Communicating through vulnerability: knowledge politics, inclusion and responsiveness in responsible research and innovation

ABSTRACT

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has affirmed the value of ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’ as institutional virtues necessary to ensure that reflexivity towards the social priorities behind innovation processes is made possible. It is argued that this affirmation links RRI to knowledge politics in other domains (e.g. environmental justice and the politics of development). It is suggested that lessons regarding inclusion and responsiveness can be drawn from these domains, focusing on the ways in which marginalised perspectives on need and vulnerability, once articulated, can help reconstitute the public sphere in which social priorities are defined. Three case studies are used to explore how entanglements of needs, vulnerabilities, identity and agency are vital to understanding the impacts of innovation and change more generally. It is argued that social science methodologies sensitised to such entanglements are necessary to help constitute a space of inclusion and responsiveness characterised, not by assumptions about idealised rational forms of deliberation, but by styles of communication that recognise vulnerability.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• knowledge politics
• participation
• responsible research and innovation
• vulnerability

Introduction

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) places at its heart questions of how those alive now should ‘take care of the future’ (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013) in the face of innovation’s inevitable uncertainties. Key elements of ‘care’, according to these authors, are inclusion and responsiveness – ‘virtues’ seen as necessary for actor to innovate responsively. Being ‘inclusive’ implies bringing into the processes that shape how innovation is guided and governed, publics whose interests may be affected by the outcomes of innovation. ‘Responsiveness’, by contrast, implies acknowledging and responding effectively and transparently to the perspectives of all those with a stake in the outcomes of innovation. Others have interpreted such calls for enactors and selectors (Garud and Ahlstrom 1997) of innovation to take responsibility ex ante more politically, as the basis for an ‘innovation democracy’ in which participation in shaping innovation is imagined as a new source of political agency or citizenship, with citizens engaging in defining the ‘problem space’ in which technological innovation takes place (Stirling 2014).

If inclusion and responsiveness are central to RRI, then this means that more than determinate risks are brought into the public realm for discussion. It requires that uncertainties and ignorance about possible consequences should also be on the agenda (Groves 2009). Also, it demands a recognition that innovation processes reflect research and development priorities and values that are socially conditioned (Wynne 2006), and which must therefore be opened up to scrutiny further upstream in the progression from basic research to product development (Guston and Sarewitz 2002; Wilsdon and Willis 2004). Whether particular goals or priorities are widely seen as appropriate and important ones; whether they are seen as reflecting already-privileged interests and therefore as potentially reinforcing inequalities; or indeed whether they are seen as targeting problems to which technological innovation, of itself, is not an appropriate solution (Sarewitz and Nelson 2008) are all questions which may be levelled as part of an inclusive and responsive interrogation of innovation.

A further implication is therefore that enactors cannot rely on defining priorities and needs from the position of established expertise. Instead, it is necessary to begin from ‘the idea that people themselves (can) have knowledge about their own subjectivity; in principle they are competent to express who they are and what they need. It [must take] seriously people's stories about what they need to live well’ (Sevenhuijsen 1998, 60). An implication of this, which we explore in depth below, is that needs but also vulnerabilities should not be treated as generic or ahistorical. They derive from concrete experiences, practices, and relationships, and may change thanks to processes of intervention designed to meet needs. Although the language and practice of policy usually attempts to create parameters that are generalisable and objective, in order to be responsive one needs to take more seriously the limitations of these supposedly purely objective measures and indicators (Turnhout, Hisschemöller, and Eijsackers 2007).

In this paper, we consider why and how inclusion and responsiveness need to be sensitive to more ‘local’ understandings of vulnerability and need, drawing on research that explores such understandings in different cultural contexts, conducted in north east Brazil (Taddei 2011, 2012), the north coast of São Paulo (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013; Di Giulio et al. 2014), and England and Wales (Groves et al. forthcoming), using a variety of qualitative methods, including narrative, biographical interviews, action research and intervention research. We are not implying that nations hold specific, nationwide sets of values that can be neatly defined and compared; nor are we saying that values across regions are also necessarily different in all cases, or that BRIC nations are necessarily similar or different from the UK or Europe. What we do want to stress is that local specificities must play a central role in understanding how the RRI dimensions of inclusion or responsiveness need to be thought and practised. Paying attention to need and vulnerability in ways inspired by social science approaches in areas relevant to RRI can help articulate these specificities, and thus enable better practices of RRI to be imagined and implemented in policy practices.

