Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, liquid biofuels for the transport sector were endorsed by official bodies in Europe and the USA as a most welcome contribution for solving the problems of energy scarcity, climate change and rural poverty, but have since become the target of so much criticism and controversy that the present situation looks like a virtual stalemate. In more recent years, research policy circles in Europe have become enamored by the idea of ‘Responsible Innovation’ (RI) or, in its more expanded version, ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI). This new approach for the social management of emerging technologies and innovations promises to address or avoid the sort of deep conflicts that have afflicted the trajectory of biofuels. Thus the question automatically arises if the promotion and development of biofuels might have been organized as an exercise in Responsible Innovation and whether this could have made a difference. As this is a counterfactual question (like the notorious ‘what if’ questions in historiography), it is impossible to come up with a straightforward and conclusive answer based on empirical research alone.Footnote 1 Nonetheless, we will attempt to arrive at a plausible answer to this question by creatively combining theoretical considerations and empirical information on the initiation and implementation of biofuels policies. But first we will present a conceptual scrutiny of the twin ideas of RI and RRI.
As the expression ‘Responsible Innovation’ and its expanded version are still of recent coinage, they should properly give rise to some wonder and surprise. This new combination of words duly invites the question to what extent innovation can actually be ‘responsible’ and what sense of ‘responsibility’ might be implied in this connection. To explore this question, we start by turning to the classical authors Max Weber and John Dewey to give a provisional specification to the notion of responsibility, which can serve as a baseline for our discussion of Responsible Innovation in the area of biofuels.
For Weber as well as for Dewey responsibility means being accountable for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions and implies an honest and serious attempt to actually foresee those consequences to the best of one’s ability and knowledge. Both hold that good intentions are not enough for responsible conduct. Weber famously distinguished between an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik) and an ‘ethic of conviction’ (Gesinnungsethik). Within the former, “one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action” (or as the German original reads: “man [hat] für die (voraussehbaren) Folgen seines Handelns aufzukommen”), within the latter, in religious terms, “[one] does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord” (Weber 1968, p. 175). Weber unreservedly opted for the former. In a similar vein Dewey held that “our chief moral business is to become acquainted with consequences” (Dewey and Tufts 1908, p. 464). While Weber’s and Dewey’s view of responsibility as being accountable for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions might not be spectacular—rather it seems quite a common-sense conception that is also shared by recent authors who write about the social responsibility of scientists (e.g. Douglas 2009; Forge 2008)—nonetheless, this fairly minimal and seemingly innocuous conception still proves to have real bite when used to critically examine the contemporary approaches to Responsible Innovation.
It is generally agreed that innovation is a collective process that involves many different actors and often exhibits unexpected twists and turns in its trajectory over time. The ultimate societal and environmental consequences of a particular innovation are therefore virtually unpredictable. This radical uncertainty of innovation processes, which partly springs from their collective character, is also duly recognized by advocates of Responsible Innovation: “The unpredictability of innovation is inherently linked to its collective nature” (Stilgoe et al. 2013, p. 1569; cf. Ozdemir et al. 2011). The puzzle, then, is what ‘responsibility’ could still mean under such circumstances. Following Weber and Dewey, one would be inclined to call research and innovation ‘responsible’ if and only if their protagonists are willing and able to take accountability for, or “stand up for”, the societal and environmental consequences of their endeavors (remember Weber’s phrase “aufkommen für die Folgen”). If there is practically no way to predict or foresee such consequences, however, all talk about responsibility in this context would seem to be groundless and misleading. Matters become even more complicated when we realize that innovation as a collective process partly occurs through economic transactions on the market.Footnote 2
In the traditional liberal conception of the market system it is quite customary to relieve economic actors from any responsibility for the more remote consequences of economic competition and technological and commercial innovation. When harmful consequences are brought about cumulatively through the mediation of (perhaps a long series of) market transactions, they are often considered inevitable and excusable and not an appropriate occasion for invoking anybody’s remedial responsibility (Miller 2001, p. 458). So when one supermarket A drives supermarket B out of business “by offering a better service to customers”, we would probably be inclined to agree that in that case supermarket A bears no special responsibility to compensate supermarket B for the economic damage the latter incurred through A’s actions.
