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Challenges for the Democratic

Management of Technoscience:
Governance, Participation and the
Political Today
a
Dominique Pestre
a
EHESS, Paris, France and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin ,
Germany
Published online: 28 Aug 2009.

To cite this article: Dominique Pestre (2008) Challenges for the Democratic Management of
Technoscience: Governance, Participation and the Political Today, Science as Culture, 17:2,
101-119, DOI: 10.1080/09505430802062869

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 Science as Culture
Vol. 17, No. 2, 101 –119, June 2008

Challenges for the Democratic

Management of Technoscience:
Governance, Participation and the
Political Today
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DOMINIQUE PESTRE
EHESS, Paris, France and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT The democratic management of technoscience and techno-scientific products, in and by

society, has become a contentious issue. The issues have been framed in diverse ways, often
marginalizing the question of power and of political-economic macro-regulations. This paper
advocates more down-to-Earth, anti-euphemistic, and realpolitik-oriented ways of describing
what organizes today’s techno-scientific world. In our market-based democracies, dialogic and
participatory democracy is not central to the regulation of technoscience, techno-scientific
knowledge and products. These are regulated mainly by other institutions that lie outside the
dialogic order. Democracy is not a political regime free from conflict; discourses of participation
have become central elements of a new form of governmentality. New concepts such as
‘sustainable development’ may conceal more than they reveal about what is at stake.
Deconstructing them in a systematic manner, and building genealogies of their deployment and
acceptance, would be helpful.
These recent developments should induce us to reconsider two key questions: how to talk
positively about various kinds of knowledge, and how to understand the various links between
science, the political order and democracy. Today we are living at a time of maximal tension
between two great historical dimensions of the ‘modernization’ process—one linked to democracy
and its extension, the other to human invention and technophilic business. Given these
developments, we should develop a reflexive look at the roles we play in the globalization
process. We must take up these difficult and contradictory questions, while not restricting
ourselves to what may be instrumentally realizable.

Between knowledge and action, philosophy makes no deduction. It simply opens an

interval where we can shift the modalities and certainties on which domination
depends (Rancière, 2004, my translation).

The democratic management of technoscience and techno-scientific products, in and by

society, has become a contentious issue. The issues have been framed in diverse ways,

Correspondence Address: Dominique Pestre, 234 rue du Faubourg Saint Martin, 75010 Paris, France. Email:
pestre@ehess.fr

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/08/020101–19 # 2008 Process Press

DOI: 10.1080/09505430802062869
 102 D. Pestre

often marginalizing the question of power and of political-economic macro-regulations.

This paper advocates more down-to-Earth, anti-euphemistic, and realpolitik-oriented
ways of describing what organizes today’s techno-scientific world. It opens up a broad dis-
cussion on the values that inform some practitioners of Science and Technology Studies
(STS), especially when considering the question of ‘the political’. This term denotes the
French concept le politique, i.e. what defines politics as a field of reflection and philos-
ophy—by contrast to la politique, official politics in the everyday mundane sense.
Since many approaches in STS have de facto become normative, in their own way, this
paper also examines their implicit norms, their implicit philosophy. My suggestion would
be, for example, that the strategy of merely following actors, that has enormous methodo-
logical advantages, also has a cost and a politics which do not help in grasping some of the
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major changes of today’s world.1 As Haraway (1991) put it when considering gender
relations nearly two decades ago, we might face a personality disorder if we do only sym-
metrical anthropology and/or adopt agnostic deconstructionist modes—at the very
moment when we need to understand the forms of domination which redefine our every-
day experience.2
As the overall structure, this paper has three main parts. First I briefly present some
major changes in the regime of science in society over recent decades. Then I propose
six theses—six criticisms of the way the questions are often framed in parts of the STS
literature. And I conclude by addressing the above questions.

