Addressing scarcities in responsible innovation

Vogt has authored an interesting article and on a significant topic. That it should be published in this journal on ‘responsible innovation’ adds further particular salience. In addition to intrinsic features and findings of Vogt’s paper concerning the materialities of speed in science and technology, his focal themes of time and various kinds of scarcity also raise important implications for wider issues around exactly what responsibility might mean and promise in the governance of research and innovation.

In this short commentary, I will address a number of questions that arise directly in the analysis undertaken in Vogt’s paper. I will argue that wider (arguably more important) queries are also raised for the speed and direction in which fields of ‘responsible research and innovation’ (Schomberg 2013) and ‘responsible innovation’ (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013; Koops et al. 2015) (together here ‘R[R]I’) – themselves major forms of policy innovation (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012) – might on their own terms best proceed. The stakes are high, concerning not just temporalities and scarcities implicated in notions of ‘responsibility’ itself, but also those of the wider politics of science and technology for which ‘responsibility’-branded structures, processes and discourses are increasingly finding themselves a front window (Duckworth and Moore 2010).

The ‘responsibility turn’ is, after all, simply the latest of many surges of policy innovation in the arena of science and technology governance (Pellé and Reber 2013). And this broad arena has repeatedly proven to be an unusually fertile source of new frameworks and procedures. In only a relatively short time, R[R]I approaches have become remarkably widely adopted across otherwise disparate jurisdictions (Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013). But considered in the spirit of the present paper (over the longue duree), it is crucial to appreciate that R[R]I – in all its variants – is firmly embedded in a deeply formative layering of earlier political frameworks around (for instance) ‘precaution’, ‘participation’ and ‘sustainability’ (Stirling 2014).

Of course, it is clear why science and technology governance should prove such a fecund site for policy innovations and neologisms. Here (in an inflected echo of the focus of Vogt’s paper), there operate some formidable political kinds of scarcity. From the view of incumbent interests, there is a constant dearth of precious instrumental resources for justification (Collingridge 1980), legitimation (Habermas 1976), trust (Pellizzoni 2005), credibility (Hilgartner 2004), acceptance (Flynn and Bellaby 2007) and blame management (Hood 2011). Here, structures for accrediting assertions of ‘responsibility’ offer a major asset. From more critical subaltern perspectives, on the other hand, the corresponding major scarcities in research and innovation governance are around accountability, inclusion and democracy (Barry and Wissenburg 2001). At their best, discourses of responsibility can also help in building these (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012).

It is in this struggle that the multivalent (progressive and regressive) ‘Janus-face’ of innovation-in-general that Vogt rightly notes applies also to responsibility as a specific locus of innovation in its own right. In this regard, his paper is very clear about its own instrumental alignment, emphasising as it does ‘the importance of societal acceptance of technologies’. When expressed like this, as a concern for acceptance, ‘responsibility’ is about duty to incumbency.

Yet the issues raised are not just prescriptive, but also diagnostic – for instance, concerning the second of Vogt’s focal themes, on temporality. Here also, serious questions arise both for this article and for R[R]I in general. This is because the relevant temporalities of innovation are often a long way from the expediently smooth trends portrayed by Vogt for scarcity, often manifesting instead as much more inconveniently messy cycles. It is with these shared normative and analytic features of this paper in particular and R[R]I in general that this commentary will wrestle.

The underlying dynamic is easily described. In innovation governance as elsewhere in politics, diverse imperatives for social control contend with similarly multiple countervailing forces of collective action (Stirling 2016). The result over time is a constant churn of paradigms and vocabularies (of which, as noted, R[R]I merely provides the most recent). Initially stabilised in the vortex of contending forces of challenge and instrumentalisation, each successive flow beaches at the end in its own inherent contradictions – and the irreconcilable tensions between incumbent expediency and critical traction.

