Fast and not furious: an inquiry into the current low-risk/high-gain configuration of public participation

For several years scholars pointed at the development of a “participatory turn” in science, technology
and innovation (STI). Decisively informed by STS, “public involvement” and then “public engagement”
with STI have been enacted in a broad array of participatory experiments across Europe. These
experiments were usually informed by rhetoric of citizen empowerment and distributed governance,
against the limitations of technocratic approaches and traditional innovation processes, in order to
“enrich”, “deepen”, “broaden” the knowledge base of our democracies. As “embarked researchers”,
STS scholars played a crucial role in facilitating and legitimizing the organization of participatory events
engaging a variety of publics. This paper will rely on the knowledge and expertise we gathered when
organizing multiple participatory events over the last decade, while still trying maintain a critical
distance with regard to our own engagement and the types of participation we contributed to enact.
More specifically, we propose to draw on the lessons learnt from two recent projects, the organization
of a citizens’ summit (Europe Wide Views on Sustainable Consumption) and a prospective study to
gauge the potential of involving users in a Living Lab in the health sector in Wallonia. These two
projects produced different publics (“citizens-consumers” or “users”), were informed by different
political rationales (“sustainability” or “inclusive innovation”), took place in diverse settings (a
European FP7 project or a project funded by the Walloon Region) and connected to several narratives
of public empowerment through participation (“being heard in policymaking” or “accelerating and
improving health”).
Our contribution maps and compares the different instrumental and strategic framings of the
engagement of publics in those two projects, emphasizing the roles attributed to fabricated publics
but also the construction of categories such as the “state” and the “economy”. It unpacks some critical
issues related to the methods and techniques used in the concrete implementation of participatory
exercises such as, for example, the relation between the assigned tasks, the allowed forms of dialogue
between the participants, the room for engagement with the issue(s) at stake and the broader
understanding of processes these inputs were supposed to contribute to. Our analysis highlights a
tension between the justificatory rationales for public engagement and its specific enactments. In
these fast and optimized exercises, participants and their inputs become resources that need to be
methodologically maximized and from which “value” may be extracted for instrumental use, i.e.
innovation or policy-making. In this configuration in which, we argue, most participation experiments
are stuck, the increasing involvement of publics in either policy-making or innovation will only be likely
to produce low risk and high gain for powerful actors, who manage to take the best advantage of
unpaid and uncritical labour from participants. Due attention (including self-reflexive critique) will be
paid to alternative framings and critical insights, which were methodologically eliminated or ‘tamed’ to
avoid threatening the design of the overall participatory exercise. By externalizing critique to favour
unconditional compliance with imposed notions of the “greater good”, we scrutinize the risk for
participation to become a mere space of experimentation for the sake of innovation and economic
growth. Furthermore, we argue that critical scholarly work should help to move beyond this particular
division of labour and responsibilities between the spheres of science, society and the state in order to
avoid re-enacting traditional conceptions of the policy-making process and innovation pathways.