1. Recent Changes in the Regime of Science in Society

As an introduction, I would like briefly to review some of the significant changes our
societies have undergone over the last three decades. Of course, I cannot consider now
at which rhythm, according to which logic and through which actors such changes have
happened (Pestre, 2003, 2005). I would only summarize a huge literature and my convic-
tions by saying that we have passed from a group of dominant cités de justice that regu-
lated social relations to quite different arrangements.
Freely borrowing from Boltanski and Thévenot (1991, 2006),3 I would characterize
the ‘common worlds of social justice’ of the mid-twentieth century (at least in Europe)
in the following terms. On the one hand, there were three major common worlds defining
the ‘good society’: (1) the civic world of the nation-state, exemplified by the welfare state
or the labour contracts signed between workers’ unions and managers in France, Germany,
and elsewhere. This was linked to a discourse that presented the sciences as quite auton-
omous from society, and ready to be put into practice for the common good; (2) the indus-
trial world of enterprise, interested in efficiency and planning, but also in integrating the
sciences and the workforce into the company as long-term partners—a norm that was in
agreement with the ideology and practice of the welfare state; and (3) the hierarchical
world of tradition, the top-down modes of conceiving authority and power. Together,
these three worlds of social justice defined a dominant way of being in society, stressing
respect for labour and merit, for integration and social protection, for ‘progress’ and the
‘rational development of the nation’. On the other hand, organized around quite a different
set of values, the market world had an appetite for freer movement of goods and funds, a
preference for laissez-faire legislation and opportunistic action. Nevertheless the market
world still accepted state regulation and contractually organized social relations.
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 103

In recent decades, a new set of values for social behaviour and justice has progressively
reordered most social beliefs. In this new ‘common universe’, the market world became the
dominant form of regulation, while itself changing between 1960 and 2000 (Pestre, 2003, ch.
3). In the new ‘common universe’ that finally took shape, personal engagement, responsibil-
ity, transparency and participation became the values that matter. Derived from that universe
is the notion of governance—built and advocated by major international institutions like the
World Bank, by most think tanks and European governments. This concept signalled the
engagement of business on behalf of ‘social and environmental responsibility’ (much in
vogue since the 1980s), as well as most programmes in the underdeveloped world when
carried out by NGOs funded by the major agencies of the North (Aubertin, 2005).
This new universe of justice—this new ‘spirit of capitalism’, as Boltanski and Chiapello
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(2000, 2006) have called it—now organizes today’s dominant values.

Using a different vocabulary, we have passed from one form of hegemony to another,
from one way of regulating social relations to another way. Two elements lie at the heart
of this change. First, a new conception of the government of both people and things, a
new practice of governmentality that stresses the duty of self-governance but also develops
unprecedented (mainly economic and managerial) procedures which bear on many kinds of
subjects—consumers, patients, workers, professionals, etc. (Lemke, 2001). Second, a dis-
mantling of the regulations put in place in the previous century (e.g. the welfare state) in
favour of an extension of property rights, along with an attack on ‘commons’, e.g. the
privatization of scientific knowledge through the extension of patent policy.
This situation has built upon, has helped invent, and has given legitimacy to new social
and political demands (e.g. human rights)—even if these rights were instituted at the cost
of other rights (rights to social protection, for example) and were often granted without
precisely defining to whom they would have a concrete meaning (though they could
still have social efficacy). Like most social processes, the process exhibits contradictory
tendencies. Considering the links between knowledge and participation, for example,
new forms of biopolitical control developed at the very moment when individuals got
far more possibilities of free and independent action and when demands for renewed
forms of democracy exploded in civil society (Brown, 2005; Rose, 2007). The process
appears contradictory on at least another level: because of the growing demands for
(and the success of) more democratic, participatory and dialogic behaviours when asses-
sing techno-scientific products, people in power developed strategies to cope with such
demands (Foucault, 2004a, 2004b; de Certeau, 1991, ch. 3). In fact, learning to manipulate
the demand for democratic debate has now been at the heart of company strategy and
politics for at least two decades.

2. Six Statements to Open Up Debate

Statement number 1: In our market-based democracies, dialogic and participatory
democracy is not (and perhaps cannot become) central to the regulation of tech-
noscience, techno-scientific knowledge and products. These are regulated mainly
by other (competing or parallel) institutions that lie outside the dialogic order:
markets, administrations, courts of justice, etc.

