Question

Reflection about the forms of government?
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Answer 1

Answer:

In European science and technology policy, various styles have been developed and institutionalised to govern the ethical challenges of science and technology innovations. In this paper, we give an account of the most dominant styles of the past 30 years, particularly in Europe, seeking to show their specific merits and problems. We focus on three styles of governance: a technocratic style, an applied ethics style, and a public participation style. We discuss their merits and deficits, and use this analysis to assess the potential of the recently established governance approach of ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI). Based on this analysis, we reflect on the current shaping of RRI in terms of ‘doing governance’.

Keywords: Policy, Governance of S&T, Technocracy, Public participation, Ethics expertise, ELSA/ELSI, RRI, New and emerging science & technology

Explanation:

Under the influence of scientific positivism, the latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the twentieth century were dominated by the societal belief that ‘science and technology development’ was rather synonymous with ‘social progress’. Its governance was left to professional scientists’ self-regulation, especially in the field of medicine (Krause 1996). The 1947 Nuremberg Code, drafted as a response to the medical experiments performed under national-socialism, can be seen as a first international policy attempt to define moral criteria for scientific conduct (Annas & Grodin 1992). The code was drafted specifically in relation to medical research on human participants, and other areas of research were not kept in mind in its drafting. It was further developed in the Helsinki Declaration (2012) and its subsequent revisions, again in relation to medical research with human participants. In the ensuing decades, the self-regulation approach in many other areas of scientific and engineering began to be challenged (OECD 1980, Braun et al. 2010). In the late 1970s and 1980s, this led to shifts in governance from self-regulation to external regulation.