By putting science on center stage, the pandemic brought to light diverse processes – with both negative and positive consequences – concerning the relationship between science, politics and policy. On the one hand, we have witnessed many examples of political manipulation of science (Abbasi, 2020; Stevens, 2020), including politically motivated denial of scientific evidence (Nature Medicine, 2020). This process that deters the use of science to confront societal problems has always been common (Druckman, 2017; Goldberg, 2017). Nonetheless, during the pandemic such manipulation was constantly exposed in the news, together with counteracting claims – including from many scientists – on the need to just follow science recommendations (Pulido et al., 2020)

However, it has long been accepted by experts in the political sciences that decision-making requires more than scientific knowledge. Decision-making involves the dispute of interests and conflicts of values within societies, requiring political mediation, negotiation and deliberation to reach agreement (see reviews in Cairney, 2016; Jasanoff et al., 2001; see also Stevens, 2020). Thus, claims to just follow science recommendations are unfounded in the realities of decision-making (Schrager, 2020). In fact, expecting science to lead directly to decisions – and not taking conflicts of values and interests into account – is the ultimate cause of science politicization and politics scientization (Pielke, 2004a; Sarewitz, 2015).

Science politicization occurs when science is manipulated (i.e. scientific information is either decontextualized, selectively used or denied; Diethelm and McKee, 2009; Goldberg, 2017) for political gain and used as a weapon by opposing sides, making science hostage to a political war (Pielke, 2004b). In such scenarios, science might actually make controversies worse (Sarewitz, 2004) instead of supporting decision-making (Fig. 1A). A consequence of politicizing science is politics scientization (Scholten and Verbeek, 2015). As science is manipulated for political gain, political issues (related to conflicts of values and interests within society) are taken as scientific questions. By leaning on the false, but prevalent idea (also within academia), that science can act as a neutral arbiter (Walker, 2003), politicians escape from their duties of mediating conflicts (Fig. 1A). An example of these processes during the pandemic was the chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine debate. Despite most studies showing a lack of efficacy of these drugs, some politicians denied the scientific consensus and leaned on a single, contested initial study to promote the drugs as cure for COVID-19 (Saag, 2020), and support the relaxation of physical distancing measures to supposedly favor the economy. What followed was an intense debate about what counts as evidence, which studies were available, and which method is adequate to assess effectiveness (Berlivet and Löwy, 2020), transforming the political question “economy versus health” into a scientific question.

Fig. 1.

Key aspects and intersections between science, politics and conservation issues in two contrasting situations. A. When science politicization and politics scientization result from using decontextualized, disciplinary scientific knowledge on complex multifaceted issues to support a political view, leaving behind the conflicts of values and interests. B. When transdisciplinary processes are conducted within science-policy partnerships by integrating interdisciplinary knowledge and knowledge of relevant stakeholders to focus on a goal related to a conservation issue that was agreed through mediation and negotiation of values and interests.

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On the other hand, a positive outcome of the pandemic has been the engagement of scientists in communicating issues related to the disease and in producing relevant information to confront its spread (Buxton et al., 2020). In many countries, such as Brazil, scientists organized themselves to produce key information concerning analyses of the number of infected people, deaths and occupied Intensive Care Unit beds (Fraser, 2020; Roehrl et al., 2020; InfoGripe; MonitoraCovid-19; Observatório Covid-19 BR; Observatório Covid-19 Fiocruz; Painel: COVID-19 no Brasil). These endeavors indicate there are scientists open to collaborate with policymakers (see also Bertuol-Garcia et al., 2020).

Hence, the pandemic broadly exposed in the media examples of, on the one hand, political manipulation of science counteracted by claims to just follow science recommendations, and, on the other hand, engagement of scientists in producing relevant information. Although other important processes related to science (but not necessarily to policy) were also observed during this period (e.g. academic extractivism; Hellmann et al., 2020), we will here take the opportunity opened by the pandemic to reflect on key science-policy issues. What conditions facilitate science politicization and politics scientization? What can be done to avoid these dangers and effectively ground policies in science?

