Fixing Technology with Society: The Coproduction of Democratic Deficits and Responsible Innovation at the OECD and the European Commission

Abstract

Long presented as a universal policy-recipe for social prosperity and economic growth, the promise of innovation seems to be increasingly in question, giving way to a new vision of progress in which society is advanced as a central enabler of technoeconomic development. Frameworks such as “Responsible” or “Mission-oriented” Innovation, for example, have become commonplace parlance and practice in the governance of the innovation–society nexus. In this paper, we study the dynamics by which this “social fix” to technoscience has gained legitimacy in institutions of global governance by investigating recent projects at two international organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission, to mainstream “Responsible Innovation” frameworks and instruments across countries. Our analysis shows how the turn to societal participation in both organizations relies on a new deficit logic—a democratic deficit of innovation—that frames a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies. These deficit politics enable global governance institutions to present “Responsible Innovation” frameworks as the solution and to claim authority over the coproduction of particular forms of democracy and innovation as intertwined pillars of a market-liberal international order.

Introduction

“Innovation Pessimism: Has the Ideas Machine Broken Down?” The Economist asked this question in early 2013, pointing to a perceived downturn in the pace of innovation and what it cast as perilous implications for global economic growth ( The Economist 2013). The multipage feature explored a range of reasons for the supposed crisis of innovation, including a lack of true inventiveness in an era of ever-more gadgets, the conflation of technological change with social progress, the retreat of the state from long-term, moonshot-type innovations, increasingly burdensome regulation, and the starkly unequal consequences of innovation for different strata of society. The article prominently cited Silicon Valley leader Peter Thiel asserting that “Innovation today is between dire straits and dead,” a view Thiel reiterated in a 2015 Harvard lecture lamenting the narrowing focus of leading tech companies on market management rather than breakthroughs, and an increasingly pessimistic public outlook on technology and its potential consequences for society (Harvard University 2015). Answering its dramatic opening question, The Economist’s feature reiterated Thiel’s concerns, surmising that “in the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes” ( The Economist 2013).

In this paper, we examine current diagnoses of innovation crisis as well as institutional responses for its resolution, focusing on the recent rise of frameworks for so-called Responsible, Mission-oriented or Co-creation Innovation within international organizations. Whereas policymakers, entrepreneurs, and media commentators traditionally relied on an imperative that presented innovation as a “universal fix for all social woes” (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017, 1), institutions involved in the accommodation of technoscience across societies increasingly identify top-down innovation imperatives as too rigid, calling for inclusive, bottom-up strategies to foster innovation. For example, the European Commission (EC) recently published its proposal for a new ten-year research funding program, Horizon Europe, which relies heavily on language of cocreation. This choice is justified by “declining trust in institutions and a rise of desire for transparency and a greater degree of participation,” which are understood to “have driven a shift towards exploring and implementing means by which the governance of science and research is more democratic, accountable, and transparent” (The Democratic Society 2018, 17). In a similar vein, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) acknowledges that “Many societal concerns about the applications of science and technology appear to arise in conditions where the scientific evidence appears to be persuasive, but not complete, yet the socio-economic implications and the appropriate policy solutions from a broad societal perspective are much less certain.” To tackle such uncertainty, the organization argues, “It is a critical issue for governments to find effective ways of consensus building…as well as fostering public engagement” (OECD 2015, 251).

Our analysis departs from the observation in science, technology, and society studies (STS) that technological “fixes” in the form of a ubiquitous innovation imperative have become the preferred framing device for the contemporary ordering of societies, “a kind of diagnostic lens” that “promises to solve problems almost independently of their specifics” (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019, 896). Similar to scholarship in STS that has criticized the persistent framing of publics vis-à-vis technoscientific enterprises as deficient in terms of knowledge (Wynne 2006), Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden (2019) identify a deficit model of innovation (DMI) which presents societies and institutions as lacking innovativeness and novel products such that interventions framed as innovation can be offered as the solution (see also Pfotenhauer 2019). In this sense, alarmist depictions of innovation as in “dire straits” ( The Economist 2013) should not be understood as neutrally descriptive of a readily apparent reality but as normative and performative framings that advance particular agendas, empowering or displacing certain actors by characterizing an existing problem associated with a set of activities labeled as “innovation,” and legitimizing corollary means for its resolution. The same is obviously true for innovation triumphalism—such as the The Economist’s recent diagnosis of a “new era of innovation” in the wake of COVID-19 vaccine developments that might suggest that “a dawn of technological optimism is breaking”—reminding us that the performance of deficit politics around innovation is always situated in particular sociohistorical contexts ( The Economist 2021).

By investigating recent attempts to mainstream Responsible Innovation frameworks across countries at two international institutions—the OECD and the EC—this paper turns the analytic lens of a politics of deficit construction around innovation to an emerging reverse logic in which the uptake of society in innovation, rather than the uptake of innovation in society, is framed as a central “principle” (OECD) or “key” (EC) for the governance of technoscience. The two logics are intimately related: as we will see, experts within both organizations claim that it is precisely because society is not included in policy-making that innovation fails to be successful in bringing the envisioned benefits to society. Drawing on a coproductionist perspective (Jasanoff 2007, 2010), we analyze the specific construction of a democratic deficit in innovation in conjunction with a set of policy interventions at the OECD and the EC that aim to reestablish trust in narratives of globalization and innovation as sources of social progress. While the democratic deficit seems to be in contrast, or at least a viable alternative to the DMI and its built-in technological determinism in that it takes social deliberation and inclusion as prerequisites for technological progress, we show how in practice these new politics of deficit construction get integrated with efforts to further advance, rather than break with, the innovation imperative and concurrent beliefs in technological fixes. Here, the democratic participation of society is envisioned as capable of repairing the underperformance of innovation governance around the world—suggesting a new pragmatic social contract to reassemble the innovation imperative with participatory innovation policies as essential scaffolding for this endeavor.

Our approach complements critical scholarship in STS that aims to deconstruct technological determinism, opening technology governance up to wider societal deliberation. While both of our cases represent pioneering work to introduce more inclusive approaches to the governance of technology and innovation to mainstream policy organizations, they also reveal the institutional struggles and tensions within recent shifts toward society in Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policy more generally. Rather than arguing a priori for a different or better way of including society in innovation governance, we ask how policy frameworks of societal participation gain legitimacy and power within organizations that have typically championed the innovation imperative and concurrent deficit models at the expense of locally situated governance frameworks for science and technology. In the pages that follow, we trace the success of Responsible Innovation frameworks at the OECD and the EC to their distinct institutionally situated forms of reasoning, while highlighting the politics of deficit construction that the cases share in spite of institutional differences. These shared modes of deficit construction invite a shift of authority over the coproduction of innovation and democracy from the national to the global arena. The OECD and the EC represent intriguing cases in this regard, since they are uniquely oriented toward advancing innovation in tandem with democracy, objectives these organizations position as central to market–liberalization and harmonization. As such, their uptake and engagement with democratic governance models for innovation are of particular significance.

The paper proceeds as follows: we begin with an overview of STS approaches to the democratic governance of innovation and their mobilization in policy-making, followed by a brief discussion of empirical materials and methods. The subsequent section presents two case studies of the making of Responsible Innovation in global governance. Drawing out key moments of deficit/solution construction, we offer an account of the coproduction of democracy and innovation in efforts on the part of the EC and OECD to mainstream Responsible Innovation across national jurisdictions. We conclude with a call for STS research that takes a symmetrical approach to the relationship between technology and society in its own interventions, especially with regard to the constructions of democracy to which the field contributes.

