Master-narratives for science policy. The interplay of political discourses on Science in Wallonia.

Both in Europe and in the United States, scientific research and science, technology and innovation (STI) policies have undergone profound changes for about thirty years. These transitions are often framed along dichotomous lines : an ‘old regime’ characterized by strong public funding, independent academia and a linear conception of innovation has supposedly been replaced by a ‘new regime’ in which research and innovation are conceived in systemic terms, regarding their economic and societal relevance (Rip 2000). My proposal states that this conceptualization is of little use when it comes to studying the evolution of STI policies at the regional level. In this paper, I investigate how global master narratives like the “Knowledge-based Economy”, the “Grand societal Challenges”, “Science, the endless Frontier”, “Responsible Research and Innovation”, etc. are locally articulated, and thereby become grounded in regional STI policymaking, research, and innovation. These narratives, as explanatory resources and mobilizing resources, provide stakeholders with different visions; they are related to power relations between groups and individuals, to institutional settings and to policy trajectories. In my contribution, I study the four narratives in context; i.e. in different situated discourses of STI stakeholders. I consider multiple issues: who is telling what, to whom, why, when, where, and in which form. Instead of dichotomizing, investigating the evolutions of STI policies with a narrative framework provides an enriched description for complex local situations, towards a more political reading of the transitions.