Theoretical background

RRI’s recognition of the importance of uncertainty, but also of the need to re-embed innovation amidst reflection on societal priorities, represents an example of what Beck (e.g. 1992) has called reflexive modernisation. Literature on innovation contains a related concept, that of ‘second-order reflexivity’, i.e. deliberative reflection on the ends of policy as well as the means to carry it out is invited and made institutionally possible (van de Poel and Zwart 2010). Responsiveness is part of a general move in governance away from a concentration on the risks of technologies and towards guiding and shaping innovation itself (Felt and Wynne 2007). Such concepts are also related to debates in development studies, environmental justice and allied fields about the politics of knowledge, and the value of participatory democracy of various kinds in reshaping this politics. Within environmental justice, for example, struggles for participation and recognition of ‘local’ or indigenous knowledges and traditions represent a call for responsiveness on the part of governance institutions and society more widely to subaltern, marginalised voices. Certain dominant forms of knowledge are established as socially legitimate and actionable at the expense of others. The political importance of such processes lies in how they can undermine the capacity of individuals and groups to shape their own future in the private and the public spheres. Further, calls from the margins are not just expressions of self-interest. They call for a shift in what is held to constitute the social good and the symbolic space in which it is discussed (Fraser 1990).

Innovation is also closely bound up with knowledge politics. Grand narratives about the progress of science reflect a politics of expertise, especially concerning quantification (Porter 1996) and commensuration (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Responsiveness requires attention to this political dimension, and particularly to the significance of such issues in relation to the governance of innovation considered within a cross-cultural and cross-jurisdictional context (where meanings, definitions and experiences of vulnerabilities are not necessarily the same). For example, we can compare debates in the US and Europe on the purposes of and uncertainties surrounding innovation to discussions in the BRICS and other nation-states. Although discourses of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ have long been criticised for helping to resurrect processes of colonisation and new waves of resource appropriation (Mitchell 2002), RRI as a way of slowing down innovation may also be seen as implying a problematic politics of knowledge and governance that risks imposing illegitimate constraints on emerging economies (Macnaghten et al. 2014). Here, emerging debates echo long-standing ones in the politics of development as well as those around environmental justice.

Knowledge politics, in all these instances, involves conflicts between narratives about preferred and probable futures, and between the forms of knowledge within which such narratives are embedded. Dominant narratives are able to draw on socially privileged forms of ‘disembedded’ expertise in demarcating the benefits and risks of particular development options. Such narratives are constructed around background ‘problems’: definitions of need or national priorities (ranging from scenarios of future energy demand to ‘grand challenges’ for innovation) to which technical knowledge is seen as the primary source of solutions. Marginal narratives, by contrast, are often encountered as rooted in specific needs or vulnerabilities, which may reflect the legacy of colonialism or environmental racism (Alfred and Corntassel 2005). These narratives frame imposed socio-technical change (such as stigmatising infrastructure, for example) as giving rise to additional vulnerabilities relating to health and other material concerns, but also as producing wider psychological, sociological and cultural effects (Irwin and Simmons 1999). Undermining cultural connections to land and territory may undermine community cohesion and agency (Erikson 1995), affecting the individual and collective capacity to live with a sense of a future that actors are able to influence and shape (Groves 2015).

In development and environmental justice debates, articulating such vulnerabilities, having them acknowledged and then seeing enactors of policy respond meaningfully to them have widely been seen as necessary components of any just settlement. Participation of marginalised individuals and communities in deciding to precisely what needs and vulnerabilities planned changes should be responsive has therefore been a central demand of development critics and environmental justice advocates. Just as knowledges, scientific or otherwise, are always part of social processes and are therefore inevitably socially embedded (Bloor 1976; Latour & Woolgar 1986), so are policy processes. Indicators used in policy, for example, not only become instrumental in defining political action, but are also the object of political disputes (Sébastien, Bauler, and Lehtonen 2014).

It is important to recognise that these are not just abstract debates about how to share out the benefits (and risks) of a plan or policy. Second-order reflexivity is about defining not just the policies to be followed but the problems to which they are intended to be responses. In terms of Fiorino’s (1990) typology of justifications for participatory politics, recognising a range of needs, including those of the marginalised, may not only lead to substantively better decisions but also to a normatively better society, one in which justice is seen to not just about distributive concerns, but also about participation (which makes inclusion important) and recognition (which makes responsiveness to specific concerns grounded in local knowledges important) (Schlosberg 2007, 2013). In this way, the reformulation of general priorities is refracted through the ‘local’, particular needs and vulnerabilities of specific and perhaps marginalised groups within a society, thus giving them the capacity to participate in defining priorities within the public sphere, and helping to re-constitute the public sphere itself by positioning their identities within it.

The setting of priorities and the allocation of the agency to set them are thus confirmed as issues rooted in knowledge politics. ‘Hegemony takes form in the process of coming to agreement about what to contest, what to struggle over’ (Besteman 1999, 232). The deployment of scientific knowledge and technical solutions to social problems often promotes, however, the depoliticisation of such issues in developing countries in appeals to science as a ‘nonpersonal form of authority’ (Taddei 2012, 79) and in developed ones alike through technocracy and the link to centralised decision-making (Scott 1998).

