About

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Science Impact Collaborative (MIT SIC) is a Research Lab located within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. For several decades, SIC has developed and tested innovative approaches to harmonizing science, politics, and public policy, advancing the public interest. Our aim is to ensure that the design, implementation, and assessment of technological solutions to various community-based problems actually yield improvements in the common interest. The tools and approaches we rely on most are collaborative adaptive management (CAM), participatory action research (PAR), joint fact-finding, scenario planning, role-play simulation, and mediated multiparty negotiation. These are all applied social science methods that enable stakeholders to participate directly in decision-making that affects them. We have shown how they can, if used properly, improve decisions about where, whether, and how to site renewable energy facilities, how to ensure that climate adaptation leads to greater community resilience and protection of coastal resources, how to facilitate the management of shared waters at every scale, how to help cities and towns achieve basic levels of cybersecurity, and how to help indigenous communities tap their traditional knowledge to address new technical problems of various kinds.

Many scientists and scientific organizations believe that by conducting the most advanced scientific studies possible, they will be able to persuade policymakers and large groups of stakeholders to take their findings to heart and do what they recommend. They also believe that investing in more technology is the best way to address the key problems we face. At SIC, we don’t agree. In our view, we need a fundamental realignment in the way science is produced and the way scientific findings are used by the public . The realignment we have in mind ought to prioritize greater social equity, more direct accountability on the part of decision-makers, vastly expanded public engagement, and a much greater emphasis on the sustainable use of resources when our shared interests are at stake. In the absence of such a realignment, additional scientific information will be ignored or contested. Public policy choices that ought to take science seriously won’t. We urgently need to implement new decision support systems that enable stakeholders with radically different beliefs and interests to engage in civic discourse (i.e., public learning) and achieve consensus-based decision-making.

MIT SIC was founded more than twenty years ago with initial backing from the United States Geological Survey. Over the past several decades, the Collaborative has worked with a wide range of partners and supporters across Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and the United States. The MIT SIC is led by DUSP faculty members Professor Lawrence Susskind, Dr. Bruno Verdini, and Dr. Jungwoo Chun. Researchers from MIT SIC—including more than 50 doctoral students, master's students, undergraduates, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty—are training, through our MIT-based Clinics, continuous generations of "public interest technologists” by volunteering our "learning time” as a form of direct assistance to partner communities (in multiple countries).