Technology and Society: From Deficit to Dialogue and Back?

From its beginnings, the field of STS has paid close attention to patterns of technological determinism and the common assumption that technological change is a prerequisite for, or driver of, social progress. This includes, among other things, critiques of “linear models” of scientific and technological development (Godin 2006), the resorting to “technological fixes” as an answer to social problems (Volti 2006) or the notion that “technology drives history” (Smith and Marx 1994). Against this view, STS offers a constructivist take on the relationship between technology and society. ¹ For example, research on the Social Construction of Technology has argued that “technology does not follow its own momentum nor a rational goal-directed problem-solving path but is instead shaped by social factors” (Bijker 1995, 3). Through this shift in perspective, the goal of STS analysis is not simply to replace technological with social determinism but to emphasize the co-construction (Pinch and Bijker 1984) and co-production of social, technological, and epistemic orders: “co-productionist accounts…avoid the charges of both natural and social determinism” and “can therefore be seen as a critique of the realist ideology that persistently separates the domains of nature, facts, objectivity, reason and policy from those of culture, values, subjectivity, emotion and politics” (Jasanoff 2010, 3). Detailed empirical studies have shown how the construction of such divides informs the politics of artifacts (Winner 1980) in contrast to standard technocratic presumptions of their political and normative neutrality. According to early and ongoing engagements of STS with scientific and technological governance, a better understanding of the politics of technology also makes them more accessible to democratic contestation and deliberation (Sclove 1995).

STS critiques have been increasingly picked up in policy-making over the last two decades, even though (or perhaps precisely because) the hubris of technological solutionism continues to thrive (Jasanoff 2003; Wyatt 2008; Morozov 2013). The increasing demand for STS knowledge in governance has pushed the field from its trouble-maker status during the Science Wars to a position of expert authority over the science–technology–society nexus, paralleled by some ambiguous headway “from deficit to dialogue” (Irwin 2006, 2014) in science and technology policy. As Alan Irwin rightly observes, “in remarkably few years, an (admittedly attenuated) form of the language of STS has been reconstructed as the language of policy” (Irwin 2006, 300). Here, STS scholars have been particularly successful in showing how expert framings of science and society relationships enacted a Deficit Model of public understanding (Wynne 1992; Hackett and Rhoten 2011)—that is, the construction of publics as lacking the necessary knowledge to accept or meaningfully engage with scientific and technological development. In that vein, STS has consistently argued for a democratization of science and technology governance that grants greater agency to individuals and collectives to reason about new knowledge and technologies (Jasanoff 2003; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2008; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). This development has been paralleled by calls for the construction of socially “robust” knowledge (Nowotny 2003) and technological deliberation (Fischer 1999), in which the public is an active partner in knowledge cocreation, the role of the expert is one of facilitation (not authority), and the touchstone of validity is robustness in the real world, not the lab. Since around 2013, in particular, the increasing uptake of frameworks such as Responsible Innovation manifests an increasing openness on the part of policymakers toward such perspectives (Schomberg and Hankins 2019; Valdivia and Guston 2015; Wilsdon et al. 2005).

The rise in the uptake of more democratic language and practice in science and technology governance in the last two decades could be read as a success story for the field’s more engaged strands. Yet, such interventions have themselves become objects of STS critique, directed at the construction of publics in the “new governance” of innovation (Irwin 2006). Ample criticism has been voiced since the turn of the century around the routine and mechanistic mobilization of public engagement in science and technology policy and practice. The desire to create engaged and empowered publics has produced its own bureaucratic logics and modes of self-justification. From Wynne’s (2006) oft-cited analysis of Deficit Models of the Public, in which institutional responses “hit the notes” but “miss the music,” to Irwin’s (2006) “Politics of Talk,” and Felt and Fochler’s (2010) identification of participation exercises as “Machineries for Making Publics,” STS analysis has been painstakingly reflexive and self-critical about the construction of publics and democratic engagement in governance contexts. Critique has centered, for example, on the closure of issues in participation and the “instrumental” rather than “substantive” uses of participation (Stirling 2008); around the control of unruly publics through the formation of “invited publics” (Wynne 2007); the questionable representativeness of and assumptions about such “mini-publics” for modern societies as a whole (Felt and Fochler 2010) and for “future societies” in particular (Engels, Wentland, and Pfotenhauer 2019), and an impoverished notion of politics implied by an overt focus on participatory practices (Brown 2009). Participatory practices have become highly standardized and have been deployed as a technocratic repertoire of deliberative democracy that is propagated by a new class of democracy-for-innovation experts and mainstreamed across places and domains (Voß and Amelung 2016), leading to recent calls for “remaking participation” (Chilvers and Kearnes 2020). Thorpe and Gregory (2010) have argued that participation is primarily a placating mechanism that enrolls publics into neoliberal agendas and begets new expert elites. Deeply implicated in the participatory turn in science and technology policy, it seems STS theory and engaged research have partly become victims of their own success.

With this paper, we aim to contribute to reflexivity around the performativity of public engagement and participatory practices in the governance of science and technology, yet also transgress the widely commented cycle of STS policy engagement and critique (Jasanoff 1999; Latour 2004; Collins, Evans, and Weinel 2017; Felt 2014; Hilgartner, Prainsack, and Hurlbut 2016). By interrogating the standardization of Responsible Innovation frameworks at two international organizations that have long championed technological fixes in tandem with global market integration, we suggest that the recent uptake of democracy and society as vocabularies and instruments of global governance and science and technology policy demands careful empirical investigation as well as recognition of the sociohistorical situatedness and political economy of policy frameworks for the better alignment of technology and society. To break with the “democracy paradox” in STS (Lövbrand, Pielke, and Beck 2011), we approach the increasing talk and practice of society in policy-making as neither a causal success story of STS expertise transforming centers of power nor as a history of repeated failure by powerful actors in the policy world to get democracy “right.” Rather, we interrogate the cultural, institutional, and political contexts that ostensibly create an opening for more democratic technology governance as a site of symmetrical analysis: how can we understand the (relative success of) practices and principles of democracy in the new governance of science and technology from a symmetrical perspective? Further, how is the meaning of “innovation” itself (co)produced with efforts to expand participation of society in its governance? In other words, we aim to show how the mobilization of democracy and society in the governance of technoscientific production can be approached by STS research such that “it calls attention to the social dimensions of cognitive commitments and understandings, while at the same time underscoring the epistemic and material correlates of social formations” (Jasanoff 2010, 3).

Methods, Materials, and Empirical Challenges

This analysis draws on two in-depth qualitative case studies of efforts to mobilize and mainstream frameworks and instruments of Responsible Innovation in the context of global governance. First, we investigate a project to establish global principles for Responsible Innovation in the field of neurotechnology at the OECD, specifically by the Working Party on Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and Converging Technologies (BNCT) at the OECD Directorate for STI. The BNCT efforts were the first main initiative by the OECD on Responsible Innovation. Second, we explore the EC’s engagement with Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in its Horizon funding programs, with a focus on one particular research project funded by the EC that, in the words of one senior researcher, aimed to “spread the good word” of RRI beyond Europe’s borders.

