1
RRI as Social Critique: Achievements and Drawbacks

1.1. RRI and its "precursors" - what's new?

It is still not quite clear what exactly RRI is. It can be construed as a concept that introduces the importance of responsibility in the context of innovation governance. Or it could be referred to simply as a framework - a broader policy orientation that might inform and guide research and innovation practice, within which different implementation solutions for responsibilization of the latter are being conceived. It could also be seen as nothing more than a notion that accommodates a patchwork of ideas problematizing the evolution of science and technology.

On the one hand, RRI proponents admit that the concerns behind it are not new and they usually refer to "RRI precursors" to underline that the same problems have been addressed in one way or the other by earlier responsibilizing formats such as Technology Assessment (TA), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Foresight. On the other hand, they attempt at legitimizing RRI as a particular kind of innovation itself - as offering a potential paradigm shift as to the governance of the research and innovation realm [OWE 12, VON 13, NAZ 16].

As any new intellectual stream, the forming field of RRI has its own interpretation of the challenges in front of contemporary knowledge societies. These are explicated through a specific discourse with its own:

• - presuppositions ? for example, responsibilization is possible through democratization of the knowledge creation process; the possibility of integrating moral considerations into the design of innovation products; ignoring values is cost-inefficient and irresponsible innovation is economically unwise and expensive;
• - pivotal themes ? for example, value-sensitive design, the polysemy of responsibility, collective and positive responsibility, the Collingridge dilemma and moral overload; and
• - its own hopeful assumptions ? for example, the possibility of solving normative conflicts and reconciling different value orientations and ensuring uptake of the idea by the business world.

In this part of the text, we will refer to some earlier attempts at introducing the theme of responsibility within the research and innovation realm. What I denote as "precursors" of RRI are developments in theoretical and institutional debates that have ultimately led to the adoption and the ongoing institutionalization of the idea in the EU RTD context. This differs from the usual approach in RRI accounts. What the latter consider being precursors are just earlier attempts for responsibilization or "socialization" of the S&T field using tools such as TA, Foresight, CSR and the precautionary principle. I will not present a thorough history of those. Nevertheless, I will engage with their particular contributions where appropriate. What I will focus on here are either single events that constitute initial institutional promotions of the idea of responsible innovation or hints in the discourse of European bodies. These could be considered early elaborations on the notion that have paved the way for its fully fledged adoption by the European Commission.

I will start with the former European Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potocnik, who, in a speech before the Budapest World Science Forum (10 November 2005), drew the attention to the importance of responsibility as one of the three key features of science, along with truth and progress [POT 05]. According to Potocnik, the 20th and 21st Century's developments in the research and innovation realm have demonstrated the ambivalence of science and revealed the limits of truth and progress as its driving motives, thus bringing at the forefront the issue of responsibility. Naturally, the latter becomes a political issue. In sensitive research areas such as nuclear energy and cloning, the stakes are so high that any action or abstinence of action requires political deliberation in order to make an adequate choice. The scientific notion of risk is not attuned to the complexities of real life (see [BEC 98]). This emphasizes the importance of perspectives of laymen, citizens, users, consumers of risk and so on. Potocnik argued the need to validate scientific knowledge as to real-life contexts because of the fact that the use of scientific advice rarely prescribes a single political opinion and that scientific expertise requires a validation process in interaction with non-scientific knowledge. Adequate estimation of the stakes and the risks of such technologies cannot be made within the walls of the laboratory.

He seems to be construing responsibilization, not in terms of sharing the responsibility with the general public by opening avenues for the actual involvement of the latter in the day-to-day activities of the knowledge-generation process. The political responsibility he refers to is more in the mode of consultation - engaging the public in the validation process means obtaining more socially relevant information, on the basis of which political action/inaction can take place. Thus, political responsibility requires going beyond the limitations of scientific expertise and not relying solely on it, because blind faith in scientific methods and scientific proof creates the risk of failing the mere validation process [POT 05, p. 16]. By validation, he seems to mean a contextualization effort that makes research knowledge socially relevant and socially robust, a position that we can also find in the concepts of post-academic research, post-normal science, and Mode-2 knowledge production [ZIM 96, ZIM 00, FUN 93, NOW 01, GIB 94, GIB 99].

Another important point advanced by Potocnik in the efforts to responsibilize the S&T realm is one that welcomes re-inventing the notion of progress in line with the importance of values. In this respect it is "crucial to give up the classical fiction of the fact-value divide in public techno-scientific issues, as it hinders more open forms of debates and it makes misleading assumptions about the values that are embodied in expert knowledge"1. This is very important for the RRI field if it really aims to challenge the claims for value-neutrality of technological determinism and market fundamentalism and to bring the notion of progress back to the Enlightenment tradition, which instrumentalizes knowledge for pursuing not only the truth but also the good (see [TOD 09]).

Then, when looking for precursors of the RRI framework, we cannot omit some developments in US policy context showing that ideas concerning the responsibilization of science and technology (e.g. responsible stewardship of nanoscience and Parliamentary TA offices) were being crafted elsewhere but developed on European soil. In this respect, it is not surprising to find some of the main RRI themes in earlier US governance responses to the developments in the realm of science and technology. Let us take, for example, the National Science Foundation's program solicitation and a report on the societal implications of nano-science and nanotechnology [NAT 01]. It claims to provide future support for making social, ethical and economic explorations of the issue a priority and emphasizes the importance of interaction with the public for debating on the unexpected consequences of these technologies. Then, within the US National Nanotechnology Initiative, the notion of responsible innovation is articulated in the following manner:

"Responsible development of nanotechnology can be characterized as the balancing of efforts to maximize the technology's positive contributions and minimize its negative consequences. Thus, responsible development [emphasis added] involves an examination both of applications and of potential implications. It implies a commitment to develop and use technology to help meet the most pressing human and societal needs, while making every reasonable effort to anticipate and mitigate adverse implications or unintended consequences [emphasis added]" [NAT 06, p. 73].

As can be seen, the responsibilization effort consists of promoting what is deemed to have productive effects, by employing it as a problem-solving tool and directing it towards urgent societal needs; at the same time, it is viewed as suppressing its potential negative repercussions. This take on responsibility as to a particular strand of emerging technology is in the mode of searching for ways to adequately assume political responsibility by examining "applications and potential implications" and promote its development in a "balancing act" of action and inaction.

We need to recognize that although currently RRI is "marching" in institutional and scientific parlance as a specifically European conceptual achievement, the notion of responsible innovation can be traced back several years within the US policy development. Of course, a particular European imprint is its institutional "operationalization" into six themes of implementation (ethics, science education, gender, participation, open innovation and governance) and enforcing it in the FP7 and Horizon 2020 Framework Programmes for research and development. However, as can be seen below, most of its tenets are already outlined in a US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues' report on synthetic biology from 2010. They are public beneficence, responsible stewardship,...