In the STS field, much work has been oriented toward the ideal of participatory and
dialogic democracy. This approach, which seeks to encourage the expression of diverse
 104 D. Pestre

points of view, is intended to facilitate socially ‘robust’ solutions and precautionary

attitudes. In a Habermasian move, emphasis is placed on the principles that all delibera-
tions should be open and public, that they should be adversarial and include non-special-
ists, that the decision-makers should be publicly accountable for their choice. From this
standpoint, well conceived, systematic, open and well-managed confrontations are
likely to lead to the ‘best’ solutions, in technical as well as in social terms. The results
about what the ‘best arrangements’ should be—about the ideal forms of organization
for democratic exchange and expertise around techno-industrial knowledge and pro-
ducts—are extremely important. They bring out some essential paths to follow and I
remain actively engaged in the struggle for their refinement.
However, this approach—a search for the ‘best’ way to decide through participatory
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methods—idealizes social reality and simplifies the processes by which decisions are actu-
ally made in today’s world. As widely acknowledged, the highly uneven distribution of
social and symbolic capital implies a very uneven distribution of the capacity to ‘partici-
pate’. The capacity to create an association or an expert group, to mobilize funds or the
media, is strongly determined in social and economic terms, as well as in the relations
between North and South (Lash et al., 1996).
It is often the same social groups that lose out, the same ‘new groups’ that emerge as the
winners, and the same questions that are forgotten [as analysed, among others, by Sennett
(2006), Dupuy (2005) and Dejours (1998)]. Perhaps this kind of discourse sounds a little
old-fashioned in our networked, post-modern societies—which have moved beyond the
old dichotomies of rich and poor, owners and dispossessed, ‘work and leisure, paid and
unpaid, public and private, profit-sharing and volunteer work, business and ethics’
(Boltanski & Chiapello, 2000). Nevertheless, ignoring or downplaying this issue means
either remaining blind to a monumental reality or acting in bad faith. These inequalities
and injustices are simply too large and influential for us not to consider them with the
utmost attention.
Moreover, the participatory emphasis underestimates the complex game of institutional
politics. This is the case with the making and formatting of ‘publics’ (Schaffer, 2005)
through management techniques or ‘evidence-based’ medicine for example, with the
relationships between political institutions and the media, with the very many modes of
regulating techno-scientific products in our ‘complex societies’. Their variety cannot,
and perhaps should not, be over-simplified. These diverse modes range from national
and international expert bodies for daily monitoring production and product safety, to
administrations and agencies elaborating new regulations, to court decisions. Each
mode has its own bent, presupposing certain frames and favouring certain solutions.
‘Deciding’ which one will run the show is a ‘choice’ with often already-implied
consequences.
A related logic is at play in the world of professional politics when confronted with dia-
logic democracy. Politicians are regularly exposed to electoral sanction, they are con-
cerned about their re-election, they feel ‘in charge’—and so they often demand the
right to make the final decision. They consider any dialogic process (always a very
local and partisan exercise) as one way among others of addressing societal demands.
More generally, short of abandoning representative democracy, the question seems to
be how to articulate between many forms of democratic activity—regularly organized
elections, ‘citizen juries’, lobbying, post-hoc controls, equilibrium of powers, judicial
and legislative acts, as well as political activism of all kinds, e.g. NGOs, associations
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 105