The case studies are based on a range of empirical materials, including an in-depth review of policy documents (including official reports, archival sources, working papers, and unofficial draft documents, official guidelines, meeting notes, etc.) and secondary literature, ethnographic fieldwork by the authors as participant observers in the projects, two focus groups, and a total of approximately fifty semi-structured interviews with policymakers, researchers, and other experts between 2016 and 2019. We used an inductive and qualitative research approach based on a comparative case study design (Deville, Guggenheim, and Hrdličová 2016; Jasanoff 2007), a discourse-analytic approach (Fairclough 2013) and an interpretive “thick” cultural and policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993; Yanow 2000). Our research was not designed as a rigorous comparative case study but follows a quasi-comparative approach in an effort to tackle shared questions and insights gained during the two independent case studies.

Informed by this detailed empirical insight, we primarily illustrate our arguments through policy documents produced by the two organizations in their shifts toward the new governance of innovation. It is through these documents, often published as consensual texts with relatively little transparency on individual authorship, that the OECD and EC present themselves as impartial and neutral organizations speaking on behalf of the global community of market-liberal democracies. Documents like reports, working papers, and recommendations are key instruments for international bureaucracies to perform “procedural legitimacy” and gain and maintain a legitimate mandate to govern the relationship between sovereign nation-states (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 166-68). Through the analysis of such documents, we can understand the “discourses of valid seeing and practices of consensus building” (Jasanoff 2017) that underwrite the organizations’ approaches to mainstreaming Responsible Innovation. They lend the institutions in our case studies the agency and authority to identify problems with—and provide fixes for—the alignment of global innovation (and markets) with local publics.

Policy documents also worked as primary sites for the authors to gain field access and to share their perspectives as declared experts on the innovation–society nexus. The authors of this article played active roles in these projects as participant observers. One of us engaged in participatory observation at OECD expert consultations and delegate meetings, and as an internal and external consultant at the OECD headquarters. Another author served as an expert and external consultant for BNCT projects at several occasions. As part of this engagement, the authors were occasionally tasked with contributing to reports, workshops, and background materials of the BNCT Working Party (see Winickoff and Pfotenhauer 2018; Garden et al. 2019). Another author was part of a US-based research team collaborating on the EC-funded research project, in which she conducted interviews and focus groups within project-affiliated institutions and co-organized a national workshop on RRI. The author was charged with promoting RRI among US policy makers and scientists, alongside teams of social scientists engaging in parallel research interventions in the partner countries. In this capacity, she coauthored a number of deliverables for the project, including a report on the status of RRI at the national policy level, and a policy brief directed at US and European policy makers.

As argued above, we believe our cases to be symptomatic of a broader trend in which STS expertise is enrolled and enacted at the intersection of innovation, public policy, and society, which can be read as a highly ambivalent success story about the impact and perceived necessity of STS expertise at centers of power. Our analysis reveals the challenges that ensue when concepts and instruments designed to open up existing imperatives are mobilized and reconfigured at the heart of policy organizations, and how critical perspectives are reshaped in the process of very basic struggles to get a seat at the table, even in “attenuated” form (Irwin 2006, 300). Yet, while such attenuations help to reproduce the very visions of technology and society that STS set out to critique, they also open up spaces for introducing and discussing alternative paradigms that have been largely neglected or rejected within mainstream science and technology policy. This ambivalence was described by one of our informants as “lip service,” which needs to be paid to the primary agendas and policy rationales of the organizations under examination. Our engagement in these politics led to moments of “disconcertement” with our own commitments toward what Responsible Innovation is and how it ought be put into practice, moments in which “the metaphysical commitments that lurk unacknowledged in your very person as a modern knower of the social come suddenly into the foreground revealing themselves as assumptions with no possibility of warrant” (Verran and Christie 2013, 53). Although further methodological exploration of the tensions of STS in policy settings, for example, through autoethnography (Law 2004), is beyond the scope of this paper, we suggest that remaining methodologically symmetrical in our analysis—despite, or maybe particularly because of STS’s deep entanglement with participatory STI policy—is a first step toward responsible STS research and engagement (Mamidipudi and Frahm 2020).

The Rise of Responsible Innovation at the OECD and the EC

The case studies discussed here describe the rise of Responsible Innovation as a discourse and instrument for global governance. Despite their differences, the mainstreaming of Responsible Innovation in both cases is deeply entangled with institutional histories and rationales focused on the economic integration of sociopolitically diverse countries into a market-liberal order. The OECD and the EC both emerged out of the post-WWII global reordering that sought stability through international economic cooperation. Originally conceived as the “Organisation for European Economic Cooperation and Development” (OEEC) and tasked with supervising the Marshall Plan, the OECD preceded the creation of today’s main European institutions, including the EC. It acted as a focal point for the harmonization of European economic and social policies in the name of democracy, free markets, and global prosperity. Today, the OECD far exceeds this original European purview and represents a much larger proportion of the world’s richest market-liberal democracies, allowing it to present itself as an organization with “global reach” (OECD 2020a). Among other things, the OECD has become internationally recognized for mainstreaming policy frameworks, including those elevating innovation to an object of collective international concern and coordination (such as the National Innovation System approach), and for its authoritative role in developing widely adopted innovation indicators (e.g., OECD Frascati and Oslo Manuals). As such, the organization has played a key role in harmonizing science, technology, and innovation policy across a substantial swath of national governments (Delvenne and Thoreau 2017; Laurent 2016). It has also been central to the proliferation of national and trans-national innovation agendas (Elzinga and Jamison 1995; Godin 2002).

Technological and economic cooperation were central to European integration processes from the start—from its first conception as a European trade area formalized through the European Coal and Steel Community, to the establishment of a European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community. Following the proliferation of a diverse array of European instruments (e.g., Framework Programs) to foster collaboration and mobility across European countries, and reinforced by the official enactment of the European Union in 1993, European STI efforts further intensified, for example, through the inauguration of a European Research Area in 2000 and the launch of the European Research Council in 2007. European economic and political integration hence always carried a “hidden integration” of science and technology, one that could be read as a “grand project with a set agenda” but indeed “was a contested process throughout the 20th century” in which competing visions within and about Europe were manifested through technology (Misa and Schot 2005; Barry 2006). More recently, the European Union has arguably suffered from accession policies that could not fulfill promises to distribute economic prosperity across member countries—“Brexit” and the rise of national populism being only the most visible indications. Nevertheless, it is consistently framing its successes and failures in terms of competition with other regions, its “Global Strategy to promote citizens’ interest” (European Union 2016, 13) just one example of how Europe has repositioned itself as a global actor.

For decades, the clubs of so-called like-minded countries (Woodward 2009, 1) represented by the OECD and the EC created the appearance of a global political and economic community dedicated to supporting and uniting countries committed to democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and free market economies. Grounded in analogous political projects, it is no surprise that the OECD and EC framings of the 2008 financial crisis were somewhat similar, appealing to “political determination to return to pre-crisis levels of economic growth” (de Saille 2015, 163). Yet both institutions have struggled with how exactly to revive growth and trust in markets after the 2008 financial crisis—and, by extension, their own roles and credibility. Among the factors that made it difficult to return to a precrisis status quo were greater attention to growing levels of inequality within and across member countries (Piketty 2017), the emerging outsized role of technology corporations in reshaping social orders at a global scale (Zuboff 2019; Lanier 2014), and growing political polarization at a national level, resulting in a “great regression” from and mounting hostility towards the authority of supra-national governance (Geiselberger 2017). Novel technoscientific interventions and products made visible and widened these rifts in international order. Still shocked by the GM Food Wars and Europe’s resistance to seeing only benefits in feeding the world through Biotechnology (Winickoff et al. 2005), and confronted with a host of new technologies with similarly controversial potential, both organizations were in need of new modes of legitimization for supra-national governance. As we will argue in the following, the policy framework of “Responsible Innovation” provided a welcome playbook, which was staged within the specific institutional contexts and cultures of the OECD and the EC.

