From foresight to hindsight: the promise of history in responsible innovation

Alfred Nordmann's (2014) essay is a helpful corrective to the still prevalent tendencies of linearity, determinism, and misattributed agency in policy and media discussions of technological advances. I take no issue with his call for more reflective forms of anticipatory governance ‘that can handle contingency, that can expect the unexpected and do not fall for the false promises or the illusion of intellectual and technical control’, or for scenario thinking that ‘becomes more versatile, creative, and powerful if … considered [as] proposals for alternative socio-technical arrangements rather than possible or likely images of the future’. And I agree that the ubiquitous metaphor of ‘emerging technologies’ can obscure far more than it illuminates.

Yet as someone who works predominantly in and with institutions of science and innovation policy, my immediate reaction on reading Nordmann's insightful contribution is to ask ‘yes, but how’? If we want to practice the ‘art of anticipation’, and experiment with the building of ‘regimes of vigilance’, what skills and capabilities do we require? How will existing cultures, processes and organisational arrangements for policy-making and governance need to adapt and change?

These questions take on particular urgency at a time when, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, we see governments worldwide investing more resources in technology foresight and horizon scanning, as part of a renewed commitment to active industrial policy. In the quest for new sources of economic growth, policy-makers are grappling with the potential for what Mariana Mazzucato, my colleague at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), calls the ‘entrepreneurial state’ (Mazzucato 2013). To highlight just a few examples:¹

• The United Kingdom (UK) has a long-established national Foresight Programme, which reports to the government's Chief Scientific Advisor and the Cabinet Office. Futures activities are also conducted elsewhere: for example, the Technology Strategy Board uses Technology Road Mapping initiatives in support of its technology ‘platforms’.

• In Brazil, the government established the Centre for Strategic and Management Studies as a not-for-profit company that now undertakes large programmes of technology foresight for the public and private sectors.

• Canada's foresight activities have suffered from institutional reconfigurations, but they have recently been re-established at the heart of central government as a means of aiding cross-departmental policy learning and formulation.

• In Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development and the Institute for Policy and Management of the Chinese Academy of Science play prominent roles as contributors to the government's cycle of five-year plan.

• At the European Commission, foresight is experiencing a resurgence and redesign, with two units in different Directorates General (DGs) undertaking projects. The Joint Research Centre has recently expanded its foresight activities in Brussels, both internally and commissioned by ‘client’ DGs.

• The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has been heavily involved in technology foresight for the past 20 years. Its current ‘BMBF Foresight’ multi-phase project was initiated in 2007 and is now carried out by 40 staff across two German research institutes;

• And in Japan, the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), situated within the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), runs a cycle of technology foresight every five years. Since 1996, this has been more strategically used to inform policy-making and the prioritisation of specific research and budget allocation.

If any such efforts are to escape the pitfalls that Nordmann has identified, in what practical ways can they be improved? To my mind, it is through his emphasis on the place of history in responsible innovation that Nordmann comes closest to answering this question. ‘History’, he reminds us, ‘requires us to refrain from the technological determinism that is inherent in the image of the rising tide or of the seed and what it harbours’. And a ‘historical sensitivity … allows us to engage in a hermeneutics of envisioned futures … without assuming that it can tell us anything about a future world’.

Such arguments play into a broader set of debates about the contribution that different types of knowledge and evidence make to policy-making. Despite a growing recognition that many policy problems benefit from multidisciplinary perspectives, implicit and sometimes inexplicable hierarchies persist among disciplines. Economics has long been a primary source of epistemic authority in policy. The natural sciences enjoy a significant role. Engineers and social scientists have gradually been welcomed into the club. But the humanities – including history – are often left out in the cold.

To take the example I know best, in the UK, there have been several efforts in recent years to demonstrate the value of the humanities to policy, including contributions from the British Academy (2008) and individual scholars (Bate 2011; Belfiore and Upchurch 2013). However, as the historian Roger Kain put it in his October 2011 evidence to a House of Lords inquiry: ‘the term science and engineering seems at the moment to not exclude but marginalise the humanities and social science in relation to advice and expertise: culture, history, language, psychology, and political science’ (House of Lords Science and Technology Committee 2011).

