4 - Putting Responsibility Centre Stage: The Underlying Values of Responsible Stagnation

Summary

As we have seen in Part I, innovation is often lauded as the saviour we desperately need, as if it is some kind of knight in shining armour astride his noble steed, Market Economy, capable of redressing all the injustices of world. Sometimes, it is acknowledged, the knight doesn't deliver quite as we hoped and some readjustments are needed – enter the faithful squire, Responsibility. But when the knight is more like Don Quixote, tilting at non-existent giants, and the market is more akin to his horse Rocinante (who was too far past its use-by date to fulfil its tasks), to keep replacing the fallen hero in his saddle isn't enough.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, the market economy is, in fact, not shaped to deliver what we expect from a supposedly prosperous society (namely real social progress and benefits, such as genuine wage growth, better environmental outcomes and so on). So what happens if we rid our hero of the steed and we meet our knight on foot, with no expectation of any specific outcome for Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Taking this agnosticism to GDP as our starting point – what van den Bergh (2011) calls the ‘a-growth’ paradigm – we ask what happens now when our knight Innovation meets his squire Responsibility? What becomes possible once we stop trying to ride the market and instead innovate independent of market-directed aspirations?

In Chapter 2, we saw how Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) emerged from responses to the inadequacy of modern structures to deal responsibly with science and technology (S&T)-induced risks and uncertainties, situations often characterized by disputed underlying values, social and/or epistemic resistance and conflicts, and urgent political decisions. Although RRI/RI opens science, technology and innovation (STI) to broader public debate and seeks to integrate various kinds of expertise (technical, sociological, lay) into decisionmaking about specific technologies, RI alone cannot sufficiently address societal, ethical and ecological concerns about broader STI processes, nor how these are shaped by, and respond to, externalities in the global political economy. So long as RI is embedded in the GDP growth paradigm, it risks only ever rearranging Don Quixote in his saddle rather than calling forth a better knight (whatever that might be).