Reflecting on these topics is critical for conservation science and practice for several reasons. First, conservation problems are particularly prone to science politicization and politics scientization (Fig. 1A). This is because both are more likely when scientific knowledge refers to two, often connected aspects that are common in conservation – complex systems and issues with multifaceted consequences (Herrick and Sarewitz, 2000; Sarewitz, 2004). In complex systems, cause and effect relationships are difficult to identify and forecasts are variable (i.e. dependent on several details), as in ecosystem management (DeFries and Nagendra, 2017) and climate change (Maslin and Austin, 2012). In multifaceted issues, attitudes depend on the perspective (values and interests) through which issues are evaluated, leading to conflicts across individuals or groups. The consequences of genetically modified foods, for instance, vary across agricultural, social and ecological dimensions (Hicks, 2015; Sarewitz, 2004). Both complex systems and multifaceted issues with conflict of interests then facilitate manipulating (selecting, decontextualizing, or denying) scientific information to support a viewpoint or political discourse (Sarewitz, 2004; Lewandowsky and Oberauer, 2016). As climate politics in the US and UK exemplify (Sarewitz, 2010), science politicization and politics scientization are indeed likely in conservation.

Second, the role and limits of science in decision-making have frequently been overlooked in conservation. A comprehensive review of the literature has shown that ecologists and conservation scientists have a naive perspective on the causes of the science-practice gap, disregarding the complexity of socio-political contexts that make direct use of scientific evidence by policymakers unfeasible (Bertuol-Garcia et al., 2018). Ignoring these issues by assuming that science can directly lead to decisions is the ultimate cause of science politicization and politics scientization (Pielke, 2004a; Sarewitz, 2015).

Finally, a unidirectional perspective of knowledge transference from science to policy predominates in the ecology and conservation literature, in particular the evidence-based conservation approach (Bertuol-Garcia et al., 2018). By focusing on the centrality of scientific information to conservation practice, this approach implicitly assumes that science can directly lead to decisions, ignoring conflicts of values and interests and the uneven distribution of power among actors in conservation (Toomey et al., 2017), potentially perpetuating the mismatch between social and ecological justice (Kareiva and Marvier, 2012). Only recently, horizontal collaborations between scientists, policymakers and other actors have been advocated as crucial to conservation (Enquist et al., 2017; Rose, 2018). Yet, such collaborations are key to conservation, as environmental issues encompass complex problems and a myriad of values and interests, that should be dealt with not only to avoid science politicization and politics scientization (Fig. 1), but also to confront structural inequalities in conservation. These collaborations can also help moving away from mainstream, globally developed and disconnected from local realities, "one size fits all" policies that have been reported to hinder conservation (Boedhihartono et al., 2018).

Below, by synthesizing ideas from different scientific fields, we explore what is needed to effectively ground policies in science, focusing on three aspects: the role and limits of science in society and its relation to politics; the centrality of effective science-policy partnerships to account for diverse knowledge and values, avoiding political manipulation of sciences; and what is needed to accomplish such effective partnerships.

We argued that COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to reflect on the role and limits of science in confronting societal problems and on the challenges of grounding policies in science. In our view, this is of great value for conservation science and practice, as conservation problems concern complex and multifaceted issues and thus involve conflicts of values and interests and are prone to science politicization and politics scientization. To tackle such issues, we need not only science but also politics. As such, science-policy partnerships should encompass and mediate values and interests, and integrate knowledge across disciplines and stakeholders. Failing to address this diversity of perspectives within science and society deters the potential for science to support decisions and can instead lead to increased controversy and prevalence of hegemonic interests. Crucial to the endeavor of fomenting effective science-policy partnerships is breaking the vicious cycle of current scientific policies and training that discourage engagement in transdisciplinary processes.

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.