Where are the politics in responsible innovation? European governance, technology assessments, and beyond

Responsible innovation (RI) is founded on the idea that the introduction and adoption of technology in society fails when technologies do not reflect societal needs and values. Hence, proponents of RI solicit society’s opinions in an attempt to render technology developments and policies more socially responsive. Solicitation typically takes the form of broad consultations involving as many relevant stakeholders as possible, in ways that enhance inclusiveness, transparency, and deliberation. This paper asks how the RI concept is taken up and elaborated, based on accounts developed on the EU policy level and on a local, Flemish, technology assessment level. It finds that, notwithstanding important differences between these two deliberative frameworks, neither one leaves much room for politics, understood as the constitution and contestation of power. Rather, these frameworks largely ignore questions about the politics in deliberation (e.g. how actors craft RI through strategic use of argument and other advantage-seeking techniques), as well as the politics of deliberation (i.e. how RI privileges a process definition of democracy at the cost of participatory and representative perspectives). In addition, these frameworks forsake questions about the authoritative allocation of values (as in formalized, representative politics) and the institutional uptake of deliberative engagements more broadly. The paper’s aim is to provide a constructive criticism of the RI paradigm by rendering the above political issues explicit and proposing ways of taking them into account.