and political parties. This assemblage has not been considered seriously enough in its
complexity.4
Finally, and most importantly, decision-making in market democracies depends on a far
greater variety of logics than rational debate or the exchange of arguments alone. The
sphere of the political is not so central to decision-making because a decisive role is
played by economic actors who produce, innovate, buy and sell; decisions of major
importance (in social and environmental terms) are simply being made in markets. Put
more bluntly, democratic procedures are often only reactive, occupying a subaltern pos-
ition in relation to the de facto situations created by financial and economic actors
(Pestre, 2007a).
These actors constantly reconfigure the social by inventing and distributing techno-
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scientific products, by reshaping techno-industrial systems; the social and political conse-
quences are often discussed in technology studies since the much-cited article of Langdon
Winner (1980). ‘Civil society’ does not lack the means to fight back; for example, consider
the very dynamic ‘form of life’ of Linux users and their capacity to oppose Microsoft
hegemonic tendencies. However, acting as though the main regulations were reached
through participatory or democratic procedures is at best naı̈ve, at worst misleading.
These approaches forget that democratic societies rely essentially on not obeying any
one unique set of rules, of not depending on any one single decisional system. Decisions
are made according to many parallel and different logics that undoubtedly operate within
the political arena, but which are also reached through financial and economic action.
On a higher level, the main actors of the world economy today constitute a meta-power
largely disassociated from states, public spaces and the sphere of the political (Beck, 2002).
Their strength resides in their capacity to do things, to invest where they deem appropriate,
and to withdraw from any country that contests their approach too vigorously. This meta-
power is not in need of democratic legitimacy even if it redefines the political (e.g. as
moral engagement) and efficiently reconfigures the legal infrastructure (via the WTO, cabi-
nets d’affaires and so-called ‘independent’ central banks).5 This meta-power helps to under-
mine the classic forms of democratic accountability, replacing such processes with infra-
political practices—e.g. political correctness or superficial transparency. It has constructed
a universe of regulation around itself which is characterized by ever-increasing litigation, by
the introduction of voluntary codes of ethics, and by the exceptional role played by inter-
national institutions like the World Bank, which govern large parts of the South through
an interesting new mix of words, knowledge and financial power to lend (Goldman,
2005). These remain beyond citizen control and dialogic procedures.
This situation leads us to a central question, which carries particular force in the current
world where market-based regulations have attained an expanse unknown since the last
third of the nineteenth century. The question is whether the political, as the site of demo-
cratic debate, is still authorized to rule on the proliferation of techno-scientific products—
especially when most people judge their effects to be irreversible, dangerous or of no inter-
est for the common wealth. The question is whether or not all commerce is justified a
priori when it radically affects societies—i.e. whether the right to commerce could
suffer limitations. The tendency today, which has flourished in the last three or four
decades and that now constitutes the norm, is to say: no, the political cannot and even
should not exercise such a power. The only possible exceptions would be areas that
bear upon traditional morality, e.g. cloning or paedophilia—although not the sex and pros-
titution industries, which are enjoying an enormous boom (Poulin, 2005).
 106 D. Pestre

Doesn’t this tendency represent a major regression for democracy? After all, in the
industrial capitalism of the middle of the twentieth century, the market world accepted
the possibility of such limitations, as well as other forms of collective regulation and redis-
tribution. Such questions could (and should) constitute major areas of research. By not
investigating them, the field of STS may be undergoing an essential regression.

Statement number 2: Technical democracy and hybrid fora potentially undermine

the right to dissent. And, unfortunately, citizens’ juries or consensus conferences
may reach proposals which ‘travel’ (in social terms) as poorly as those that
emanate from the world of representative politics.
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Democracy is not a political regime free from conflict. As Ricoeur (1991) says, ‘conflict is
neither an accident nor a misfortune’ but rather ‘the expression of the undecidable nature
of the public good’. Only by forgetting this could one promote the belief that, if the pro-
cedure is good and properly engineered, then a more rational, optimal and legitimate con-
sensus will emerge. Our societies are not made of one unique world of justice, nor of one
unique universe of reference. The decisions made, as well as the dominant arrangements
reached, cannot avoid also being choices in favour of some against others. The notion of
consensus—in science studies as in political sciences—might therefore be misleading.
Looking symmetrically at the choices finally made from the viewpoint of those who
will be most affected by them might be a helpful heuristic tool, in terms of mental and
social hygiene.
The fact that collectives of people establish themselves, that they demonstrate the limits
of representative democracy, or the violence done to them, is more than positive. The fact
that proposals are made on the basis of different cités de justice, that new forms of empow-
erment emerge in the social body, is a fantastic step forward. But it is equally important to
be attentive to the question of who is most in need of help in order to gain some form of
empowerment.
Decisions remain acts of authority—even when they are the outcome of the most open
process. The central function of politics is to learn how to live with conflict and to turn any
potential enemy into an adversary willing to play by common rules. Once a dispute is
settled, however, antagonism may not simply disappear. As Paul Ricoeur (1991) has
remarked, ‘Political discussion is without conclusion, even though it is not without
decision’. Because the game of the political is a blend of collaboration and conflict, and
because it does not constitute the central locus for resolving questions in market democ-
racies, the right to dissent has to be defended; one must always retain the right to publicly
contest both the decision and the états de fait. Cases of injustice will continue to arise if we
forget this right, if we behave as though everyone had the same possibility to participate,
as though the procedure would allow us to arrive at the optimal solutions—or more pre-
cisely: if we deny the right of the victim of a decision to rationally persist in his or her
refusal and to continue protesting or go to court.
More importantly, most decisions in techno-scientific matters imply fundamental
choices about the society one wants (what kind of agriculture, for example?), about
ethics (what kind of humanity?), and about the environment (what kind of sustainability?),
so their acceptability always remains problematic. This is certainly the case with poli-
ticians (notably in Europe) caught between the Scylla of the demands of their electorate
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 107

