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. (shrink)

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue (...) that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project. (shrink)

Much discourse on low-carbon transition envisages progressive social change towards environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies. Yet much of this literature pays inadequate attention to the key question of (productive, relational) power. How do energy infrastructures and socio-technical systems interact with, construct, enable and constrain political regimes, and vice versa? Conceiving low-carbon energy transitions through a power lens, the paper explores a case study of huge, but overlooked, significance: the paradox of the ‘phenomenal’ resurgence of coal in an era of (...) low-carbon innovation. Through exposition of the strong connections between coal-based socio-technical systems and a political regime of classical liberalism, illustrated in two eras, we trace an emerging constellation of energy and political regimes connecting ‘clean coal’ with a ‘liberalism 2.0’ centred on a rising China. This affords a critique of the low-carbon society emergent from these developments – a society more reminiscent of coal's previous Dickensian heyday than the progressive visions of much ‘low-carbon transition’ literature. (shrink)

This paper examines the promise of science and its role in shaping research policy. The promise of science is characterized by expectations of science, which are embedded in promissory discourses that envision futures made possible through advances in promising science. Through a single case study of the origins of Genome Canada, the research was guided by the question: How did expectations of genomics shape the creation of Genome Canada? A conceptualization of discursive power and expectations of genomics storylines provide the (...) theoretical and analytical basis for an in-depth examination of the ideational effects and material impacts on research policy decisions over three years that culminated in the creation of Genome Canada. Expectations of genomics storylines functioned in a complex interplay of discursive practices and dynamics among diverse policy actors within a genomics discourse-coalition to produce a range of ideational and material impacts. The expectations of genomics storylines produced powerful genomics subject-positions from which policy actors perceived their interests, identities and preferences and gained agency, which led to various material impacts, such as mobilizing support and funding, coordinating activities and transforming Canada’s research policy framework. With the increasing importance of research policy to a range of broader policy priorities underpinned by expectations that science will resolve societal challenges and contribute to socio-economic benefits, this paper sheds light on how complex research policy decisions are made; it further contributes to understanding the role of promissory discourses in shaping those decisions. (shrink)

The rapid, recent emergence of new medical knowledge models has engendered a dizzying number of new medical initiatives, programs and approaches. Fields such as evidence-based medicine and translational medicine all promise a renewed relationship between knowledge and medicine. The question for philosophy and other fields has been whether these new models actually achieve their promises to bring about better kinds of medical knowledge—a question that compels scholars to analyze each model’s epistemic claims. Yet, these analyses may miss critical components that (...) explain how these models actually work and function. Using the case of translational medicine, this paper suggests that analyses which treat these models as a primarily epistemic interventions miss the way that new approaches are increasingly shaped by specific financial and commercial agendas. Ultimately, social epistemological analyses that are attentive to market forces are required to make sense of emerging bioscientific research models, which are increasingly tethered to or a manifestation of increasingly financialized models of science research and innovation. (shrink)

As health care systems have been recast as innovation assets, commercial aims are increasingly prominent within states’ health and medical research policies. Despite this, the reformulation of notions of social and of scientific value and of long-standing relations between science and the state that is occurring in research policies remains comparatively unexamined. Addressing this lacuna, this article investigates the articulation of ‘actually existing neoliberalism' in research policy by examining a major Australian research policy and funding instrument, the Medical Research Future (...) Fund. We identify the MRFF and allied initiatives as a site of state activism: reallocating resources from primary and preventive health care to commercially-oriented biomedical research; privileging commercial objectives in research and casting health as a “flow on effect”; reorganising the publicly funded production of health and medical knowledge; and arrogating for political actors a newly prominent role in research grant assessment and funding allocation. We conclude that rather than the state’s assumption of a more activist role in medical research and innovation straightforwardly serving a ‘public good’, it is a driver of neoliberalisation that erodes commitments to redistributive justice in health care and significantly reconfigures science-state relations in research policy. (shrink)

In recent decades, academic science has increasingly been directed toward commercializable ends by neoliberal governments. In this article, I outline a concern that academic scientists have not been consulted about the transformation of science, but nevertheless, in some ways accept commercialization as the way things are done. I focus on the ways in which academic scientists attempt to exercise agency, albeit within the parameters of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In this economy, scientific inquiry has transformed to be focused more on (...) producing marketable products. In order to explore the parameters of scientists’ agency in the context of that transformation, I first elaborate on the idea of agency’s “parameters” and argue that the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I propose a methodological direction that can attend to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy. (shrink)