Behind RRI stands a tradition of comparable treatments of knowledge politics in relation to technoscience. As a variety of researchers have shown in investigating the concerns which people have about emerging technologies in countries such as the UK, US, Denmark, France and Germany, issues relating to risk – and therefore about the potential distribution of ‘bads’ resulting from the development and deployment of new technologies – are not foremost among them. Instead, people express doubts regarding the trustworthiness of enactors and regulators, about the readiness of enactors to admit to uncertainties about how technologies will be used in practice and what their effects might be, and to the effects of new technologies on existing inequalities within and between societies (Kearnes et al. 2006; Wynne 2006; Gavelin, Wilson, and Doubleday 2007; Kearnes and Wynne 2007). These are concerns about the priorities built upstream into innovations and about how agency and responsibility for shaping innovation are distributed.

To address these concerns, it is necessary (as in development and environmental politics) for a range of stakeholders to be brought into deliberation over what priorities – and thus whose needs and vulnerabilities – technical and governance innovation should address, ensuring that activism, science and policy enter into dialogue to shape both the definition of problems and the development of solutions (Monteiro, de Seixas, and Vieira 2014). Engagement with publics and civil society organisations is thus an essential part of enacting and realising second-order reflexivity directed at the definition of priorities. It has therefore been argued that inclusion and responsiveness are not keyed to widening participation solely to arrive at instrumentally or substantively better decisions. Instead, just as development and environmental politics widen our understanding of what it is to be engaged, as citizens, in politics, so engagement with innovation can use socio-technical change as an opportunity to re-imagine how citizens can realise agency in shaping the social future.

The aim of participation in assessing and governing innovation is therefore to re-embed innovation in society by connecting the interests, vulnerabilities and needs of concretely defined groups to innovation processes (Groves forthcoming). In many cases such groups are constituted from within the participation process itself, as new knowledge of needs and with them new identities are generated as a result of dialogue (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barth 2009). Again, as with development and environmental politics, the goal of such processes is not simply to acknowledge ‘difference’, but to allow definitions of needs articulated from a subaltern, marginalised or minority position to enter into redefining ideas about priorities, needs and vulnerabilities in general. The problem space of decision and action is thus changed. A move is made from the abstract universal (as it were), through the articulation of the particular, to the definition of a singularised ‘concrete universal’ of differentiated and specified needs and vulnerabilities.

Articulating ‘what matters’ is not always easy, however, for those with a stake in the outcome of a decision or policy (Davies 2001). Achieving agency means finding a voice, which may be a complex and difficult process. Need and vulnerability are bound up with the relationality of human subjects and the way this relationality shapes identity, priorities and vulnerabilities. A key aspect of this contribution is emotional attachment – to people, but also to non-humans, practices, places, institutions and/or ideals (Marris 1996). Attachments may, in fact, be seen as the conduit through which needs are concretely experienced by individuals and groups. There is no need-satisfaction, in this sense, without the accompanying production of identity, along with individual and/or community agency, through attachment and belonging at some level. Needs are not therefore generic and thus determinative of what we care about. Instead, how we understand our needs is dependent on our attachments:

The meaning of our lives cannot, therefore, be understood as a search to satisfy generalizable needs for food, shelter, sex, company and so on, as if our particular relationships were simply how we had provided for them. It is more the other way round: without attachments we lose our appetite for life. (Marris 1996, 45)

Attachments are an ingredient of the subjectivity of individuals. The expectations about the near and further future which they help to secure contribute to taming and making sense of an intrinsically uncertain future. They shape the sense subjects develop of what they and those they care about will need. As such, attachments are important for understanding motivation and how people make sense of their situation (Sayer 2011), and from a political philosophical point of view, are arguably central for understanding the normative content of claims about recognition (Groves 2015). The ‘locality’ and particularity of need may thus be connected to aspects of identity which are highly complex.

The role of academic research in building the institutional capacity to undertake participation therefore requires methods that can help facilitate the articulation of needs and vulnerabilities among inhabitants of specific localities and interest groups for whom social problems exist in specific and often unacknowledged ways. Social science research has a role to play in facilitating the agency of those affected by decisions and policies and thus in helping to constitute problems as ‘concrete universals’ that reflect in their definition the viewpoints of a range of actors. But it must be sensitive to the aforementioned aspects of subjectivity, and how they contribute both to social actors’ capacity to make sense of and act in the face of an uncertain future and also to their vulnerabilities.

In the next section, we discuss case studies from research projects in which the authors have been involved in knowledge politics, sense-making and environmental justice. These explore different dimensions of the need to link local, situated knowledges to processes of building inclusion and responsiveness into planned processes of change. We suggest that these therefore have relevance to the development of inclusion and responsiveness as two of the core ‘virtues’ of RRI.

Case studies

Attachment and identity in development-induced population displacement in northeastern Brazil

Our first case study underlines how the interplay between the meeting of needs, the formation of attachments, and the construction of identities can shape the outcomes of processes of disruptive change. It concerns the displacement of the population of the town of Jaguaribara through the construction of a large dam by the state of Ceará, in Northeast Brazil. The analysis draws on ethnographic data and interview transcripts generated between 2002 and 2006, and on Gamboggi (2004, 2010) and Taddei and Gamboggi (2009).