and the Charybdis of what they see as necessary to ensure international competitiveness of
their national economy.
This situation might be as true for participatory procedures, however wonderfully they
might be conceived. Once they leave the circle in which they were originally elaborated,
the resulting propositions might no longer possess any greater legitimacy in the social
body than those elaborated by the politicians. This somewhat resembles Hobbes’ argument
against Boyle and the new natural philosophy, whose conclusions he regarded as being a
priori unacceptable since they were decided in a closed space, a space not accessible to
public scrutiny—e.g. the Royal Society of London. There is no obvious reason why
these propositions should not suffer a similar fate and be rejected by large sectors of
the population. The convictions reached by these ‘panels’—mounted in the constrained
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spaces of consensus conferences or other citizens’ juries—may not ‘travel’ any better
than those of the politicians.
Thus the social efficacy of participatory procedures might be more problematic than
expected. If the hope is that a socially better and more acceptable choice emerges from
such a procedure, the result risks being a disappointment.

Statement number 3: Discourses of participation and good governance are to be

found everywhere now. They have become central elements of a new form of gov-
ernmentality, combining calls for individual government of the self and extended
regimes of rationalization. These new forms of governmentality should become
central objects for our investigation.

Governance has now become the standard way of conceptualizing the political. Much has
already been written about what this word implies in ideological terms, as well as on the
chronology of its appearance. The concept was initially elaborated in business manage-
ment circles in the late 1960s when managers were less and less capable of properly
running the shop floor—at FIAT, for example, or at General Motors in the United
States (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2006; Waring, 1991).
The concept spread in a first wave in the early 1980s, following the demands for trans-
parency made by managers of pension funds and because of the renewal of shareholders’
involvement in business. For them, a transparent governance of their assets was essential
(Pestre, 2003, ch. 3). Next, ‘good governance’ moved into politics via the discourses of
international institutions such as the World Bank; it then started to appear in the rhetoric
of NGOs working in the South to make public life more ‘accountable’ (Kalaora, 1999).
The 1990s stage of this evolution was the notion of ‘global governance’ and ‘global exper-
tise’, in part theorized at the London School of Economics, that aimed at establishing
common values for the management of a collective future (Moreau Défarges, 2001).
As Moreau Défarges (2001) and others have suggested, governance discourses convey
the idea that the world of politics, as it was invented and has been practised for more than
two centuries, is de facto becoming obsolete. Not only because it is based on an overly
conflictual understanding of the social, but also because it relies too much on the state
and the formal procedures of representative democracy. Our societies now have to
solve global questions, e.g. in environmental terms, which have high stakes for the
entire planet. Our societies have been pacified from the outside; we have finished with
the Westphalian model and no longer need to fear wars of aggression. And they have
been pacified from within; we live in wealthy societies. In sum—thus goes the happy
 108 D. Pestre

