The Co-production of Pilot Projects and Society

Abstract

This chapter discusses the shaping of pilot projects. Against a critique that such projects tend to be shaped top-down by powerful actors, our discussion notes how such projects are also shaped locally by materiality, culture, actors, interests and issues. Through this we show how projects end up looking very different from each other while enacting diverse socio-technical futures. We discuss three types of pilot projects: technology-oriented projects, geographically bound projects and national laboratories. We argue that pilot projects, in either form tend to mirror and amplify the interests of involved actors, and we proceed to discuss the potential politics of such projects. We do this by discussing processes of scaling up pilot projects, and through upscaling, shaping broader aspects of society. As these projects often have wide transformational ambitions, we conclude that a focus on who participates and who does not is central for future research.

Testing Emergent Technologies in the Arctic

“…Pilot projects, trials and experiments are important sites, where the discursive elements of expectations are made concrete and material (Engels et al, 2017). They represent an approach to innovation which signals ambitions of making technologies that function when implemented in society (Skjølsvold et al, 2020;Ryghaug and Skjølsvold 2021b) and tend to have a dual set of ambitions: On the one hand, they seek distinct and localized lessons. On the other hand, there is often an outspoken ambition of scaling up and to apply what has been tested in one setting universally (Naber et al, 2016;Ryghaug et al, 2019;Engels et al, 2019).…”