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This paper analyses the recent widespread moves to ‘restore’ public trust in science by developing an avowedly two-way, public dialogue with science initiatives. Noting how previously discredited and supposedly abandoned public deficit explanations of ‘mistrust’ have actually been continually reinvented, it argues that this is a symptom of a continuing failure of scientific and policy institutions to place their own science-policy institutional culture into the frame of dialogue, as possible contributory cause of the public mistrust problem.

This paper draws general insights into the public reception of scientific knowledge from a case study of Cumbrian sheep farmers' responses to scientific advice about the restrictions introduced after the Chernobyl radioactive fallout. The analysis identifies several substantive factors which influence the credibility of scientific communication. Starting from the now-accepted point that public uptake of science depends primarily upon the trust and credibility public groups are prepared to invest in scientific institutions and representatives, the paper observes that these are contingent upon the social relationships and identities which people feel to be affected by scientific knowledge, which never comes free of social interests or implications. The case study shows laypeople capable of extensive informal reflection upon their social relationships towards scientific experts, and on the epistemological status of their own `local' knowledge in relation to `outside' knowledge. Public uptake of science might be improved if scientific institutions expressed an equivalent reflexive discourse in the public domain.

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