Jaguaribara was a small town located on the bank of the Jaguaribe River, 260 km from the state capital of Fortaleza. Plans to construct a large dam in the area date back to 1910. In 1985, the federal government announced that the Castanhão reservoir would finally be built. Sixty-seven thousand hectares was the area designated to be flooded, and 1020 buildings were located inside such perimeter. Of these, almost 75% belonged to the municipality of Jaguaribara. The state government and the World Bank, which funded the construction of the dam, present the case of Jaguaribara as a model of socially responsible development. Yet, for the inhabitants of Nova Jaguaribara, large differences exist between this story of the development and how they lived through it (Gamboggi 2010).

The announcement of the construction of the dam brought about dramatic economic and political disorganisation (Taddei and Gamboggi 2009). Local economic activity declined, as tenants migrated and landlords tried to sell now devalued lands (Santos 1999, 16). Members of the political elites had more assets, most moving either to the capital city or to neighbouring towns, disrupting the town’s political life (Taddei and Gamboggi 2009).

A local nun, Sister Bernadete, then the highest Catholic authority in the town, recalls that the announcement generated huge poverty. People would not fence their land or cultivate it, as everyone knew that the waters were coming (Taddei and Gamboggi 2009). The long distance phone service was disconnected, and banks stopped giving loans to local producers. The local population resisted the project from the beginning, but without assistance from local politicians. The community, led by Sister Bernadete, organised itself horizontally with other actors, including an NGO from Fortaleza, which assisted the community in 1987 to found the Association of Neighbours of Jaguaribara.

On 16 November 1995, the construction works finally began. In 1998, the Association of Neighbours created the House of Memory (Casa da Memória), a cultural centre that houses a collection of objects, donated by the inhabitants of the town, to represent its culture and traditions. Here were organised art workshops, including acting, photography, literature, theatre, poetry and regional dances. These activities were planned in order to help the children and youth population of the town to cope with the trauma of the coming displacement. Soon the House of Memory became the preferred locus for the production of narratives of resistance – including on the community’s anxieties around the new town, which was being planned without much community consultation (Gamboggi 2004).

The struggle of the community and the artistic production of the House of Memory eventually attracted the attention of the state and the national media. Sister Bernadete and the members of the Association of Neighbours were in a better political position to negotiate. The nun had established contact with the Movement of People Affected by Dam Construction (MAB), and the Association formed a commission to study cases of previous displacements in Brazil. One of the results of such efforts was the creation of a list of demands, including that the spatial distribution of families had to be maintained so that the same neighbours would be retained in the new town, and that each family would closely supervise the exhumation of their deceased relatives, and their transfer to the new cemetery. Community members also wanted autonomy to decide the geographical location of the new town. The government later offered three possible locations (Gamboggi 2004; Taddei and Gamboggi 2009).

The transfer of the population started on 25 July 2001. The new town was planned around modern urban concepts. Different districts were created, with streets all parallel to each other. All streets were paved and connected to the sanitation infrastructure (unusual at the time for Brazil). Houses had garden space on all sides. Significantly, this meant that buildings were not spatially contiguous as in the past. According to a number of authors (DaMatta 1997; Harvey 1999), time and space are phenomenological dimensions of life created by social practices. The modern principles that guided the design of the new town of Jaguaribara thus radically disorganised important aspects of the experience of life for most of its inhabitants. In the interviews collected by Gamboggi (2010) there is a rich body of evidence in that regard, of which we present some fragments below:

My friends used to live close to me; now they live far away, and sometimes I ask them to come to my house and they don’t want to come because it’s too far (boy, 8 years-old, son of community leader)

Here the structure of the house is different. You see that it is distanced from one another? And there is a wall between the houses. So now people don’t put their rocking chairs in the sidewalk to chat with neighbours as in the past [because the doors of the houses are too distant from each other] (53 year-old teacher and local poet)

The central square in the old town was a meeting point for everyone, but in the new town, the equivalent – an open space without trees and benches – no longer served this function (Gamboggi 2010). Moreover, the standardisation of space created through gridded streets broke the symbolic hierarchy that organised collective perceptions in the old town. In the latter, only main streets were paved and had sidewalks. Marginal, unpaved roads attracted fewer cars, and were thus perceived as safe spaces for children to play. In the new town, there are three or four main avenues. All other streets are also paved and have sidewalks, which means all roads are now perceived as places for cars and motorcycles. Consequently, the new town, though being more than twice the size, is seen by the children as a place where there is nowhere to play (Gamboggi 2010).

New forms of sociality have emerged strongly marked by a preference for private spaces and rituals, in stark contrast to the communal spaces of the old town and the social rituals they made possible. In a large number of interviews, people mention the prevalence of private spaces and privatised forms of entertainment:

In the old house there were no doors; in this one there are doors, and they have keys. I lock my room. My room seems small to me (boy, 8, son of community leader)

There my house was like one very large room; not here. Here the house is all split into small rooms. The living room is L-shaped, and there are four bedrooms and two bathrooms (boy, 16)

In the past there was one room for me, my brother, and my father and mother; here each one has his own room (boy, 8)

The only thing left to do around here is to watch television. Everyone remains inside their homes and watch soap operas (woman, 20)

Previously, children preferred to play in the unpaved streets and the central square. Now they mention video games, films for rental and television. Football used to be played in the dry riverbed. Now, with the river over 2 km away and dominated by the massive dam, sports became restricted to the town’s sports centre located besides the school – both seen by the government as icons of the progress brought by development to the interior of the state.