Fixing Innovation with Society at the OECD

In 2016, the OECD’s BNCT Working Party began convening several expert meetings and published a number of reports on Responsible Innovation in brain science and neurotechnology, a process that would eventually result in the OECD’s Council Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology almost four years later (OECD 2019). This Responsible Innovation agenda could itself be understood as an innovation at the OECD STI Directorate, traditionally a stronghold of an econo-centric approach to innovation with a principal focus on the contribution of research and development (R&D) to growth and policy rationales around institutional and market failures. Explicit considerations of “society” first surfaced in the 1970–1980s in the context of energy crises and stagnant economic growth, as expressed in rare reports such as Technology on Trial: Public Participation in Decision-making Related to Science and Technology (Nichols 1979) or Science, Growth and Society (OECD 1971). They also included the OECD’s former Secretary-General Thorkil Kristensen’s participation in the Club of Rome’s controversial outlook on the economy’s Limits to Growth (Schmelzer 2016, 263). Yet, these early considerations about the right relationship between science, technology, markets, and society remained largely exceptional and did not immediately translate into mainstream OECD instruments such as official guidelines, recommendations, or statistics but were mostly left to member states’ own discretion and policy authority. The “social,” in other words, worked as the “residual…relegated to the periphery” in most of the OECD’s STI efforts over the last fifty years (Godin 2009, 371).

The 2008 financial crisis and concurrent critiques of the unequal global distribution of economic growth and wealth produced what may appear to be a similar organizational response as that of the 1970s–1980s. The turn toward Making Innovation Benefit All (OECD 2017a), for example, supported the development of an OECD vocabulary around “Innovation Policies for Inclusive Growth” that emphasized compatibility between concerns of societal inclusion and the organization’s dominant “economic growth paradigm” (Schmelzer 2016): “inclusive growth means that people…should have fair opportunities to contribute to growth, and that their contribution should yield equitable benefits” (OECD 2017a, 81). A number of OECD activities, like the 2011 workshop Fostering Innovation to Address Social Challenges, further paved the way for greater consideration of society at the STI Directorate. The workshop report argued that “much of the thrust and focus of efforts to mobilise innovation have focused on economic objectives,” while stakeholders in innovation governance were now “recognis(ing) that modern economic growth must go hand in hand with societal progress” (OECD 2011, 3). Thus, while “none of this is very new,” the post-2008 attention to the nexus between society, science, and technology nevertheless has “a different flavor, it’s a different scope,” as one policy-analyst at the OECD STI directorate observed in an interview (I5, OECD, 2018).

Unlike before, the new agenda focused squarely on the social dimensions of innovation rather than treating them as an afterthought to the creation of science and technology. It also did not relinquish matters of science and innovation governance to national policy-making as easily. Instead, it shifted questions of responsibility and the scope of STI governance more generally to the global stage: “The underlying motive of innovation has been generating economic value. However, looking ahead to the society in the future, it is crucial to construct a new system that enables us to address social challenges through innovation by collaborating and acting globally,” one report explains (OECD 2011, 7). This change in narrative resonated with the organization’s new quest for “bridging divides” as well as with postcrisis calls for a new multilateralism by OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría, who tirelessly emphasized that for “beating the crisis…we cannot integrate our economies without integrating or at least coordinating our acts of government, institutions and policies” (Gurría 2011). Whereas member states had been previously judged and benchmarked primarily according to their economic performance in R&D, the 2008 crisis gave the OECD’s growth agenda a new twist in which instruments for the better alignment of global innovation with local publics were presented as key for global economic growth. Within this context, the project on “Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology” was set up to “pool ideas, norms, and approaches for achieving more responsible innovation in neurotechnology through dialogue with stakeholders” (Garden and Winickoff 2018, 9). The construction of a democratic deficit in national innovation governance, as well as a set of knowledge and tools for its resolution through global governance, was central to aligning the project with wider institutional interests at the OECD.

Reframing society for modern economic growth

The Responsible Innovation project caused some friction within the STI directorate, as it challenged a highly stabilized linear narrative describing the causal relationship between innovation, economic growth, and societal benefits. As one OECD STI policy expert described the situation, “The more senior people here think that the market will work [social controversies] out. We have to get the market right but we must not inhibit innovation” (I2 OECD, June 2017). Growing acknowledgement that “somehow, we have to take into account these soft social concerns,” as the same expert argued, met increasing fears “that society can block some of these technologies…so there is concern” (I1 OECD, June 2017), as another policy analyst expressed. For a great part of STI expertise at the OECD, the new focus on societal inclusion was legitimate only as part of the organization’s larger Innovation Imperative (OECD 2015), in which “soft” social issues were reconfigured as risks to innovation’s hard economic benefits.

In order to build institutional and member state support for the Responsible Innovation agenda, societal inclusion and deliberation in STI were made discursively compatible with the economic rationale with which the organization had hitherto approached the steering and monitoring of innovation. For example, in the “Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology” project, traditional approaches to governance such as market mechanisms and product regulation were framed as deficient for taming public concerns with innovation: “Leaving policy engagement on the social challenges to post hoc regulation can be restrictive, controversial, and burdensome” (OECD 2017b, 11). Adherence to traditional top-down regulation was made plausible as a threat to the marketability of new products, and failure to take societal concerns into account in innovation governance reframed as a potential risk to the diffusion of promising technologies such as neurotechnologies on a global scale. The project’s first policy paper, Neurotechnology and Society, spells out how a deficit in integrating public values in innovation governance may impede emerging global markets, arguing “inattentiveness to ethical, legal, social, and safety aspects of new technology could […] lead to bad social outcomes, and breed resistance and distrust in society. Furthermore, and as a consequence, neglect of these issues may impede the uptake and diffusion of innovation” (OECD 2017b, 11). Whereas the project was keen to advance nonconsequentialist views on society at the OECD, through such statements, the need to engage society in the governance of innovation was presented as a solution for the creation of social acceptance of new technologies.

Framing Responsible Innovation as a remedy for potential social barriers in the diffusion of innovation also included presenting it as a suitable instrument for fixing “demand uncertainties” produced by the 2008 crisis (OECD 2012, 23). Rather than relying on “traditional infrastructure and financial support instruments,” new “policy tools, notably in sectors where potential demand is high (e.g., health, aging), would help improve innovation and growth prospects,” the OECD proposed in its 2012 outlook on the role of innovation in the crisis and beyond (OECD 2012, 23). A case in point, the Neurotechnology and Society Policy Paper dedicates a lengthy preamble to a meticulous enumeration of unmet but increasing needs in the market for mental health solutions. The paper notes, for example, “It has been estimated that the global costs of mental health conditions in 2010 were USD 2.5 trillion. This number is expected to rise to USD 6.0 trillion by 2030” (OECD 2017b, 9). This performance of quantification and statistical production of a measurable problem for which neurotechnologies are posited as providing the solution aided the project in enrolling the directorate and member state delegates, aligning it with the wider imperative of achieving “modern economic growth” (OECD 2011). In the process, local innovation governance was portrayed as insufficient to meet social demands for innovation and new markets.