The doctrines of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Responsible Innovation (RI) run counter to this conventional wisdom. In CSR there are for instance activists in the worldwide anti-sweatshop movement, who have been quite successful in convincing Western consumers and multinational companies that they bear some responsibility for the fate of far-away workers toiling in nominally independent subcontractor firms in the initial stages of the value chain of the international garment industry (Young 2004). In a similar vein the advocates of Responsible Innovation try to mitigate the possible social and ecological problems that arise from development of novel (technological) innovations.
Nonetheless, both these currents of thought are themselves far from clear about where to draw the lines in delimiting the scope of responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of new scientific and technological developments. Moreover, widening the scope of responsibility also dramatizes the epistemic problem concerning the limited predictability of the consequences of research and innovation.
Scholars in Responsible Innovation have tried to overcome this problem of limited predictability of the consequences of innovations by turning to methods of public deliberation and public participatory decision making. The basic idea is that by involving the public in the deliberation and decision-making about an innovation project from the earliest stages on, and being “responsive” to their “concerns”, we can compensate for our limited predictive capabilities (Stilgoe et al. 2013). This way it would also be possible to evade David Collingridge’s well-known control dilemma, which holds that early on a new technology is not amenable to social control because at that stage the consequences are still unclear, while later on, when the consequences become manifest, the technology is so much entrenched that it can no longer be steered in a desirable direction (Collingridge 1980).
The trick is to use the “societal concerns” about possible future effects of an innovation as expressed by the public in the present (real-time) as a stand-in for the virtually unforeseeable future consequences and then to feed those “concerns” back into the on-going research and development work (Fisher 2005). When the innovators are genuinely responsive to the public’s concerns, they should be able to curb these possible future negative effects.
Various forms of foresight and forecasting figure prominently in the armamentarium of Responsible Innovation—indeed, ‘anticipation’ is considered one of its central dimensions, next to ‘reflexivity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’ (Stilgoe et al. 2013)—but the meaning of these words seems to deviate from their normal sense. As David Guston clarifies, “anticipatory governance involves a rejection of prediction but an embrace of an approach to foresight we call anticipation, which casts multiple, plausible futures as objects for deliberation rather than a single predicted future as an object of pursuit” (Guston 2010, p. 434). What is fed as an input into public deliberation and decision-making about technology development is thus not a forecast of the future, but a menu of visions of various possible futures, which can then be taken into account in the processes of research and innovation.
The turn to public engagement
One can wonder, however, why such visions have to be taken seriously as a basis for concern calling for adjustments in the innovation trajectory if they are only slightly plausible. The shift from predicting effects to being responsive to societal concerns also explains why public participation or public engagement is considered an essential part of Responsible Innovation. A central role for the public is also prescribed by the ideal of a deliberative democracy, as set out, for instance, in Habermas’s discourse ethics. In a situation of genuinely power-free communication, according to Habermas, the only force that counts is the force of the better argument. Following this line of ethical reasoning, Annelies Balkema and Auke Pols argue that the responsibilities of policymakers in Responsible Innovation “include making sure that actual stakeholders are identified as such and are invited into the discussion, stakeholders representing all relevant views can participate in the discussion, and that power differences between stakeholders are compensated for as much as possible, in order to create a level playing field” (Balkema and Pols 2015, p. 8). Moreover, the participants in the discussion have to engage in rational argumentation. They are expected to give “all values and arguments due consideration, and not suppressing or excluding any relevant argument” (ibid.).