These processes of disruption, grounded in the destruction of familiar attachments and the spatial and temporal schemata of experience that evolve alongside them, have been widely noted in other contexts by researchers (e.g. Marris 1986; Fullilove 2004). A variety of activities (centring on the House of Memory) were employed by residents to articulate and explore their specific needs and vulnerabilities as residents of the locale, and to underline their individual and collective identities as belonging to it. However, there was neither the political will nor any institutional mechanisms to translate these efforts at representing attachments and identities into forms which could achieve traction within the public sphere. The case of Jaguaribara thus underlines how identity and agency can be affected, and vulnerabilities created, by how change directed at satisfying generic needs is planned and managed. It also shows how forms of horizontal agency can be created in response, in the attempt to preserve attachments as part of the identity of a community. Nonetheless, without opportunities to participate in shaping change and particularly in helping to define the problems to which interventions are supposed to be solutions, the degree to which those affected by decisions are able to influence them is limited.

Needs and capacities: understanding risks and vulnerabilities in relation to climate change with action and intervention research

To create opportunities to participate in processes of change, a recognition on the part of experts and others of the existence and role of knowledge politics in shaping action and governance is necessary. Complex socio-environmental problems, such as climate change, create contexts in which the politics of knowledge may come to the fore, as confirmed by our second example, an empirical study undertaken on the North Coast of São Paulo, Brazil from 2011to 2013. In this area, which has an estimated 745 km² at risk of landslides and flooding (Ferreira et al. 2012), a number of projects being undertaken in the port and oil sectors have been presented as having great positive potential for the local economy and environment (Viglio 2012). A future premised on meeting economic needs through infrastructure development has become entangled with other priorities, such as tourism, challenges to quality of life and sustainable development. The addition of climate change, and the vulnerabilities it may create in such areas, as policy priorities only intensifies the resulting complexity (Di Giulio and Ferreira 2013; Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013; Di Giulio et al. 2014).

The study was carried out in three cities within the northern São Paulo coastal region (São Sebastião, Caraguatatuba and Ubatuba, a population of around 253,000 people in total) and involved 8 focus group meetings, 20 interviews and 2 workshops (in July 2011 and December 2013). The study focused on how individuals who live in areas subject to risks of landslides and floods and other local stakeholders construct risks associated with extreme events and climate change, but also how they make sense of recent plans for urban expansion and development in these areas, and the effects of the combination of environmental risks (including ones associated with climate change) and development on their capacities to adapt and thrive within their communities. As part of this approach, the study used intervention and action research to encourage purposeful collective action within communities, but also to improve dialogue between those who make science and those who use science to make decisions.

If needs and vulnerabilities are constructed as part of processes connected to identity, there is also a large body of literature which sets out how risks, which are the correlate of vulnerabilities, are constructed through similar processes (Freitas 2000). The São Paulo study research aimed to provide interactive arenas in which community stakeholders, policy practitioners and experts were able to deliberate on and re-construct their understanding of interconnected risks and vulnerabilities, drawing on both ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ knowledge. Such an approach can be seen as a way of embodying the RRI virtue of inclusion in attempting to define needs and priorities, through the acknowledgement of locally embedded vulnerabilities and forms of agency.

Focus groups were used in the studies to maximise opportunities for participatory discussion and elicitation of individual views (Morgan 1988; Krueger 1994), guided by principles of action research and intervention research (Di Giulio et al. 2014). The meetings targeted four types of stakeholder groups: (a) scientists; (b) practitioners dealing with risk assessment and management in the area; (c) neighbourhood leaders living in areas considered at risk by emergency management authorities and (d) youth between 12 and 17 years also considered to be living in areas at risk. The study also included interviews with emergency management professionals and scientists, along with workshops for exchanging information on climate science between scientists and policy-makers.

The participatory aspect of this research encouraged the improvement of scientists’ ability to learn about the personal and interpersonal dimensions involved in people’s understandings of and responses to risk, the complexity of which were demonstrated within focus group discussions. Lay participants showed themselves to be comfortable deconstructing and reconstructing concepts, bringing to the debate personal experiences and a range of information (either through official sources, from the media or conversations with family members, neighbours and friends) in making connections between a range of risk issues (Di Giulio et al. 2014).

Participants made connections between a series of potential threats related to climate change, including floods, landslides, landscape changes and rising sea levels, and possible contributory causes of climate change such as deforestation, vehicle pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. They also highlighted potential difficulties in confronting risks and threats locally such as controversies surrounding weather forecasting and scientific studies, and the lack of dialogue between those producing scientific knowledge and all those who could make use of this information in planning and decision-making. In addition, they discussed the social, economic but also emotional and interpersonal conditions necessary to enhance the adaptive capacity of communities living with risk (Di Giulio et al. 2014).