But it is the political sediments that accumulate from these passing waves that form the cultural and institutional strata that in their turn help constitute the onward flows (Felt et al. 2013). The initially formative wave itself may be spent or reversed, but some imprint of its orientation remains. Indeed, when progressive aspects are as effective as they have been with ‘precaution’, ‘participation’ and ‘sustainability’, then it is the irritation of this imprint to incumbency that can help motivate a new wave. Either way, it is in this cyclical dialectic of necessity and scarcity that innovation governance plays out – not just in the specific terms of the chemical availabilities discussed in Vogt’s paper, but also in a more general fashion relating to material political resources for justification and challenge.

With respect generally to R[R]I then, the dance between different kinds of power and counterpower that stabilises the ordering flows and structures in science and technology governance rapidly exhausts each sequential dancing configuration in this space. So, it is true of ‘responsibility’ (like ‘precaution’, ‘participation’ and ‘sustainability’ before it) that each successive policy innovation in this field is galvanised strongly at the beginning (at least on one side) by sincerely progressive aims to harness new opportunities. Newly emerging resources seem offered for securing more rigorous critical scrutiny, asserting stronger public accountability and enabling greater social agency over the directions taken by research and innovation (Stirling 2008). Yet, to hold any prospect of feasibility, each effort is also constituted by countervailing forces. And (varying across contexts) each tends to ebb to ignominious (if temporary) rest in instrumental appropriation or diversion by incumbent interests.

To note this is not to judge, but simply to observe. The cyclical motions in the dancing waves of the power dynamics in research and innovation governance are neither necessarily ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Only to ignore them is negative. But in considering the particular implications of the present article, a key consideration arises that is relevant both to Vogt’s own argument and to R[R]I in general. This is, that the more materially institutional strata left by earlier waves in research and innovation governance may sometimes allow greater traction for progressive critical engagement with the central political issues, than can recent (more discursive academic or endogenous policy) frameworks for ‘responsibility’. This is as much of a potential worry for this journal in general, as for this paper in particular. So it seems worth elaborating.

For instance, arising first in the 1980s, the precautionary principle is emphatically clear about an issue that is entirely neglected in this paper until a peremptory mention at the end: uncertainty (Gee et al. 2001, 2013). There are few dimensions of governance practice more critically mediated by time, than uncertainty (Wynne 1992). And many versions of R[R]I also make strong reference to this dilemma in various well-framed (albeit merely discursive) criteria and principles (Groves 2015). So the neglect is odd. But the remedy is clear. It is distinctively around precaution, that material institutional structures, sticky cultures of practice (Renn, Dreyer, and SpringerLink 2009) – and forceful international law (Fisher 2010) – have been forged in hard-fought struggle and in order to engage with open ‘uncertainties’, rather than instrumentalised ‘risk’ (Stirling, forthcoming). If it is to deliver on the progressive side of its promise, R[R]I should support, strengthen and add to these existing political resources. In competing or substituting, R[R]I more easily becomes regressive.

This is important, because neither ‘scarcity’ nor ‘abundance’ are, in reality, the ostensibly objective quantities suggested by Vogt (Scoones et al. 2014). As his own focus on time should remind, these are relationships between ever-changing subjective, as well as objective, contexts. So, just as the ‘rebound effect’ (well addressed by Vogt) corrects overly simplistic linear notions of efficiency, so reductive deterministic categorisations of scarcity (like those he himself deploys) are prone to serious error. Time and again, definitively asserted scarcities turn out to be artefacts of framing by highly interested perspectives (Mehta 2010). This is not to say they do not exist, but that they should be treated with much greater humility and reflexivity over the associated politics of knowledge (Stirling 2012). The tangible practices and structures of precaution around uncertainty engage directly with this.

