Translations of Responsibility: Innovation Governance in Three European Regions

In 2020, a group of European researchers got a European Union (EU) grant to do a project called TRANSFORM. The objective of TRANSFORM was to integrate the principle of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into the research and innovation policies of three European regions: Lombardy, Brussels, and Catalonia.

This book tells the story of how TRANSFORM translated RRI into practice, all the way from philosophy of technology to EU policy jargon, to the project contract, and finally into the real-life events in these regions. Responsibility was translated in creative ways, with surprising goals and ambiguous outcomes. Armed with these stories, the book analyses the broader context of the desire for better governance of technoscience and draws two lessons: Firstly, that there is more governance than one may see at first sight, and secondly, that there is a need to rethink the borders of technoscience and the spaces in which it resides.

The book proposes to think of governance in technoscience, rather than governance of technoscience.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Thomas Völker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities (SVT) of the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include practices of knowledge production and circulation in environmental governance and modes of experimenting with participatory democracy in policymaking.

Rasmus Slaattelid is Director and a professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities (SVT), University of Bergen, Norway. His research focuses on translations between fields of knowledge, in the form of metaphors, models, and analogies.

Roger Strand is a professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and Humanities (SVT) of the University of Bergen, Norway, and Co-Director of the European Centre for Governance in Complexity. His research focuses on uncertainty and complexity at the interfaces between knowledge and action.