Phil Macnaghten

Science and technological innovation wield unfathomable power in the shaping of social life and the environment. Yet, the democratic control and shaping of technology remains at best an unfinished project, not least due to dominant paradigms of governance implicitly that have historically delegated the good to market forces. This Element explores responsible innovation as an emergent discourse in governing science and society relations. Specifically, it explores the making of responsible innovation through three lenses: first, as a way of reconfiguring the concept of responsibility in science governance with far-reaching implications for scientific culture and practice; second, as a way of injecting agency through deliberative methods aimed at anticipating and deliberating upon the kinds of possible worlds that science and technology bring into being; and third, as a framework for governing innovation sensitive to the dynamics of specific technologies and to the particular socio-political context in which innovation develops.

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `save the environment'.

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `save the environment'.