The second wave of technology governance innovation mentioned above as helping to constitute institutional bedrock for contemporary R[R]I debates is the burgeoning international move from the 1990s, towards new participatory institutions and practices (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). Here again can be found a further gap in Vogt’s analysis – the neglect of the inherently political (not technical) ambiguities and contentions over how his paper’s own key analytical foci can be conceived (like ‘time’, ‘speed’, ‘technology’, ‘scarcity’ or ‘abundance’) (Maasen and Wengart 2005). Even aside from uncertainties about the future, each of these terms is open to radically divergent (inherently political) framings. Despite the dualities in their stabilising political vortices noted above, participatory practices can offer ways to ‘open up’ such concealed politics and test what ‘responsibility’ actually means (Van Oudheusden 2014).

Yet, where Vogt acknowledges politics at all, it features not (as it should) as an unavoidable constitutive feature of any analysis, but as an exogenous (seemingly ephemeral) source of possible ‘unrest’ or ‘challenge’ to analytical results. Albeit inadvertent, this kind of instrumentalised politics-suppression is widely encountered in science and technology governance – including, unfortunately, in some versions of R[R]I (Gianni and Goujon 2014). The ubiquity of this syndrome makes it all the more important to challenge (Pellizzoni 2001). And, for all their flaws, it is the materialised disciplines of progressive participatory practice that can help address this gap – catalysing and engaging messier diversities of social agency, than can the neatly structured discursive orders of R[R]I on their own (Wynne 2007).

Then there is the third major innovation governance framework identified above, that is (commendably) mentioned by Vogt – the venerable concept of sustainable development (Redclift and Springett 2015). Resurgent in recent years from its origins in green social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and its canonical codification by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987), sustainability arguably now in this latest vigorous new global wave, offers a deeper, thicker and stickier opportunity than ever before, for ratcheting progressive interests in the governance of science and technology and addressing the issues raised by Vogt (Adger and Jordan 2009).

Rejuvenated from earlier stagnations in sustainability discourse, the 17 sustainable development goals agreed on by 193 countries in 2015 offer a substantive and nuanced framework for pivoting progressive interests in science and technology governance (UN 2014). Albeit (of course) imperfectly compromising, these multiple metrics, targets and processes for sustainability offer valuable loadbearing fulcra for social critique and appraisal of a kind that more recently formed R[R]I discourses cannot alone provide. And this materiality of structure and stickiness of practice is an essential addition to more recent, predominantly discursive, academic or policy interventions like much R[R]I, in helping to hold incumbent interests to account and steer more socially just and environmentally benign alternative directions for science and technology (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010).

Yet, Vogt’s analysis disappointingly mostly deploys the language of sustainability in far more archaic, instrumental and regressive terms. At one point, it is characterised as ‘provid[ing] a more sustained long term support for science and engineering research’ – apparently more about perpetuating established structures in science and technology, than evaluating them. Elsewhere, sustainability is described as aiming to ‘buy us enough time’ (whoever the conspicuously depoliticised ‘us’ might be). And the scope for diverse social choices is reduced in Vogt’s framework merely to the instrumentalised binary of two forms of ‘capital’: ‘social’ in the case of notionally ‘weak sustainability’ and ‘natural’ in the case of supposedly ‘strong sustainability’.

In either guise, the simplistic neoclassical idiom of ‘capital’ again here sadly (in its singularising metrics and dichotomies) eclipses the more richly nuanced and plural political potentialities of sustainability. The space for social agency thereby diminishes merely to a choice between ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ in a fashion mediated primarily by expert calculation. Scope for overtly political deliberation over more radical reorientations in directions for science and technology contracts to asking simplistically, as does Vogt, ‘are there reasons for us to accelerate or slow down an innovation?’

To emphasise a question with such restrictively self-enforced limits is possibly worse than not asking questions at all. By imagining criticism in this circumscribed way, constructive potentialities of critique are more attenuated than exercised. Preoccupations merely with the rate of movement according to some supposedly given parameter or trajectory are far more superficial than concerns about the orientations of such axes themselves. To restrict attention as this paper does, then, merely to questions of ‘how fast?’ (like ‘what risk? or ‘who’s ahead?’) in some singular presumed direction of change is to completely exclude the most important questions in the governance of science and technology in any given area: ‘which way?’, ‘who says?’ and ‘why?’ (Stirling 2014). The exclusions are all the more regressive, for being concealed in the ostensibly progressive guise of responsibility.

