Relating Future Challenges, Civil Society and Technology Assessment in Participatory Processes of Research and Innovation Policy – Transforming Future High-tech Strategies?

Before the last wave of democratisation, policy makers and public administrators usually seemed to practise what “realist” accounts described as a command-and-control approach to public policy. Today, policy practitioners often present their own activities in policy-making as embedded in ever changing societal contexts. Even in countries such as Germany with its traditional dualism of state vs. society, policy makers do not only stress that public policies are charged with the task of solving social problems and enhancing the quality of life in all sectors of society. They also maintain that policy-making is itself inextricably intertwined with societal processes. In policy fields such as research and technology policy that used to be fenced off from “normal citizens” because they seemed to require scientific expertise, public administrators now claim that policy-making should include “society as a central player”. In their view of this field, another old dualism – the separation of basic or “curiosity” driven research vs. applied research (or engineering) – needs to be overcome in order to achieve an integrated innovation policy. Moreover, if innovation is itself to be understood as a complex societal process, then the formulation of policies that are supposed to shape this process in the future cannot and should not be done from the traditional heights of a state bureaucracy disentangled from civil society. What is required to cope with these future challenges and the issues of their prioritization, so many policy makers argue, is a robust, i.e. socially embedded strategy. And such a sustainable strategy cannot be formulated within the conventional triangles of state bureaucrats, scientists and industry. It calls for a relational approach that includes more stakeholders and enhances the opportunities to establish new kinds of relations with citizens. Against this backdrop, the question of relating future challenges, scientific experts and creative entrepreneurs with actors representing civil society gains central importance for policy practitioners in future oriented fields requiring long term strategies such as research and innovation policy. To structure these relations and the interaction in participatory processes in a strategically oriented perspective, concepts of policy analysis such as technology assessment are brought into play. This paper is going to look at the case of the “new high-tech strategy: innovations for Germany” and its relational approach from different perspectives. Some of its open fora are not only supposed to provide opportunities for interested citizens to shape ongoing innovation-policy processes, but to develop new formats for citizen’s dialogue and public participation vis-à-vis future challenges. Do these new and presumably “innovative” relational approaches in innovation policy bring out what Charles Lindblom once called the “intelligence of democracy”? Can such new types of relationships be interpreted as interventions that may produce new kinds of shared knowledge and learning, and if so, who is supposed to learn how from whom, and to what effect? Do such interventions contribute to the transformation of future high-tech strategies and innovation policies?