Recommending principles for national innovation governance

In taking on Responsible Innovation, the OECD continued its mandate to harmonize its member states’ heterogeneous political cultures in science and technology governance through the production of international “non-binding law” (OECD 2020b), or soft law, that is, practices of standard-setting, recommendations, indicators, and comparative benchmarking, agenda-setting, etc. The OECD has historically played a key role in establishing policy-relevant metrics for its member states, with a performative effect on problem framing (e.g., through competitive benchmarking), policy agendas (e.g., catching-up strategies or best-practice transfer), and national political debate. The Responsible Innovation project further stabilized the organization’s expertise to assess and compare national innovation performance when it identified “limited coherence on the process, or processes involved, for compliance with frameworks such as anticipatory governance, RRI, or open science” (OECD 2017b, 46), which in turn helped legitimize the creation of shared rules for Responsible Innovation as solutions to the risks and quibbles of national particularities: “Guidelines might be needed that bring together brain science, technology innovation, and society in an international and cross-cultural perspective” (OECD 2017b, 8). A patchwork of local responses thus provided a key rationale to help construct a deficit in international harmonization arising from incongruent governance concerns and instruments across member states.

The diagnosis of deficits in the international standardization of national policies and organizations’ expertise in mainstreaming governance frameworks for the integration of markets eventually justified the OECD’s global policy intervention in the form of a Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology (OECD 2019). Among several legal instruments for international governance at the OECD’s disposal, recommendations have been the organization’s most extensively used tool as they “are not legally binding but practice accords them great moral force as representing the political will of Adherents” (OECD 2019). The production of international soft law for Responsible Innovation helped stabilize the organization’s impartial view from “nowhere” as well as its collective gaze from “everywhere” (Jasanoff 2017, 3) regarding how the right relationship between innovation and society ought to be put into policy practice, as it helped delineate boundaries between the OECD’s technocratic “assistance” function in international relations and it’s member states’ political and normative agendas, including what counts as Responsible Innovation. The “background information” of the Recommendation exemplifies this distinction, stating that the principles “aim to assist governments and innovators in addressing and anticipating the governance challenges raised by mental and neurological disorders and novel neurotechnologies” (OECD 2019). The Recommendation not only reified deficits diagnosed in the innovation governance of member states in foreseeing and tackling controversies around emerging neurotechnology; it also positioned the organization as the conductor for a “concerted action across governmental levels and across the public and private sectors” (OECD 2019) and hence as an important provider of solutions to such deficits in the form of shared yet politically neutral instruments. It legitimized the OECD in moving epistemic authority over Responsible Innovation policy and practice firmly into the international arena, elevating questions of comparability, compatibility, and harmonization over more localized forms of public reasoning and governance of emerging technologies.

While the Recommendation was ratified by OECD member states only (see “Adherents” in OECD 2019), deliberations around its orientation also involved reaching out to nonmembers that were deemed essential players in emerging neurotechnology markets. As an international organization that gathers primarily “Western” advanced economies with democratic political systems, efforts of standardization at the OECD have traditionally also been a way of projecting “soft power” (Nye 2009) beyond its circle of membership—and particularly toward emerging economies such as the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) nations, to whom it offers formal roads to accession as well as more informal forms of mutual policy “learning” (Mahon and McBride 2008). In the case of the OECD’s Responsible Innovation efforts around neurotechnology, a two-day workshop on Minding Neurotechnology: Delivering Responsible Innovation for Health and Well Being convened in Shanghai, China, sought to “enrich current discussions of the social implications of neurotechnology on both short and long-term time horizons by hearing from those engaged in bringing products to market” (OECD 2018). Here, the opening keynote by neuroscientist Mu-ming Poo, well-known for his controversial efforts to clone gene-edited monkeys for drug testing and behavioral research (Cyranoski 2019), raised eyebrows among participants and put into question the vision of a global alliance in Responsible Innovation on commensurable terms (Field notes Shanghai 2018). Shortly after the workshop, a Chinese contribution to the flagship journal Neuron (Wang et al. 2019) by some of the meeting participants framed national brain science and technology development in China as being governed responsibly and emphasized the need for international exchange—language that directly picked up themes from the meeting in Shanghai. However, the paper also insisted on a “Culture-oriented Perspective” that respects national particularities, putting Chinese Confucianism on equal footing with alternative sets of values on which global guidelines might be based. The Recommendation itself reflects such difficulties in the development of shared principles by recognizing in the document’s preamble that “there may be diverse ways of putting responsible innovation into practice” (OECD 2019). In this case, however, diversity in national policy approaches is framed as an “opportunity for learning” (OECD 2019) rather than a deficit (as in the identification of incongruent Responsible Innovation policies above). This observation reifies the complex and differentiated politics of deficit construction in Responsible Innovation governance, which also depends on the issues and addressees that are deemed relevant and effective for the OECD’s overall market harmonization agenda.

Drawing boundaries around the social orientation of innovation

Drafting the Recommendation necessarily required a consensual approach to defining Responsible Innovation, which was reached through narrowing down a cacophony of nationally situated approaches with regard to what problems innovation in neurotechnology is believed to solve in the first place, and how such problems can be tackled responsibly. For example, the American BRAIN initiative aims at “revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain” to “treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders” with a focus on “Neuroethics” (National Institutes of Health 2020), while the EU Human Brain Project’s goal is to “put in place a cutting-edge research infrastructure” by relying on “RRI” (Human Brain Project 2020). Consensus among countries was reached primarily through narrowing the Recommendation’s scope to medical neurotechnological applications that address “human health and well-being” (OECD 2017b, 7) as the orientation toward health was a framing that national brain research and technology policies share and hence could subscribe to, despite diverging R&D agendas and governance frameworks. However, the prescription of a social orientation on the part of the OECD also gave the organization the legitimate role in “assisting” governments not to deviate from centering health in their consideration of neurotechnology R&D. Following a “general…shift since the crisis…towards a more societal orientation” of innovation policy (I3 OECD, April 2018), the Recommendation’s very first principle, for example, urges stakeholders to “first and foremost, promote beneficial applications of neurotechnology for health” and prescribes that member states should “foster alignment of public support and economic incentives for neurotechnology innovation with the greatest health needs” (OECD 2019, Principle 1). Thereby, Responsible Innovation governance is not only constructed as a useful solution for better matching emerging neurotechnology markets with public demand for health (i.e., controlling “uncertain demand” as described above); it also lays the groundwork for future deficit monitoring where national policies and innovation trajectories diverge from the Recommendation’s understanding of social orientation.

Within the reduced scope of neurotechnology’s orientation toward health, public consultation was seen as safe and, in fact, key to the success of neurotechnology innovation. Without public engagement, neurotechnology was constructed as running the risk of not being accepted by societies if these are not consulted in advance. By not engaging “public values which warrant representation or at least consideration” the Working Paper on Issues in Neurotechnology Governance argues, member states could risk “a disconnect or conflict between public values and research, allowing science to evolve in ways that may run counter to the goal of improving human health and wellbeing” (Garden and Winickoff 2018). Through focusing efforts to construct responsible neurotechnology innovation guidelines solely in the area of health and well-being, publicly contested applications in other domains such as military (Ienca and Andorno 2017) and direct-to-consumer markets (Eaton and Illes 2007) remained largely unaddressed. This positioning was in part achieved through the politics of who was invited to OECD expert and delegate meetings, as a stand-in for who was considered legitimate to define what Responsible Innovation in the field entails. The absence of representatives of military and security R&D on the human brain during an expert consultation convened by the OECD, the Kavli Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences (OECD 2017b), for example, allowed the explicit exclusion of discussions about dual-use neurotechnologies. Whenever the topic of military uses of research arose, participants could point to the lack of expertise in the room about such controversial issues (Field notes Washington 2017). As a result, Responsible Neurotechnology Innovation could be credibly constructed as an area for public good rather than an enabler of new forms of warfare and surveillance. Bypassing more controversial neurotechnological applications also helped differentiate “good” neurotechnologies for health from the “unintended and/or misuse of neurotechnology.” The very last principle of the Recommendation describes the latter as “activities that seek to influence decision processes of individuals or groups by purposely affecting freedom and self-determination” against which “active steps” should be taken “where possible” (OECD 2019, Principle 9). Here, Responsible Innovation is stabilized as a solution that both enables technologies to easily spread through societies and shores up the imperative of innovation because it is defined as productive of good social outcomes, trust, and acceptance.

