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Science communication is built on a persistent tension: how should expert knowledge and public understanding meet? For much of the field's history, the dominant answer was straightforward—fill a knowledge gap, and attitudes would follow. That answer proved too simple, and each subsequent framework has redefined what the gap actually is. The result is a layered landscape where older models survive in institutional practice even as newer ones challenge their assumptions.
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Deficit Model shaped most science communication efforts. Its core logic was transmission: scientists possess accurate knowledge, the public lacks it, and communication means transferring facts from experts to non-experts. The model drew on a simple causal chain—more information leads to better understanding, which leads to more favorable attitudes toward science. Funding agencies and science organizations found this framework attractive because it was measurable, straightforward to implement, and placed the burden of change entirely on audiences.
By the 1990s, empirical research had accumulated enough counterevidence to undermine the deficit model's central claim. Studies repeatedly showed that providing more facts did not reliably shift public opinion on contested issues like nuclear power, genetic modification, or vaccination. In some cases, better-informed audiences became more polarized, not more aligned with scientific consensus. The deficit model could not explain why people with similar levels of knowledge reached different conclusions, nor why trust in institutions mattered more than factual recall.
The Contextual Model emerged in the 1990s as a direct response to the deficit model's explanatory failures. Rather than treating audiences as empty vessels, this framework recognized that people interpret scientific information through pre-existing cultural values, social identities, and personal experiences. A person's trust in the source of information—whether a government agency, a university researcher, or a community organization—often mattered more than the factual content of the message.
Researchers working within the contextual model borrowed heavily from risk perception research and from frameworks like Diffusion of Innovations and Framing Theory, both established in the broader communication discipline. Diffusion of Innovations helped explain why some scientific practices spread through social networks while others stalled, while Framing Theory showed how the same scientific finding could be interpreted differently depending on whether it was presented as an opportunity or a threat. The contextual model narrowed the deficit model's scope: it preserved the goal of improving public understanding but insisted that effective communication had to start with the audience's existing worldview, not with the scientist's message.
This framework became especially influential in health and environmental communication, where practitioners learned to segment audiences by their values and tailor messages accordingly. The Health Communication subfield adopted similar audience-centered strategies, using models like Communication Accommodation Theory to adjust expert language to lay audiences. Yet the contextual model still assumed that the ultimate goal was to bring public opinion closer to scientific consensus—a goal that later frameworks would question.
The Public Engagement with Science (PES) framework, which gained traction in the mid-1990s and remains active today, marked a more fundamental break. Where the deficit model saw a knowledge gap and the contextual model saw an interpretation gap, PES identified a trust and legitimacy gap. The solution, its proponents argued, was not better messaging but genuine dialogue: scientists and publics should meet as partners to discuss the direction of research, the ethical implications of new technologies, and the social priorities that science should serve.
PES drew intellectual energy from Science and Technology Studies (STS), particularly work on the co-production of knowledge and the social construction of scientific authority. In practice, the framework took shape through consensus conferences, citizen juries, deliberative polls, and public dialogue events, especially in European countries like Denmark and the United Kingdom, where funding agencies institutionalized engagement requirements. The shift was visible in policy language: terms like "public understanding of science" gave way to "public engagement with science."
Despite its influence, PES attracted criticism from two directions. Some practitioners noted that engagement events could become procedural exercises—checking a box for public involvement without actually redistributing decision-making power. Others pointed out that the framework still centered scientific institutions as the conveners of dialogue, leaving little room for communities to set the agenda themselves. These critiques opened space for a more radical rethinking.
The Critical Science Communication framework, emerging around 2005 and continuing to grow, challenges the assumptions shared by all three earlier models. It asks a question that the deficit, contextual, and PES frameworks largely avoided: whose knowledge is recognized as scientific in the first place? Critical science communication draws on feminist science studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory to argue that science communication has historically reinforced hierarchies of expertise, marginalizing Indigenous knowledge systems, community-based knowledge, and the lived experience of affected populations.
Researchers in this tradition examine how science communication practices can perpetuate epistemic injustice—for example, when public health messages assume Western medical frameworks are universally valid, or when environmental risk communication ignores the historical knowledge of communities living on contaminated land. The framework does not reject the value of scientific expertise, but it insists that science communication must be accountable to the communities it claims to serve. This places critical science communication in living disagreement with the deficit model's transmission logic and with PES's institution-centered dialogue.
Critical science communication also connects to the Critical Tradition in the broader communication discipline, sharing its concern with power, ideology, and structural inequality. Within the subfield, it has pushed researchers to examine who gets funded to do science communication, whose voices are amplified, and what counts as a successful outcome.
Today, no single framework dominates science communication. Instead, the four models operate in different institutional contexts, often layered on top of one another. The deficit model persists in many policy documents and press releases, where the assumption that "if only the public understood the science" remains rhetorically convenient. The contextual model is standard practice in risk communication and health campaigns, where audience segmentation and message tailoring are routine. PES is the default framework for publicly funded engagement initiatives, particularly in Europe, and has shaped the professional identity of many science communicators. Critical science communication remains the smallest but fastest-growing strand, concentrated in academic research and among community-based practitioners.
What the frameworks agree on is worth noting. All four reject the idea that audiences are passive recipients of information, though they define audience activity differently. All recognize that trust is central to effective communication, even if they locate the source of trust in different places—in message accuracy, in shared values, in institutional legitimacy, or in structural accountability. And all acknowledge that the deficit model alone is insufficient, a point of consensus that would have seemed radical forty years ago.
The disagreements are sharper. The frameworks diverge on the fundamental purpose of science communication: is it to improve understanding (deficit and contextual models), to build trust through dialogue (PES), or to advance epistemic justice (critical science communication)? They disagree on whether scientific knowledge should retain its privileged position in the conversation or be placed alongside other ways of knowing. And they differ on whether the primary unit of analysis should be the individual, the community, or the structural system.
These are not disagreements that will be resolved by a single new framework. The field's trajectory suggests that science communication will remain a space of pluralism, where researchers and practitioners choose their framework based on the context, the audience, and the kind of change they hope to achieve. The question that opened the field—how should expert knowledge and public understanding meet?—now has multiple answers, each with its own strengths, blind spots, and political commitments.