Where are the politics in responsible innovation? European governance, technology assessments, and beyond

Abstract

Responsible innovation (RI) is founded on the idea that present modes of innovating with science and technology fail because they insufficiently take into account societal needs and values. Hence, proponents of RI solicit society's opinions in an attempt to render science and technology developments, institutions, and policies more socially responsive. This article asks how the RI concept is taken up and elaborated, based on accounts developed on the European Union policy level and on a Flemish, technology assessment level. It finds that, notwithstanding important differences between these two deliberative frameworks, neither one leaves much room for politics, understood as the constitution and contestation of power. Rather, these frameworks largely ignore questions about the politics in and of deliberation, the authoritative allocation of values, and the institutional uptake of deliberative engagements. The article's aim is to provide constructive criticism of the RI paradigm by rendering these political issues explicit and proposing ways of taking them into account.

Responsible research and innovation as a travesty of technology assessment?

“…2. The terms 'responsible innovation' or 'responsible research and innovation' have a history stretching back 15 years or so and multiple roots in the United States and Europe (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012, 751;Van Oudheusden 2014). However, it is in Europe, and especially at the European Commission policy level, that the terms gained the more visibility and traction (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012).…”

“…By promoting the adoption of soft governance tools, like codes of conduct, RRI develops into a new form of governmentality (Thoreau 2013;Van Oudheusden 2014); that is, a strategy to intervene in science and technology to rationalize actions and control actors from a distance (Rose 1999;Foucault 2008Foucault [1978). RRI therefore reproduces the constant denial of the system of 'organized irresponsibility', which manifests itself in […] technically orientated legal procedures designed to satisfy rigorous causal proof of individual liability and guilt.…”

Limits to responsible innovation

“…Taebi et al 2014). As such, RI has been criticised for assuming that stakeholders will generally cooperate, try to align interests and harmoniously strive for consensus (Blok 2014;van Oudheusden 2014). This is understandable insofar RI has roots in Habermasian theories on procedural justice and deliberative democracy, which start with defining just norms for an ideal situation -in which stakeholders contain all those characteristics -and then investigate how these norms should be implemented in our non-ideal reality.…”

“…Knowledge production based on the realities of life of farmers would look very different as a consequence. This would mean that different stakeholders in the project would be able to play the role of knowledge-producers -and indeed, in wicked problems and post-normal science it has been argued that expertise and knowledge production is not and should not be only the prerogative of the scientist (Norton 2005;Van Oudheusden 2014).…”

“…Of course RI can be all of these things, though the background we have just sketched suggests that the motivation for RI research is ultimately pragmatic: it should yield us methods to apply its characteristics to real innovation processes (Davies, Glerup and Horst 2014;Van Oudheusden 2014). In this paper, we predominantly focus on RI as a process or method; procedural norms have received more attention and are more developed in the RI literature than substantive norms related to innovation outcomes, although the product-and process-based approach has also been combined (e.g.…”