Fixing Innovation with Society at the EC

The RRI Practice project, an EC-funded Horizon 2020 project that ran from 2016 through 2019, offers a second example of the deficit politics at work in efforts to mainstream Responsible Innovation at global scale. ² The stated aims of the project were “to understand the barriers and drivers to the successful implementation of RRI both in European and global contexts; to promote reflection on organisational structures and cultures of research conducting and research funding organisations; and to identify and support best practices to facilitate the uptake of RRI in organisations and research programmes” (RRI Practice Project 2016). The project produced reports and comparative analysis of case studies in twenty-three research funding and conducting organizations across Norway, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, China, Russia, India, and Brazil.

Efforts (instantiated by RRI Practice and its sister projects ³ ) to mainstream RRI beyond Europe were preceded by those to do so within European science and technology governance, and by a long trajectory of related programs targeting “Science and Society,” and initiatives to improve “public understanding” and “public engagement” with regard to science and technology, for example, in the domains of genetically modified organisms or nanotechnology. Resting on a belief in the leading contribution of science and technology in driving the EC’s economic integration, growth, and global competitiveness, such approaches initially neither targeted “innovation” specifically, nor were they deeply streamlined into the EC’s funding structures for R&D until the 2008 crisis. Acknowledging a failed European “Lisbon Agenda,” which aimed to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” (Council of the European Union 2000) by 2010, and confronted with diminishing member state budgets for R&D after the crisis (e.g., Izsak et al. 2013), the EC launched “a comprehensive research strategy from research to retail” (EC 2010) in the form of an “Innovation Union” program in the immediate crisis aftermath. The stated purpose of this imagined transformation was to “innovate our way out of the crisis” (EC Directorate General for Research and Innovation 2013, 6), by giving “our innovators the environment they need to flourish” (European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2013, 9). The aspiration toward such an environment was articulated in contrast to that with which biotechnologies had been met at the turn of the twenty-first century, which was marked by the widespread rejection of genetically modified crops and foods across Europe. Establishing an innovation-friendly culture also involved balancing top-down European governance (perceived as rigid) with flexible governance mechanisms and market liberalization: “Although we must be wary of heavy-handed governance, simple free-market faith in an invisible guiding hand is no more adequate with regard to unfettered research and innovation than it is in other sectors of the economy” (EC Directorate General for Research and Innovation 2012).

Involving society in innovation governance became a key tool to deliver such a balanced approach, as it was perceived as capable of making innovation “more relevant and acceptable and to improve its uptake” (EC and Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2014, 11) and of strengthening “Europe’s ability to respond to societal challenges” (Geoghegan-Quinn 2014). The Rome Declaration on Responsible Research and Innovation (Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2014) and the designation of RRI as a “cross cutting issue” in the EU’s seventh funding program, Horizon2020, set the stage for the EU to increase related budgets and actions. Here, RRI has ascended within a globally competitive policy landscape with the suggestion that the creation of a new kind of innovation enabled by public participation can reposition Europe as a leader in science and technology, while addressing predefined “grand challenges,” and relying on European values for judging the right impacts of innovation on society. It is set up to position Europe as a global player, in times when President Juncker implores the Commission to “play our part on the world stage; not for our own vanity, but because we have something to offer” (Juncker 2015). In this context, the RRI Practice Project offered a “democratic” (RRI Practice Project n.d.) framework for innovation governance in non-EU countries, which went hand in hand with the diagnosis of specific deficits in national innovation governance within and beyond Europe.

Reframing the public legitimacy of innovation

The EC’s Science With and For Society program, under which the RRI Practice Project was funded, drew widely on the abiding concern with the (insufficient) amount of innovation happening inside of Europe. The interim assessment of the Horizon 2020 funding program articulates this by pointing to a concerning “innovation gap,” characterized by a European Union lagging “behind in breakthrough, market-creating innovation” (EC 2017, 7), echoing previous diagnoses of an “innovation emergency” in Europe (EC 2016). These documents frame Europe as dependent on innovation for social and economic advancement—a rationale that has accompanied the evolution of RRI within the EU from the very early stages. Responsive to EC’s objective of accelerating innovation and reducing social resistance to new technologies, the Rome Declaration emphasizes the utility of RRI in “reassure[ing] society about embracing innovative products and services” (Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2014, 1). Accordingly, in an early published RRI statement, “Responsible Research and Innovation—Europe’s ability to respond to societal challenges,” Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, then European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, points to “many cases in which the successful and early consideration of societal needs has brought up innovation[s] which were particular[ly] successful also in economic terms”. She advocates for the allocation of resources to RRI as an opportunity “to overcome the current economic crisis,” by involving “as many stakeholders as possible in the research and innovation process” (Geoghegan-Quinn 2014.). In these terms, RRI is leveraged as an ideal instrument for global governance, capable of building social acceptance for cutting-edge technologies across national contexts in ways thought to be central to creating economic growth.

The concern with public legitimacy for innovation remains central to European RRI discourse. In June 2019, a group of project leaders from Horizon 2020 research projects geared toward mainstreaming RRI released a declaration titled The Future of Responsible Research and Innovation in “Horizon Europe.” In this short text, the authors laud the EC for its pioneering role in advancing RRI and responding to “the issues at stake” (Pathways Declaration 2019). The central issue, the authors argue, is “the need for public legitimacy and support for research and innovation actions that address real societal needs in a way that respects the values of European publics,” pointing to RRI as primarily capable of ameliorating a crisis of legitimacy and public support that threatens to stymie research and innovation. Prominent advocates for RRI within the EC further reified such deficit and solution constructions when presenting the framework to outside audiences, such as Dr. Rene von Schomberg’s opening words in a summer school on RRI organized at the Technical University of Munich: “For the next 20 minutes, I will tell you what’s wrong with the innovation system, and in the last 10 minutes, I’m going to tell you how to solve it.” According to his presentation, “the whole idea that the market will take care of (socially desirable innovation) is of course an illusion,” and as such a new “paradigm” is needed in which governance priorities would be “social desirability” (Field notes Summer School 2019). The allure of aligning public values and innovation to provide positive social outcomes and frictionless technological advance is embedded in the propositions of added value that have elevated RRI to a notable position within the EC’s strategy for advancing its objectives. In the RRI Practice Project, the process of seeking to deliver on these promises of alignment in the form of social acceptance of innovation involved mobilization of a set of practices and instruments legible to the EC’s institutional rationalities and responsive to its aims.

