Responsible Innovation and Climate Engineering. A Step Back to Technology Assessment

Abstract

Much in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is part of a participatory turn within the Technology Assessment (TA) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) community. This has an influence also on the evaluation of Climate Engineering (CE) options, as it will be shown by reference to the SPICE project. The SPICE example and the call for democratisation of science and innovation raise some interesting concerns for the normative evaluation of CE options that will be addressed in the paper. It is by far not clear, or so it will be argued, how much of the innovation process of CE technologies should be put in the hands of social actors and the wider public. This is due not only to special features about CE technologies but also to some more principle concerns against some features of participatory RRI approaches. Still, this does by no way mean that ethical and societal issues in the context of CE technologies should be ignored. Rather, the paper will argue that one can take a step back to expert TA linked to the evolution of approaches of ethical impact analysis in this area. This does not only lead to reconsider the emphasis on participation and democratisation of research and innovation, but also opens up for an alternative evaluative framework for CE technologies developed in the last part of the paper. Keywords Climate engineering. Geoengineering. Responsible research and innovation. Ethical impact analysis. Technology assessement. Participation "Somewhere along the line I slipped off track. I'm caught movin' one step up and two steps back". Two lines from the song "One Step Up" by Bruce Springsteen

Unraveling the politics of ‘doing inclusion’ in transdisciplinarity for sustainable transformation

“…Including societal stakeholders in R&I processes is neither a 'tick-the-box' activity, nor the panacea for ensuring that R&I processes are democratic, responsible or legitimate (e.g., Cooke and Kothari 2001;Few et al 2007;Genus and Stirling 2018;Brand and Blok 2019;Stelzer 2020). Yet, meaningful societal stakeholder engagement can provide 'better', more socially robust R&I processes and outcomes (Jasanoff 2003;Bunders et al 2010;Owen et al 2012).…”