Emergency managers saw needs in generic terms, asserting that it was critical to improve understanding among the public of the nature of objective risks in order to increase the likelihood of appropriate adaptive responses to local risks of climate change. Neighbourhood leaders, on the other hand, highlighted a series of barriers impeding their ability to adapt, including socio-economic conditions, a lack of public engagement and institutional capacity and other more urgent concerns affecting their day-to-day lives and interacting with environmental risks. Striving to implement managerial solutions aided by more effective communication of expert knowledge failed to address these interlinked conditions.

Professionals engaged with problems associated with climate change perceived that laypeople seemed to prefer to deny environmental risks, or to not talk about them, staying in homes potentially under threat – even when given information about the potential hazards that they are exposed.

When we talk to people who live in risk areas (on the hills, for example), we realize that they have knowledge [about the risks], but they will not leave their houses. They say do not have economic conditions to move for another place … Their discourse is ‘what happened in Rio de Janeiro or in any another place will not happen in their houses’ (agent of Civil Defence)

But what the focus groups, interviews and workshops demonstrated were the differences between how climate risks, needs and vulnerabilities are perceived from the perspectives of policy-makers and affected communities. Responses of denial could, in fact, be understood as different framing of problems connected to climate change, and attempts to balance distinct and sometimes competing priorities and vulnerabilities against each other. Even where explicit refusal to discuss climate change and other troubling environmental issues was evident, this may have been driven by other, hard to articulate concerns (Davies 2001). Among these, for example, may be issues relating to identity, in particular attachment to place as a way of maintaining identity and a sense of agency in complex and threatening circumstances (Wester-Herber 2004). Although in our research residents were aware of the environmental risks to which they could be exposed, they maintained they needed to live in their localities, citing financial, psychological, emotional and social reasons alongside the view that these dangers would not materialise. Managerial attempts to impose solutions focused on ‘solving’ problems of vulnerability associated with a longer term perspective on climate change may thus ignore other concerns, short or longer term in nature, that are connected to vulnerabilities very often invisible to the managerial perspective.

Participants identified the public authorities and communities themselves as jointly, if differentially, responsible for acting on climate change. However, authorities were also charged with needing to understand the aspirations and fears of communities (Serrao-Neumann et al. 2013), and therefore needing to confront the problem of competing priorities and the vulnerabilities that issue from how decisions, including those surrounding climate change, are imposed on populations. In particular, people viewed the new, large oil and gas infrastructure projects in the region as being of more immediate concern than climate change.

Energy biographies: navigating entanglements of technologies, practices and identity

Inclusion and responsiveness, the Sao Paulo study confirms, are about more than rational deliberation on universal needs to which planned change must then be responsive. But the study also registers the value of attachment as an anchor for identity and agency in the face of new vulnerabilities that are then expressed in the denial of risks related to climate change. An implication is that methods for eliciting and reflecting on ‘what matters’ have to be sensitive to additional complexities related to the specificity of the connections between vulnerabilities and identity. Identity processes may be expressed through participatory activities in subtle ways, and even obscured as much as they are revealed. In this section, we examined an example of how research can explore such dimensions of identity and vulnerability.

The Energy Biographies project in the UK has explored how the ways in which people use energy are shaped by value-framings which can lead to conflicts between different practices and result in tensions within everyday life (Groves et al. forthcoming). This renders problematic policy approaches to reducing energy demand such as those outlined by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in the UK (2009) that rely on new technologies, such as smart meters, to drive ‘behaviour change’ (Ozaki and Shaw 2014). Rather than viewing how they use energy solely through a lens of financial costs and benefits, interviewees’ accounts of energy use express attachments to often distinct (though concurrently held) conceptions of a ‘good life’ which may clash with each other. The resulting tensions between different conceptions of ‘how we should live’, the project has found, may emerge as a result of planned or unplanned biographical transitions.

The specific longitudinal methodology employed by the project comprised three rounds of narrative, biographically focused interviews complemented by multimodal photography tasks designed to make everyday energy practices more tangible and available for discussion. Seventy-four first round interviews were carried out across four sites in Wales and England, including both socially deprived and affluent neighbourhoods in Cardiff, an eco-village in West Wales, and the Royal Free Hospital in west London.

As examples of the kinds of tensions mentioned above, we cite extracts from an interview with Lucy (pseudonym), who, when first spoken to, had recently moved from London with her partner and young children to a house in an affluent commuter village on the outskirts of Cardiff, Wales. Lucy and her husband both had family roots in South Wales, and had begun the process of renovating a house in the village. This move to an area where they had family connections was bound up with the desire for an ideal home, and for an enhanced quality of life. This entailed establishing a (re)new(ed) identity, centring on their new rural surroundings and the possibilities for hosting family and old friends from London afforded by their new home.

