Tag Archives: Auke Pols

Balancing responsiveness and investor security in Responsible Innovation

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Our colleague Dr Auke Pols will be presenting at the Fourth Annual OZSW conference (Dutch research school in Philosophy), 9-10 December 2016 on the topic ‘Balancing responsiveness and investor security in Responsible Innovation’.

Here’s an abstract of the talk:

In recent years, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a popular framework for developing and implementing new technology in the EU, as witnessed by its incorporation in Dutch and EU funding schemes. Building on process values such as anticipation, inclusiveness, responsiveness and reflexivity, RRI seeks to invite and incorporate stakeholder input from early on into the design process (Stilgoe et al. 2013). The hope is that this will lead to technical innovations that better fit societal and ethical values.

A general criticism of RRI is that it often ignores questions of power, politics and institutional settings (Van Oudheusden 2014). One significant political aspect of RRI that has received little attention so far is that RRI operates in a policy context where technical innovations are by and large developed by or in cooperation with the private sector. In this paper I argue that one fundamental problem of this arrangement is that the private sector prefers guaranteed returns on investment and thus stable and predictable policies supporting the innovation, or investor security. I show that this preference is in tension with RRI’s value of responsiveness and its stress on the importance of agility and flexibility when innovating. Basically, there is a trade-off here: increasing investor security diminishes motivation and opportunities to be responsive and vice versa. I explain how RRI could respond to this value conflict, using examples taken from the field of renewable energy technologies.

Renewable energy technologies illustrate this tension particularly well, as they often have difficulties competing with entrenched fossil fuel technologies and thus require significant and prolonged policy support and investor security to get off the ground. For example, the EU has an ambitious biofuel blending target for 2020 meant to create investor security and thus stimulate biofuel innovations for transport energy (Pols 2015). This target became controversial when it turned out that many biofuel projects created serious environmental and social problems. Nevertheless, in the face of diminishing social acceptance and ethical acceptability of biofuels, the EU changed its target only slightly. This was done to maintain investor security in the hope that this would stimulate further biofuel innovations that would solve the problems caused by earlier biofuel innovations (cf. Levidow et al. 2012). Thus, though this policy change exhibited some responsiveness towards the signalled problems, this responsiveness was made dependent on and limited by investor security. Hence the need to investigate the role investor security should play in RRI.

References

Pols, A.J.K. (2015). The Rationality of Biofuel Certification: A Critical Examination of EU Biofuel Policy. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28(4), 667-681. DOI 10.1007/s10806-015-9550-2.

Levidow, L., Papaioannou, T. and Birch, K. (2012). Neoliberalising technoscience and environment: EU policy for competitive, sustainable biofuels. In: L. Pellizzoni and M. Ylonen (eds.) Neoliberalism and technoscience. Theory, technology and society, 159-186. Farnham: Ashgate.

Van Oudheusden, M. (2014). Where are the politics in responsible innovation? European governance, technology assessments, and beyond. Journal of Responsible Innovation 1(1), 67-86.

Stilgoe, J., Owen, R. and Macnaghten, P. (2013). Developing a framework for responsible innovation. Research Policy 42, 1568-1580.

Stakholder involvement and the case of Hidden Design

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The first output from our project was published yesterday. Dr. Auke Pols published a paper titled:

‘May Stakeholders be Involved in Design Without Informed Consent? The Case of Hidden Design’

The paper is open access. You can find it here http://rdcu.be/jVvs

Abstract

Stakeholder involvement in design is desirable from both a practical and an ethical point of view. It is difficult to do well, however, and some problems recur again and again, both of a practical nature, e.g. stakeholders acting strategically rather than openly, and of an ethical nature, e.g. power imbalances unduly affecting the outcome of the process. Hidden Design has been proposed as a method to deal with the practical problems of stakeholder involvement. It aims to do so by taking the observation of stakeholder actions, rather than the outcomes of a deliberative process, as its input. Furthermore, it hides from stakeholders the fact that a design process is taking place so that they will not behave differently than they otherwise would. Both aspects of Hidden Design have raised ethical worries. In this paper I make an ethical analysis of what it means for a design process to leave participants uninformed or deceived rather than acquiring their informed consent beforehand, and to use observation of actions rather than deliberation as input for design, using Hidden Design as a case study. This analysis is based on two sets of normative guidelines: the ethical guidelines for psychological research involving deception or uninformed participants from two professional psychological organisations, and Habermasian norms for a fair and just (deliberative) process. It supports the conclusion that stakeholder involvement in design organised in this way can be ethically acceptable, though under a number of conditions and constraints.

Conference Responsible Innovation: Societal challenges and solutions

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Our team member Dr Auke Pols is attending the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) conference on Responsible Innovation on Friday 10 June 2016, Amsterdam Science Park.

If you want to find out more about our project, do grab hold of him there.

You can find more information about the conference below:

Auke Pols gives public lecture on Prosperity without Growth

Posted on by under valorisation activities

auke with ppt

On 22 April 2016, World Earth Day, environmental philosopher Dr Auke Pols gave a public lecture on ‘Prosperity without Growth’ in Baambrugge for the Cursusproject Abcoude – Baambrugge. The lecture dealt with the topic of economic growth policy and its relation to sustainable development and was inspired by Tim Jackson’s report on Prosperity without Growth. First, Auke examined the relation between economic growth and well-being. The basic (ethical) idea behind this is that the more we buy and consume, the more we (apparently) satisfy our preferences. Assuming that satisfying our preferences makes us happy, the more the economy grows, the happier we become. Yet this assumption can be criticised in a number of ways. For example, for many people ‘leading a good life’ entails much more than simple preference satisfaction and often entails consuming less (e.g. dieting or giving up smoking). Also, sociological research has shown that, once people are rich enough to satisfy their basic needs, happiness is influenced much more by other factors (e.g. social security, health) than by simple GDP growth. In addition, our current policy focus on growth has led to ecological problems (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss), social problems (e.g. rising inequality) and economical problems (e.g. our current economy is designed so that it will either grow or fall into recession, but cannot stabilise.)

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