges, to embrace the tensions as well as the synergies, and to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable as we sit in those grey zones.

Conclusion

Let’s start to have diverse conversations about what a renewed social contract could look like.  Let’s think beyond our established categories and disciplines and take risks. Let’s ask the big and difficult questions even though it will be uncomfortable. Let’s find ways to rebuild and regain trust to ensure that science is able to make the breakthroughs that will lead to the transformation and innovation that society needs.

References:

1. Park J, Lee S, Kim J, et al. Decline in scientific disruptiveness: A 60-year analysis of papers and patents. Nature. 2023. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x#Sec9

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