Responsible innovation across borders: tensions, paradoxes and possibilities

Abstract

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on 'Responsible

Smart Farming: Including Rights Holders for Responsible Agricultural Innovation

“…As well, unlike technology assessments that consider pros and cons or risks and benefits, responsible innovation leads with broader and valuesbased inquiries into innovations in society. Table 1 provides three concrete suggestions for Canadian smart farming's decision makers that build closely off of a recent study conducted on smart dairying in New Zealand (Eastwood et al, 2017), which in turn builds off of foundational literature on responsible innovation (Guston et al, 2014;Stilgoe et al, 2013;see also Macnaghten, 2016;Macnaghten et al, 2014, c.f. Asveld et al, 2015Bronson, 2015).…”

Limits to responsible innovation

“…These include paying explicit attention to questions of the politics of complex economic inequalities and power relations, opening up the current focus on emerging and potentially disruptive advanced technologies to include technologies that are relevant for day-to-day life in Brazil, including the explicit recognition that in some cases it might be preferable not to innovate at all, and the need to consider responsibilities in a more systemic way instead of as an issue placed at the level of the individual actors. We argue that these issues are not only specifically important in the global South as Macnaghten et al (2014) seem to suggest. Just as we argue that the existing development studies literature has important contributions to make to the RI literature, we also claim that our case study from Hassan district, Karnataka, India, highlights a range of important problems that RI cannot yet address, whether in the South or in the North.…”

“…Inspiration to theorise dealing adequately with power differences in a process of RI can be drawn from a range of sources which include, but are not limited to, the literatures on the politics of design and CTA which have frequently encountered power differences in innovation processes. According to Macnaghten et al (2014) paying due attention to power structures is particularly important when trying to innovate responsibly in the global South.…”

“…An interesting example of otherwise rare work engaging with RI and the global South suggests that these same roadblocks are also an issue in RI. Based on discussions between UK-based and Brazilian scholars, Macnaghten et al (2014) write that for RI to be useful in the global South without becoming a neo-colonial instrument, a number of changes have to be made. These include paying explicit attention to questions of the politics of complex economic inequalities and power relations, opening up the current focus on emerging and potentially disruptive advanced technologies to include technologies that are relevant for day-to-day life in Brazil, including the explicit recognition that in some cases it might be preferable not to innovate at all, and the need to consider responsibilities in a more systemic way instead of as an issue placed at the level of the individual actors.…”

Reflexively stumbling towards sustainability : understanding social learning in regional governance networks

“…The challenge remains to create a reflexive governance network which is able to adjust, reorient and change in a flexible and sometimes even a surprising way (Guijt, 2008;Sotarauta and Srinivas, 2006). The aim of fostering reflexivity is that the network becomes more responsive and responsible as well as more courageous (Perez, 2014) and anticipatory (Macnaghten et al, 2014;Stilgoe et al, 2013).…”