Critics, however, claim that discourse ethics is unduly idealistic and that the procedural requirements for communicative rationality are far too demanding to be practically implemented in real-life institutional settings. Just to call for an ‘open’ debate is a meaningless gesture if no “frame” is provided to define the issues at stake—without a frame, there is no disagreement but only indifference. Setting a frame, however, implies establishing relationships of power (Torgersen and Schmidt 2013). Some critics go further and call into question not just the practical feasibility but the normative desirability of the ideal of power-free communication. The Danish economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg, for one, considers the very attempt to purify communicative rationality from power, rhetoric and strategic opportunism as fundamentally misguided (Flyvbjerg 1998), while the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe insists that democratic politics is not a utopian quest for an unforced consensus, but a pluralistic process of contestation and confrontation marked by ineradicable antagonism (Mouffe 2009).
These alternative views in political philosophy also lead to a more skeptical assessment of the role and potential of public engagement in Responsible Innovation. Its advocates often lament the strategic reason policymakers sometimes invoke for setting up participation initiatives as a way to ensure public support for the delivery of a pre-committed policy (Owen et al. 2012, p. 753; Stilgoe et al. 2013, p. 1573). However, it would be amazing if such strategic motives were absent given what is at stake for the various parties. After all, in the battle for the hearts and minds of the populace to which a public participation exercise ultimately boils down, each interested party has its own axe to grind (cf. Van Oudheusden 2014). Furthermore, deliberative initiatives do not necessarily guarantee full societal consensus, as groups with radical or non-reformist worldviews tend to be excluded, or exclude themselves, from participating in the deliberation (Schouten et al. 2012). A case in point is the almost continuous public engagement with agricultural biotechnology: “From surveys to focus groups to citizen juries, GM crops have probably been engaged with more than any other technology, but this has not helped to build societal consensus in Europe” (Tait and Barker 2011, p. 766). These theoretical insights and practical findings give reason to at least tone down the high expectations that discourse ethics and deliberative democracy have vested in public participation initiatives.
From a business angle, the emphasis on reflexivity and “opening up” rather than “closing down” (Stirling 2008) in current versions of Responsible Innovation may also be problematic. Understandably, companies will be reluctant to commit large funds to risky innovative projects as long as everything is up for grabs. Critical social scientists have perfected the art of questioning framing assumptions, but have largely ignored the difficult task of bringing a public debate to a timely conclusion.
In many European countries public engagement with new technologies (e.g. nanotechnology) is routinely organized as a part of official research and innovation policy, but laypersons are often reluctant to participate. The professional organizers of participatory events have sometimes much difficulty to recruit sufficient numbers of willing participants. On occasion, citizens’ dialogue meetings take place—without citizens (Bogner 2012, p. 509). One avowed reason why ordinary citizens show little enthusiasm to take part in “upstream engagement” is that at an early stage of development the possible future impacts of a new technology are still unclear even to the experts. Perhaps the attempt to square the circle of limited predictive capacity by involving the wider public is bound to fail after all.
Provisional balance-sheet
Our preliminary, theoretically informed analysis of the notion of Responsible Innovation given above thus already raises several skeptical points. The overall impression is that the currently popular approach would still fall short of adequately addressing the problem of “responsibility” in the context of research, innovation and technology development. According to Weber and Dewey, one is to be held responsible for the “foreseeable” consequences of one’s actions, but in the context of RI the problem is precisely the limited “foreseeability” of the future consequences of innovation, despite the fact that RI virtually amounts to a sustained attempt at exercising “foresight”. Nor can this problem, it seems, be solved or compensated for by engaging the wider public. It remains to be seen to what extent the problematic issues that we identified above actually emerge in concrete processes of research and innovation in novel technologies and how they are (or could be) dealt with in such settings. We thus turn in the next section to the global biofuel debate in order to examine an actual example. We first set out how the process of biofuel innovation and the corresponding biofuel policies have developed over the past years and then explore the negative direct and especially indirect effects which have been contestably attributed to this once almost unilaterally welcomed solution in the global quest for sustainable energy.