In March 2013, this argument received a high-profile endorsement from Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, who called for historical advisers in every government department. ‘Those who take major policy decisions in ignorance of relevant history,’ he wrote, ‘are like a driver who commits to some manoeuvre in the road without looking into the rear mirror’ (Butler 2013).

In science policy, history often plays a role as an example or justification, based on assumptions about how science is done or how innovation occurs that misrepresent our knowledge of the past. There can be a ‘totemic role’ for historians, where historical messages are ‘misunderstood or used for particular policy purposes’ (Berridge 2007).

However, there is a role for a broader input. Historians are good at judging the interests that lie behind differing interpretations of the past, as well as exploring their validity. One example is the work of David Edgerton, who has highlighted a number of areas in which common assumptions in science policy are shown to be problematic. These include challenging the perceived economic and technological significance of publicly funded research, and cherished notions of researcher autonomy such as the ‘Haldane Principle’ (Edgerton 2009).

Although Edgerton has shown that the so-called ‘linear model’ of innovation is a recent academic construct, created as a foil to better models, there is frequent recourse, both by science lobbyists and austerity-juggling politicians, to economic arguments for science funding that sound suspiciously similar. The same is true for the argument that pure scientific research is the best means of producing new and unexpected technologies, a notion which dates back to the early nineteenth century and has been impressed into support for the increased state funding of science ever since.

Of course, historians are not likely to be welcomed to the party if their only contribution is to scold, ‘but it's more complicated than that’. An ability to unpack assumptions, myths and the lost contexts in which particular policy ideas formed can be particularly useful. Dealing with nuance and complexity in evidence, and how perspective changes its interpretation, are commonplace skills in historical research and could be invaluable for mitigating potential policy failures and controversies, for example, around new and emerging technologies. Historians and political scientists have also made important contributions to the field of ‘evidence about evidence’, helping policy-makers to understand how knowledge is formed, exchanged and used in policy-making (Fox 2010).

What practical and institutional implications flow from a heightened ‘sensitivity to the contingencies of history’ of the kind that Nordmann advocates? In the UK, the historian of science Rebekah Higgitt and I recently called on Sir Mark Walport, the newly appointed Government Chief Scientific Adviser, to signal his commitment to the value of history by establishing a ‘hindsight’ team within the UK's existing Foresight Programme (Higgitt and Wilsdon 2013). Adding one or two historians of science to the mix could, we argued, provide the Government Office for Science, and the wider science and engineering policy profession, with the ‘rear mirror’ on which, as Lord Butler argues, every good driver should rely.

If Nordmann's critique of ‘speculative ethics’ is capable of rejuvenating, rather than proving ‘fatal’, to responsible innovation, it is through such measures that cultures of policy-making might begin to change. We see glimpses of what is possible in a growing range of novel institutional experiments. In a recent paper, Guston (2013) describes how he and colleagues have designed the Centre for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University ‘to edify the agora with at least one example’ of an institution advancing ‘anticipatory governance as a responsible innovation from the social sciences’. In the UK, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2012, xxiv) recently drew on a multidisciplinary team of experts, including historians and sociologists of science, to conclude that ‘the determination of biotechnology policy should attend explicitly to diverse perspectives and bodies of evidence rather than privileging a single, quantitative frame of evaluation’.

However, if responsible innovation and anticipatory governance are to move from the creative margins of science and technology policy to the mainstream, more work is needed to understand the contribution of different disciplines and types of evidence to policy-making, the architecture of adaptive institutions, and the changing role of experts, intermediaries, and publics. Nordmann points us in the right direction, but the journey is still young, and we must hope that this journal provides many more signposts along the way.

Notes on contributor

James Wilsdon is Professor of Science and Democracy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, and former Director of Science Policy at the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences (@jameswilsdon).

Notes

1. These are explored in greater detail in a forthcoming report which SPRU has produced for NESTA, the UK foundation for innovation (Wilsdon et al., forthcoming) A Crisis-sharpened Vision? A Comparative Analysis of Technology Foresight in Eleven Countries. London: NESTA)