At the same time, Lucy stressed the need to manage household energy budgets, prided herself on her skills in this regard, and on her knowledge of the energy efficiency ratings of her domestic appliances: ‘The tumble dryer I think that literally hardly ever got above a B but most of my things are like AAA or AA or stuff.’ Nonetheless, this understanding of need conflicts with other values that emerged as part of the recent move, which centred on visions of how to achieve an improved quality of life in a rural setting. This brings with it attachments to practices that use energy in ways which are demonstrably inefficient, but which contribute affectively and aesthetically to a ‘life worth living’. As part of a photography task during the project, Lucy took pictures of ‘probably super-inefficient’ open fires which the family had reinstated in their new house as a luxury feature: ‘we just don’t need a wood burner to be on at any point but actually it’ll sort of make the room’. In addition, she photographed patio heaters, which she recognised as ‘wasteful’ and ‘bad’ but also as necessary in a specific sense. She downplays the wastefulness of ‘heating the outdoors’ (Hitchings 2007) because a particular vision of how one should enjoy rural life is important to her.

… we do love our patio heater when it’s a sunny evening but it gets a bit cold and dark and you can sit out and they’re like probably the worst things aren’t they?

Having moved from London, it became necessary to maintain attachments to friends by playing host – and providing a ‘rural’ place to stay (for friends from London) that included the provision of warmth and comfort for visitors.

Cos we love being outside, we just love that you can you know go, we were sitting out there one evening … it was like midnight and you could have a drink outside still and it’s so lovely here cos it’s so quiet and everything so but you wouldn’t have been able to do it without that so or you would have been freezing. So that’s our kind of, we know it’s really bad but we’re still going to use it.

Her reflections on the technology of the patio heater show that the value of the technology lies in how it helps her ‘hedge’ against a specific risk – this being one that concerns her identity as a hostess, friend and (recently acquired) rural dweller. At the same time, she recognises in the end that there is a conflict between the wasteful ways in which she feels impelled to ‘make’ her home, and the rationality of household management: ‘I literally got the bill about two weeks ago, and I suddenly thought (gasps)’. She disavows the importance of this conflict, however, noting that ‘everyone’s you know got wood burning stoves’ and finally stating that the patio heater is ‘bad’ but ‘we’re still going to use it’.

Here, the narrative Lucy provides about her use of particular technologies shows how they become more than ‘instruments’. The general problem of how to create ‘homeliness’ and provide hospitality as part of a lifestyle in which old relationships are maintained but a ‘higher quality of life’ is also attained could be solved in a variety of ways. But specific technologies become central to this, and in a dialectical reversal, come to embody what homeliness and hospitality, as they are concretely experienced, actually mean (cf. Fraser 1998). The means reconfigure the end; a satisfier creates the need in its cultural, spatial and temporal specificity. Technologies, practices, identity and agency thus become thoroughly entangled over time. These entanglements create dependencies, and with them, inconsistencies and tensions which may (as in Lucy’s talk about the heater) be hard to acknowledge. If needs create vulnerabilities, then how these needs are met – through technologies or otherwise – may create additional vulnerabilities.

This entanglement of technologies, practices and identities, as Ozaki and Shaw (2014) point out, means that simply applying technological solutions to a predefined problem of meeting abstract needs can often fail, producing unintended consequences – including additional vulnerabilities – in the process. Inclusion and responsiveness are not, therefore, just a matter of letting more subjects articulate their needs and listening to what they say, but also allowing these needs to be articulated with an appropriate sensitivity to their complexity.

Discussion

The three case studies discussed above add to a body of literature on environmental justice and knowledge politics which support an expanded concept of citizenship, one that is at once ecological (Latta 2007), relational and embodied (Gabrielson and Parady 2010), and also technological (Winner 1992). Rather than the disembodied, rational actor concerned with abstract universals who exemplifies Enlightenment ideals of citizenship, this new model of citizen is a complex subject whose particularity and singularity, together with the vulnerabilities that come with embodiment and affective subjectivity, enter fully into defining the concrete universal of social problems, a process of definition in which it participates with other such citizens. This has implications for RRI, which we explore in this section.

Planned or unplanned change brings disruption which, as is underlined by the Jaguariba study, creates vulnerabilities rooted in particular needs (for singular places, communities and so on). The experience of disruption thus harms individuals and their communities by disrupting attachments that are constitutive of identity, but also of agency. Debating the social legitimacy and desirability of specific changes is a way of anticipating and responding to the possibility of such harms. But to do so inclusively requires an approach that is sensitive to the contribution that self-representation by citizens of their particular needs and vulnerabilities can make to understanding social priorities. The São Paulo study attempted this with methods drawn from action and intervention research. It assisted communities affected by a complex set of vulnerabilities, including ones associated with the entanglement of socio-economic and environmental risks, to respond to change by articulating their own understandings of the future through their own vulnerabilities.

The importance of this approach to understanding the connection between particular interests and the common good is underlined by Fraser (1990), who criticises Habermas’ conception of discursive democracy for ignoring exclusions that have historically prevented women and others from participating in the liberal public sphere. These exclusions, as we have seen in the first and second of our studies, can be joined by other exclusions, deriving from knowledge politics, which help powerful actors to ignore how various culturally specific forms of attachment are constitutive of identity and agency.

