Empirical data and the historical facts must be understood in its context. HoNESt is innovative in its method and approach. It combines historical comparisons across countries, traces transnational connections and the intermediary role of international bodies, such as EURATOM and the IAEA. In this sense, HoNESt has sought the interaction with the main stakeholders and actors to establish the bases of the historical narrative. Aware of the need to integrate the different stakeholders in the review of the historical and social analysis, HoNESt has made a great effort to seek interaction with the different actors.
Considering the contribution to the understanding of factors triggering the social engagement with nuclear energy and other nuclear applications, HoNESt has addressed the blind spots of the existing research. It has also contributed to the understanding of factors triggering social engagement with nuclear energy and other nuclear applications in different ways. HoNESt has provided the first ever performance assessment of nuclear-social relations over the past 60 years in Europe and beyond. Assembling the relevant information from technology, science, economy, politics and society allows lessons to be drawn from a large number of examples of different engagement practices related to different technologies. By systematically juxtaposing these, it has been possible to uncover relevant mechanisms and key factors. At the same time, change over time, path dependencies, learning processes and the impact of changing social and political contexts, had become visible.
HoNESt provides insights to decision makers and other stakeholders regarding interaction with civil society. It has been able to single out important factors by taking seriously the preferences and motivations, worldviews, suspicions and concerns of all relevant actors in civil-nuclear engagement. Raising mutual awareness for “how scientists and engineers think” and “how policy makers think” and “how nuclear critics think” – and drawing relevant conclusions – HoNESt has contributed to a new understanding of these relations, and mediate these insights to the different stakeholders via dissemination and engagement.
In this sense HoNESt has contributed to overcoming what has been characterised as the “dialogue of the deaf” that so often debilitates social relations with nuclear technology. In this way, the results provide an innovative analytical framework for the analysis of nuclear-social relations in the past and present that is highly relevant to decision-makers.
Regarding the implementation of effective engagement with civil society in future nuclear projects, HoNESt has tested the mechanisms characterising societal engagement with nuclear energy through a backcasting exercise. Through its engagement and dissemination strategy, HoNESt had been designed to ensure that decision makers and stakeholders will actually benefit from the “tangible” insights from this innovative research for their current and future work, notably with a view to future nuclear and other high technology applications.
In its approach, considering the concerns and preferences of all relevant actors, HoNESt provides a more differentiated and nuanced view of nuclear-social relations. Thus far, many citizens and scholars have perceived “nuclear power” as a “black box”, rather than as the interplay of actors with various objectives, concerns and ideals and a complex technological system to be studied and understood.
HoNESt has triggered dialogue, mutual understanding and ideas for future fruitful cooperation among members of the nuclear research community and the Social Sciences and Humanities.
