Towards Innovation Democracy? Participation, Responsibility and Precaution in Innovation Governance.

Social Innovation, Democracy and Makerspaces

“…Yet the most important thing to recognize is the underlying normative values and therefore the politics inherent to innovation (Herrera, 1973;Smith & Arora, 2015). One way of permitting improved expression, contestation and deliberation over visions, values and outcomes is for innovation itself to become more democratic (Stirling, 2014). A democratic aspiration for social innovation could be, theoretically: improving in any way, access by the least powerful people, to the capacities for challenging power in innovation (Smith & Stirling, 2016).…”

Social Science Insights for the BioCCS Industry

“…Politicians and decision-makers, regularly in receipt of briefings and updates on innovative and emerging technologies to assist their decision-making processes, nonetheless continue to debate this issue worldwide [25], not least due to the social choice nature of the decision. Social choice navigates "a variety of continually branching alternative pathways for change" [26,27]. Innovative advancements in technology, whether deliberate or inadvertent, reflect social choices involving uncertainty, legitimacy, and competitiveness within the decision-making process [20].…”

Precaution in the Governance of Technology

“…Whatever position might legitimately be taken on the prioritising of values or importance of uncertainty, to reject out of hand the reasoned basis for precaution is (for reasons that will be further explored below) not only ironically irrational, but profoundly anti-democratic [66].…”

“…As repeatedly shown in the application of precaution, the inhibition of one particular trajectory (e.g., nuclear power or genetically modified organisms) becomes an advantage for another (e.g., renewables or marker assisted breeding) [83] [121]. Precaution is about steering, not stopping, innovation [66]. In this sense, precaution can actually offer to help reconcile tensions between political pressures for promotion and control [122].…”

“…Although one reaction is to diminish or deny the inconvenient intractabilities of uncertainty to which precaution is a response, another is to seek to address them more fully and openly. It is under these latter imperatives, that influence of the precautionary principle has extended, expanding from environmental regulation [64], to wider policy making on issues of health [23], risk [65], science [60], innovation [66], emerging technologies [67] and world trade [68].…”