So it is on this point that my main comments on the internal content of Vogt’s paper most crucially hinge. The entire frame for analysis inherently restricts attention merely to the ‘speed’ of innovation, rather than to its direction. And the profundity of this limitation is especially well expressed, in the self-consciously momentous statement early on in this paper that ‘we need to ask a more fundamental question, namely what speed should a particular innovation have?’ The key point here is that this is not a fundamental question at all! To present it as such – implicitly in the voice of responsibility – is an especially poignant form of irresponsibility.

So we return at the end to the more general implications raised throughout my commentary. Whether or not conceived in terms of marketised private property rights over individual chemicals, it would be a betrayal of the earlier hard-fought waves of progress on which it builds, for R[R]I to become characterised (as in this paper) merely as a means to ‘identify potential resource constraints early on and accelerate research for more abundant substitutes’. In such forms, ‘responsibility’ is instrumentalised simply to questions over material efficiencies around whatever direction for research and innovation happens to be driven by incumbent structures in any field.

Equally in this specific paper and any more general vision of R[R]I framed this way, the crucial missing issue is directionality. To fixate on notionally singularised parameters of what is ‘efficient’, ‘risky’, ‘ethical’ (… or ‘scarce’ or ‘slow’ or ‘fast’) in any given setting is a seriously anti-democratic restriction of political attention. It is surely the central progressive role of ‘responsibility’, to enable (not attenuate) more plural processes of accountability, challenge and wider social agency in the orienting of research and innovation (Blok 2014)? And where this task is neglected, then the greatest scarcity in R[R]I – as in innovation governance more generally – is democracy itself (Stirling 2014).

It is here that R[R]I should recall that earlier waves of progressive struggle in science and technology governance – for instance around precaution, participation and sustainability – have stratified many hard-won institutional structures and practices. These offer precious fulcra, pivots and ratchets for further forms of challenge that are inherent to any progressive notion of responsibility in the face of concentrated power (Stirling 2016). It is only by catalysing, enabling and articulating in such ways wider forms of democratic struggle that the formidable political loads can be borne of counterbalancing entrenched incumbent interests and navigating more socially responsive orientations for research and innovation (Johnstone and Stirling 2015).

It is in these more material political ways that challenges of time and scarcity can best be addressed in what would otherwise be more purely bureaucratic, academic or rhetorical forms of R[R]I. Established precautionary practices directly engage the intractable depths of uncertainties that are otherwise too easily elided with risk (Stirling 2007). Participatory institutions, at their best, articulate constant inconvenient pressures from wider social interests and values and more marginalised forms of agency (Saward 2000) – or at least empower ‘civilising effects of hypocrisy’ to this end (Elster 2011; Stirling 2016). Global frameworks around sustainable development offer crucial accountabilities concerning the pluralities of normative orientations for social progress (Scoones, Leach, and Newell 2015).

For all the churn in policy vocabularies and etiquettes, then, the persistent challenge remains the same. How can collective action most healthily balance incumbent power in steering fundamental directions taken by research and innovation – not just their speed or modalities of implementation? If it is reflexive and respectful about these broader political dynamics in which it is embedded, then R[R]I can help drive a valuable new wave of progressive agency. If it eschews these earlier struggles and retreats instead into unduly academic, discursive or incumbency-driven principles and processes, then a further cycle of instrumentalisation would already have run its course. It would be time for a new wave.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andy Stirling is a professor in SPRU and co-directs the STEPS Centre at Sussex University. An interdisciplinary researcher with a background in natural and social science, he has served on many EU and UK advisory bodies on issues of around science policy and emerging technologies.