Fixing Technology with Society: The Coproduction of Democratic Deficits and Responsible Innovation at the OECD and the European Commission

Abstract

Long presented as a universal policy-recipe for social prosperity and economic growth, the promise of innovation seems to be increasingly in question, giving way to a new vision of progress in which society is advanced as a central enabler of technoeconomic development. Frameworks such as “Responsible” or “Mission-oriented” Innovation, for example, have become commonplace parlance and practice in the governance of the innovation–society nexus. In this paper, we study the dynamics by which this “social fix” to technoscience has gained legitimacy in institutions of global governance by investigating recent projects at two international organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission, to mainstream “Responsible Innovation” frameworks and instruments across countries. Our analysis shows how the turn to societal participation in both organizations relies on a new deficit logic—a democratic deficit of innovation—that frames a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies. These deficit politics enable global governance institutions to present “Responsible Innovation” frameworks as the solution and to claim authority over the coproduction of particular forms of democracy and innovation as intertwined pillars of a market-liberal international order.

The politics of scaling

“…Nor do we argue that non-scalability is inherently good. Rather, our concern is that scaling, and in particular blitzscaling, often obscures and privatizes consideration of the opportunities and uncertainties of innovation, closing off a multitude of possible promising directions in favor of a few ( Frahm et al, 2021 ; Leach et al, 2010 ). To that end, the routes of extension taken matter.…”

Cosmopolitan technology assessment? Lessons learned from attempts to address the deficit of technology assessment in Europe

“…Second, as TA (re-)makes community, the idea of engaging newcomers should be taken seriously as a political processnot as something that fixes a universalist approach to TA, but as something that itself is locally situated, co-produced, and that requires an elaborate and outspoken political and epistemic subsidiarity regime. Third, whereas the construction of 'deficits' with regard to science and technology has been a target of STS critique for several decades (Wynne 2006;Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019;Frahm, Doezema, and Pfotenhauer 2021), the construction of a deficit in the PACITA project vehicled normative dimensions that, at least a priori, many STS scholars would probably endorse. However, without due attention, the reflection about TA is at risk of being trapped in a vision whereby standard TA approaches, for instance some 'participatory' forms of TA, are mastered by a transnational space of experts who project their epistemic authority onto local contexts, leaving little room for situated reconfigurations, ad hoc refinements and 'reflexive engagements' (Voß and Amelung 2016).…”

Geographies of science and technology III: Careful entanglements, responsible futures

“…Such formulations have been co-produced by STS scholars – including many geographers – and the givers and receivers of funding for technoscience. Nonetheless, issues abound around how RRI has become ritualised as a means of performing responsibility while arguably avoiding deeper consideration of structural inequalities, reflection on the framings of the problems innovations are presumed to solve, or about genuinely practicing care with and for communities and environments (Frahm et al, 2022).…”