Abstract
The governance of emerging science and innovation is a major challenge for contemporary democracies. In this paper we present a framework for understanding and supporting efforts aimed at ‘responsible innovation’. The framework was developed in part through work with one of the first major research projects in the controversial area of geoengineering, funded by the UK Research Councils. We describe this case study, and how this became a location to articulate and explore four integrated dimensions of responsible innovation: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. Although the framework for responsible innovation was designed for use by the UK Research Councils and the scientific communities they support, we argue that it has more general application and relevance.
Highlights
The call for improved anticipation in governance comes from a variety of sources, from political and environmental concerns with the pace of social and technical change (e.g. Toffler, 1970), to scholarly critiques of the limitations of top-down risk-based models of governance to encapsulate the social, ethical and political stakes associated with technoscientific advances
Solar radiation management introduces a range of significant social, political and ethical questions. These include: whether international agreement and buy-in for such a planetary-wide technology is plausible; whether research into or deployment of solar radiation management geoengineering will create a moral hazard, diverting political attention away from climate mitigation efforts; whether the impacts of solar radiation management can be fully understood before deployment; whether solar radiation management can be accommodated within democratic institutions; and whether the technology would be used for other purposes, opening up the potential for new geopolitical conflicts
Aware of at least some of the wider ethical and socio-political dimensions of solar radiation management (a point stressed by a presenter at the beginning of the sandpit from an environmental Non Governmental Organisation (NGO)), the UK Research Councils were sensitive to the potential for the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project to be the subject of external scrutiny, given that its proposed testbed moved beyond laboratory tests or simulations and could be defined as a “small field trial”
Summary
Responsible innovation is an idea that is both old and new. Responsibility has always been an important theme of research and innovation practice, how it has been framed has varied with time and place. As Callon et al (2009) point out, science and technology can, paradoxically, add to our sense of uncertainty and ignorance They tend to produce a “continuous movement toward a greater and greater level of attachments of things and people at an ever expanding scale and at an ever increasing degree of intimacy” Callon et al (2009) use the metaphor of science and technology ‘overflowing’ the boundaries of existing scientific regulatory institutional frameworks They point to the need for new ‘hybrid forums’ that will help our democracies to be “enriched, expanded, extended and. Current forms of regulatory governance offer little scope for broad ethical reflection on the purposes of science or innovation
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