Sharing the keys to best practice

Despite the stabilization of a European RRI discourse as driver of innovation, RRI has been widely noted for its definitional ambiguity (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012; Burget, Bardone, and Pedaste 2017). One major challenge in efforts to achieve greater clarity is the tension between the EC’s focus on what it calls RRI “keys”—ethics, science education, gender equality, societal engagement, and open access—and the scholarly work that focuses on what are referred to as “AIRR dimensions”—anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013). While many argue that the scholarly work on Responsible Innovation (RI) should be understood as distinct from the EC’s “policy-driven discourse” (Owen et al. 2021, 1), the EC’s mobilization of RRI draws directly on the expertise of scholars who are central to the theorization and advancement of RI, who consistently lead and participate in projects funded by the EC that seek to mainstream RRI across and beyond the European Union. Such ambiguity and overlap produce tensions between modes of scholarly theorization in this space and the particular kinds of information the EC communicates as necessary for successful project applications and deliverables. These tensions existed within and shaped the RRI Practice Project itself in important ways discussed below.

The modes of legibility required by the EC in its funded projects incentivize operationalization of RRI in concrete ways that can cross national and institutional settings and that can be measured in discrete, quantitative ways. An EC commissioner described the organization’s approach to RRI in an interview this way: “The first thing to understand is what is RRI?…this is still to be discussed at European level…we need something rather precise, because we have to monitor what’s going on and we have to follow up. If everybody within Horizon 2020 is just adopting a different definition or practice, it becomes difficult for us to know what we are doing and what kind of impact we can have” (I4 EC, December 2017). This point emphasizes the organizational orientation toward measurement and impact. For the EC, RRI is only fundable if its meaning is institutionally legible and comparable across contexts. While the lack of a static and universal definition of responsible innovation is widely remarked upon, and even commended in scholarly literature (Doezema et al. 2019), the basic institutional premise for mainstreaming the framework on the part of the EC demanded a consequential “precision.”

Gaining authority over how RRI is defined and how it ought to be operationalized in national policy-settings claims for the EC a considerable power to identify national and organizational deficits in the ways publics are constructed, educated, and induced to participate in the governance of innovation. The global ambitions of the RRI Practice Project are telling of the subtle negotiation of such authority. While the project explicitly recognized the delicacy of attempting to promote RRI beyond Europe by promoting “a reflective, learning approach to such implementation rather than a top-down paternalist approach” (Forsberg et al. n.d., 6), the EC’s RRI “keys” eventually served as a heuristic for identifying deficits in national policies for the alignment of innovation and society. In most of the research sites, RRI was a new term that researchers were introducing to many of the interview subjects for the first time. In these settings, the keys easily became central to the understandings of those not familiar with the concept. Although the research protocol outlined an approach in which the keys were offered as only one possible definition, the interview protocol shared among the research teams was significantly structured around them. This emphasis stemmed from the requirement of the project to report back detailed information about each key, such that these operated as the de facto definition of RRI in research interventions. This tension was repeatedly brought up in project meetings but remained unresolved, as noted by the project’s own internal review (RRI Practice Project 2019). While some advocated for tailored approaches that sought to instill anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness, and reflexivity within organizations, teams, and researchers, the imperative to produce significant measurable and comparable data across the keys and extract internationally relevant best practices from the case studies maintained a level of centrality for the keys in interviews and other field work engagements for the majority of the participating research teams.

In practice, the hybrid definition on the one hand allowed interviewees to see RRI as something they already were undertaking in practice, since RRI keys such as gender equality and ethics have long histories that span institutional and national contexts. This made the project seem to demand only small changes on the part of organizations, while prescribing measures of “responsibility” amenable to the EC’s institutional rationalities. The prescriptive framing posited by the list of keys not only encouraged a circumscribed notion of responsibility but also helped to articulate deficits in research contexts that had different approaches to promoting what they deemed good research practices. For example, the keys influenced how the research partners negotiated the overlapping tasks of description and intervention. When the US team noted in its draft report that the research organization under examination did not clearly distinguish between science education and public engagement, with similar crossovers at the national level in the United States, the internal project reviewer inquired whether there was some way the research team could intervene to convince the organization to implement such a distinction. As such, it emerged as desirable to attempt not only to find and encourage good practices deemed exemplary for cross-national learning but also to adjust the modes of self-assessment and intervention observed within the different national contexts to align with the modes of reasoning and categorization of the EC.

Similarly, in the project’s final policy recommendation, mainstreaming RRI becomes a matter of comparing and, ultimately, harmonizing national practices in terms of techniques the EC views as productive of the right kinds of innovation: “More generally, in a number of the organisations there is significant scope for improvement, harmonization and implementation of good practice: for example, around public engagement, where activities are observed to be fragmented and often constituted as forms of one-way communication/dissemination” (RRI Practice Project 2019, 2). Here, appreciation of difference and the learning approach falls away, and the imperative to model national approaches on the EC’s RRI keys arises in order to make national practices legible across the landscape and thus available for intervention through the global lens of RRI concepts and practice. These micro-interventions, which construct measurable deficits in national practices of social alignment with innovation, subtly position the EC as the global arbiter of what responsibility in research and innovation entails in practice, and by association right modes of public reason and democratic participation.

Expanding boundaries of socially aligned innovation

Like at the OECD, projecting RRI as a universally desirable set of transnationally applicable practices required key interventions of ontological surgery and boundary work, delineating particular activities as under the aegis of RRI. For example, the RRI Practice Project readily tapped into a current wave of policy debate around better aligning innovation activities with social needs and grand societal challenges, most prominently in the context of mission-based innovation and corollary discussions about “directionality” (Mazzucato and European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2018), which aim to link complex problems such as climate change to concrete, manageable, and fundable innovation activities. As the project’s synthesis policy recommendation points out “[organizations we studied] also agree (to varying degrees) that there is a need to adapt and change the research and innovation system, orienting this towards urgent societal challenges and aligning this with societal values, although the socio-political frame for this can vary considerably. Many agree that working more closely and meaningfully with stakeholders and publics is necessary to achieve this change” (RRI Practice Project n.d.). This ambition delineates a generally “desirable” innovation (that which spurs growth in Europe through addressing shared global challenges) from particular forms of locally “undesirable” innovation (that which spurs controversy), positing these as distinguishable entities, wherein the right instruments can advance the former while eliminating the latter.

Attempts to rationalize RRI outside of Europe tended to rehearse such boundary work around socially desirable innovation, going beyond the presentation of innovation as insufficiently attuned to social needs without public participation. The RRI Practice Project also sought to redraw an expanded boundary around what might constitute socially aligned innovation by positing citizens as insufficiently equipped to appreciate the benefits of a wide range of new knowledge and technologies. By offering public engagement as a tool to expand understanding and participation of citizens in the innovation process, the territory of innovation practices and outcomes that might be understood as socially accepted could be expanded. One Chinese policy brief, an output of the RRI Practice Project, summarizes, “Innovation is the key factor driving China’s economic and social development. However, China has come to a historical stage that the social impact, social acceptance and social responsibility of scientific research and innovation have to be emphasized and seriously considered. [Yet], public’s opinions on and attitudes to innovation are important and need to be considered. The challenge, however, is how to increase the quality of public participation when the public’s scientific knowledge and awareness are extremely diversified” (RRI Practice Project 2018). Here, socially aligned innovation is conceptualized as that which actively engages citizens to produce what we might call more “innovatively aligned” subjectivities. The work of creating socially aligned innovation is thus intimately bound up in the creation of publics scientifically aware enough to be able to productively participate in the innovation process. Framed in this way, RRI becomes a tool capable of creating national innovation governance logics productive of technoscientifically appreciative populations, removing barriers to and speeding the progress of what gets depicted as generally desirable innovation.