Where traditional models of entry into the public sphere have seen difference and particularity as obstacles to rational autonomy, the research presented here underlines that the recognition and affirmation of the particularity of needs and vulnerability can serve as the basis of effective agency and the creation of new identities, and thus help marginalised or unarticulated concerns achieve representation within the public sphere (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barth 2009). Indeed, in a polity where citizenship is ecological, embodied and technological, affirming particularity as a stage on the road to rethinking what is in the common interest becomes productive of a public sphere that extends beyond the institutions traditionally thought to constitute it – an insight reflected in Fraser’s concept of ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (1990).

The Jaguariba and São Paulo studies underline that to take care of the future, in the phrase employed by advocates of RRI, means not just taking care of how needs will be met and social priorities defined, but also understanding how needs are not just generic considerations that can be adequately defined by experts who claim disembedded and therefore disinterested knowledge. Needs are always encountered in forms that are particularised and singularised as part of embodied processes of everyday living.

The goal of RRI therefore needs, we argue, to be understood in relation to goals advanced by advocates of the role of knowledge politics in environmental justice and critiques of development discourses which are similar to those of RRI and reflect commitments shared by advocates of these positions to creating new opportunities for citizens to participate in complex processes of social change and shape their common futures. Nonetheless, it appears that, if the subject is a relational, embodied, ecological subject of singularised needs and vulnerabilities, then using participatory methods to achieve inclusion and responsiveness will face particular challenges.

The Sao Paulo and Energy Biographies studies suggest that, if identity helps to define vulnerability, then there will be a psychosocial dimension to how subjects enter into and participate within the public sphere. In some cases, experiences of change may create conflicts between attachments or values that, while constitutive of identity, cannot easily be reconciled by individuals. Such cases sound a cautionary note over the politics of participation. Eliciting views on ‘what matters’ might, for example, run into difficulties where identities are bound up with practices or technologies that individuals themselves view ambivalently or even as morally dubious. As a result, the complexity of vulnerabilities also needs to become a focus for deliberation and participation. Rather than assuming that communication about ‘what matters’ must be conducted according to an idealised standard of rationality, this process confirms that inclusion and responsiveness requires proper communication, but that this should be communicating through vulnerabilities, not a form of communication that simply aspires to transcend them. Formulating methods for eliciting perspectives on ‘what matters’ needs, therefore, to be part of the process of ‘norm construction’ in the face of uncertainties that is required by RRI (Pellé and Reber 2013). It cannot simply be assumed that participatory methods can be used ‘off the shelf’.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have used three case studies to underline links between established bodies of scholarship in the fields of environmental justice and knowledge politics and the call made in RRI research for care for the future to be exercised through the virtues of ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’. Such virtues, we have argued, must be characterised by a sensitivity to and understanding of the dimensions of knowledge politics explored by environmental and development justice advocates. Without such a vision of inclusion and responsiveness, not only may singularised needs and vulnerabilities be ignored (as in the Jaguariba study) but the complexity of entanglements between identities, risks, vulnerabilities, practices and technologies may be missed (as suggested by the Sao Paulo and Energy Biography studies). Just as the concern of individuals and groups for their own needs is culturally specific and singularised, rather than being bound up with generic needs, if ‘care for the future’ is to characterise RRI, then it has to be equally sensitive to the cultural, embodied, localised and otherwise singularised dimensions of need we have explored here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Gabriela Marques Di Giulio is Assistant Professor in the Environmental Health Department, School of Public Health, University of São Paulo (USP). She has a Ph.D. in Environment and Society (University of Campinas), and an undergraduate degree in Social Communication-Journalism (State University of São Paulo). She has worked extensively on human dimensions of environmental change, science and communication, risk perception and governance.

Christopher Groves is a research associate in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University in the UK, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on how individuals, groups and institutions make sense of an uncertain future and on the ethics and politics of technology.

Marko Monteiro is Assistant Professor in the Science and Technology Policy Department at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (University of Campinas, 2005), and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s STS Program (2006–2008). His recent work focuses on scientific visualisation practices in remote sensing research and deforestation knowledge about the Amazon.

Renzo Taddei is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at the Graduate Program in Social Sciences and at the Department of Oceanic Sciences at Federal University of São Paulo. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology (Columbia University). His is also an associate researcher at the Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions (Columbia University) and associate director of the Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study, in New York.

ORCID

Christopher Groves http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5873-1119

Marko Monteiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4008-4985

Additional information

Funding

Research in Ceará was funded through the National Science Foundation [NSF grant number 951516]; the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research [IAI grant number CRN-3035], [grant number CRN-3106]. Research in northeastern Sao Paulo was funded by FAPESP [grant number 2010/51849-8], [grant number 2012/02125-2]. Research on the Energy Biographies project was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council [grant number RES-628-25-0028]. The paper also benefitted from the following FAPESP [grant number 2013/11592-6], [grant number 2013/01217-3].