The Coproduction of Innovation and Democracy in Global Governance

Our case studies make evident the ways emerging imperatives of democratic innovation governance promoted by international organizations are inextricably linked to ideas about the maintenance of incumbent global political, economic, and social order. Mainstreaming the inclusion of society into STI at the OECD and the EC entails reconfiguring technology–society relationships within institutional spaces that have traditionally relied on market-based approaches and technological fixes in their articulation of policy. As we have described, these shifts are achieved through the construction of a democratic deficit of innovation that relies on very specific deficit/solution framing, “soft” instruments, and boundary work around what counts as Responsible Innovation and how it should be put into policy practice. Democratic deficits in national innovation policy are presented as potentially impeding global economic growth and competitiveness, a frame that gives society the necessary relevance to be considered more seriously by the science and technology departments at the EC and OECD while allowing these organizations to define more generally what the desirable place of technoscientific change in any given society is and how it ought to be structured. As such, the new politics of deficit construction around democratic innovation governance at international organizations figure as a site of coproduction for innovation and democracy as intertwined pillars of a global market-liberal order.

A New Politics of Deficit Construction

Deficit construction around the inclusion of society in technological governance goes hand in hand with the provision of Responsible Innovation as a solution since deficits figure as “a powerful justification and organizing principle” for intervention in policy-making (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019, 8). In the OECD and EC cases, perceived barriers in the uptake of innovation are portrayed as resolvable by way of attending to a lack of engagement of society, insufficient standardization of soft governance “keys” and “principles,” and a missing orientation of innovation toward social needs. Here, democracy is framed as a solution within the bounds of innovation and defined by the institutional rationales of international policy organizations, that is, democratic expression ought to take place within a regime of economic growth and globalized liberal markets in which the understanding of innovation as a force for global good is highly stabilized (Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014).

Although the projects we have studied differ in terms of how exactly they frame, standardize, and delineate Responsible Innovation, they both engage in the construction of a particular kind of democracy in the service of innovation co-produced with a particular vision of embattled innovation which must be saved by society. In the OECD case, such ordering occurs through depoliticizing participation by presenting it as a key for socially desirable innovation and global economic growth: democracy enhances the diffusion and uptake of innovation, better orients the supply of innovation toward demand, and achieves coordinated science and technology policies based on comparable and harmonized “principles.” The EC, in turn, encases participation primarily as a means to reach public legitimacy and support for innovation, which is also believed to help the Union leapfrog its innovation gap and lag in global competitiveness, in part by way of disseminating EU-inflected “best practices” across competing countries’ R&D institutions. Within these processes, the restabilization of a global market-liberal order and innovation’s presumed contribution to it are pursued. Such a model of democracy shifts sovereignty away from the nation-state and demands that locally grounded forms of reasoning about science and technology as objects of political consideration and decision-making become flexible and responsive to global challenges and growth concerns.

Shifting Arenas for Democratic Innovation Governance

Elevating the production and standardization of knowledge of the right relationship between technology and society to the global arena is made possible through deficit politics seeking to stabilize the collective gaze of market-liberal democracies represented by international organizations founded to order post-WWII geopolitics. While this order served as a stable backdrop for imperatives that linked techno-optimism and liberal markets in a deterministic way, it is increasingly being destabilized in a perceived retreat from “techno-globalism” to “techno-nationalism” (Edgerton 2007), including the rise of trade barriers and a weakening authority of supranational governance arrangements. The documents, reports, and guidelines, as well as workshops, projects, and organizational narratives analyzed here are not devoid of struggles between global and local authority over society–technology relationships but rather their expression: the newly articulated “epistemic jurisdiction” (Winickoff and Mondou 2017) over the democratic performance of national innovation governance offers legitimacy and renewed purpose to global governance organizations and their project of stabilizing a liberal global order in the context of ongoing institutional existential crisis.

In this light, the emphasis on soft governance instruments and the circulation of responsibility “best practices” found in our cases should not distract attention from the technoconstitutional dimensions (Hurlbut, Jasanoff, and Saha 2020) of “new governance” strategies in international policy-making. The mainstreaming of Responsible Innovation on a global scale implies a significant reordering of technology-society relationships—including what (good) innovation and a (good) society look like, with the latter receiving innovation benevolently and allowing itself to be enrolled as an active contributor to it through processes of participation. The siting of epistemic authority over democratic matters with regard to innovation thus has considerable political implications. By claiming responsibility over democracy in global innovation trends, the mainstreaming of Responsible Innovation locates both the power to correctly diagnose problems and enact solutions within international organizations—in this case, the OECD and the EC—whereby their mandate is significantly expanded. As constructivist scholars of international relations have argued, such an expansion of areas of expertise for global governance always also entails “creating particular kinds of states with particular kinds of interests” (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, 164)—in our cases, states with an interest in liberalized global markets attainable through democratic innovation. In the same process, international organizations, themselves accused of contributing to democratic deficits in the international order (Miller 2007), become the arbitrators of right modes of social deliberation and appraisal of technoscientific change.

Conclusion

This paper argues that Responsible Innovation in its globalized, mainstreamed form helps to relegitimize extant innovation imperatives by providing additional justificatory elements and toolkits for the mobilization of innovation in the name of society. Our analysis identifies a troublesome logic in the new ordering of technology–society relationships—namely, that of an emerging and increasingly standardized view in policy-making that presents the integration of society as a “fix” to problems with innovation policy and its contribution to global economic growth. Through this logic, international organizations can claim additional interpretive authority over matters of democracy while at the same time restabilizing innovation discourses and frameworks in crisis. In so doing, they relocate democratization within their own global expertise, commitment to economic growth, and market liberal political agenda, identifying, in effect, a deficit in national innovation governance, characterized as a failure to align emerging global markets with local publics, and setting out to remedy it through trans-national harmonization.

We provide a complementary perspective to the common STS critique that points to a reliance on technological solutionism and “fixes” in policy-making on science, technology and innovation, and which has been described as relying on a Deficit Model of Public Understanding (Wynne 1992), and recently also on a Deficit Model in Innovation (Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019). Mirroring technological determinism’s inherent reductionism, the politics of a democratic deficit of innovation turns the fixing logic upside down: it presents society as capable of determining pathways to desirable technological change through participation in its governance, simultaneously remedying any wayward tendencies of technological development and producing social acceptance of the products (and projects) of technoscience. Thus, we emphasize a concern regarding “a kind of primacy upon the ‘social’ that careful work in STS, broadly conceived, has consistently denied” (Jasanoff 2010, 19). This is a mode of simplification that early advocates for democratization of science and technology originally aimed to leave behind altogether when insisting on the co-construction of technological and social orders.

These reconfigurations are somewhat counter-intuitive to the epistemologies of STS and should prompt us to be more attentive to the various works of ontological surgery and epistemic kind-making needed for making science and technology governance more democratic in settings whose raison d’être is the liberalization of markets in conjunction with the (re)production of a liberal democratic order. Approaching the coproduction of innovation and democracy as a situated object of research that unfolds in specific settings and at a particular point in time means taking central STS tenets of symmetry seriously and allows us to confront the contingency of our commitments to democratization once they move into “the policy room” (Webster 2007). In this sense, we do not understand our findings as a sign of failure of STS scholarship put into practice (Tyfield 2012) or our critique as “anti-social” STS (Mosse 2006), but as a form of co-laboration (Niewöhner 2015) with the actors and institutions that hold disproportionate power over collective futures by commanding the language and politics of innovation, and recently also that of democracy. Such an acknowledgment and critical reflection of the context and politics surrounding the democratization of innovation is crucial not only for better understanding how governance discourses and trajectories are closed down within centers of power but also for finding new ways to challenge the powerful bond between innovation and democracy that contemporary STI policy conjures.