discourse of governance—there are no longer any real conflicts of interest or wars; and we
no longer have to worry about the redistribution of goods, since expanding globalized
markets are the solution. Therefore society no longer has any important choice to
debate; politics can fade away and at last allow ‘civil society’ to auto-organize freely,
as it sees fit (Falk, 1999).
In such a frame, the only remaining questions are procedural and managerial—perhaps
with the help of an international police acting against any small groups that may perturb
this globally happy world. In this universe of good will, all have been ideologically recon-
ciled.6 Thus, the political question of representation is no longer a live issue, and every-
thing has become the responsibility of everyone. The only task that remains is
supervisory; the questions of sovereignty, legitimacy and power can be quietly forgotten.
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As a specially controversial case, agricultural biotechnology has provoked European

citizens’ opposition to the entire innovation trajectory, but this central issue is excluded
from formal public participation. In EU regulatory procedures, public comments have
taken a broad scope, but these comments are rejected as irrelevant to the official scientific
criteria for relevant evidence (Ferretti, 2007). In state-sponsored participatory Technology
Assessment exercises, issues of corporate control over the agri-food chain have been chan-
nelled and reduced into technical questions of regulatory control measures (Levidow,
2007).
To address these issues, STS practitioners should develop a more informed political
philosophy. The task is not easy. But it is essential to reconsider how we conceptualize
contemporary societies and their many modes of self-regulation; which functions are per-
formed by states, agencies, NGOs and international bodies today; what are the relations
between procedures, substantive questions and values; and between representative, parti-
cipatory and oppositional politics?
If industrial and financial technoscience has become a major power today, then let us
turn to good old Montesquieu and try and imagine ‘a constitution for risk societies’ to
counterbalance its powers. According to Halffman (2003), ‘legal guarantees of a [new]
constitutional state’ should be on our agenda, by adding ‘the freedom of citizens in a
decent society’ to ‘the integration of interests’ through various forms of dialogic activity,
and to the social awareness of a very unequal distribution of powers. As Halffman writes,
‘there is a gap on the political theory-flank of constructivist STS the size of a library’—and
that gap needs to be filled (Halffman, 2003, pp. 476 –477; also Latour, 1999).
We can probably go a step further and say that today ‘governance’ constitutes the new,
more elaborate and dominant form of governmentality. Following Foucault, governmen-
tality is considered here the art of governing, the set of administrative knowledge and tech-
nologies ‘by means of which we are able to constitute, define, organize, and
instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, acting freely, can have with respect to
one another’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 728). These new forms of governmentality are not the
exclusive property of nation states or international organizations. Indeed, as I mentioned
above, ‘governance’ was initially conceived in the world of business and finance; the
concept is now at the core of any shop floor management. Consider also how medicine
evolved in recent decades, becoming increasingly managed at the moment patients
evolved into consumers and activists.
An exemplary case is the way migrant people are now treated by state agencies (Fassin
& Memmi, 2004). In Paris they are required to be free subjects in charge of themselves, to
describe to immigration officers their own itinerary and objectives. The ‘charters of
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 109

corporate responsibility’ are a kind of symmetrical object. Proposed by most companies

nowadays, these texts, in which managers lay out their social and environmental commit-
ments, serve multiple goals, namely: to affirm the moral rectitude of the company, to guide
action, to present a brand image, and to protect it against challenges from activist groups
that might launch smear campaigns or boycotts. As another aim of such charters, by enga-
ging the level of voluntary commitments, a company may escape restrictive legislation
that might be imposed from the outside.
Rating agencies (comparable to the ones found in financial markets) have thus started to
appear. The idea behind such agencies is to assess what companies actually do in social
and environmental terms, to compare their engagements against what they do, and to
make these assessments public. These agencies claim that doing so will help give more
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weight to voluntary business commitments, that it will make companies effectively

more accountable, that it will help convert these charters into public contracts (Pestre,
2003).
Taking these engagements of ‘good governance’ at face value, and monitoring their
implementation, constitutes astute politics vis-à-vis new forms of governmentality; they
should be backed. However, these business engagements form part of larger strategies
put in place over the course of at least the last two decades. These strategies were con-
ceived with the help of image consultants and advertising companies. The book Going
Green is not alone in offering advice to companies. The author suggests that companies
should be ‘model(s) of openness’, should ‘submit (their) activities to public scrutiny’
and should ‘keep up a constant dialogue with everyone interested in (their) performance’
(Harrison, 1993).
He also advises them to get down to the work of directly managing this dialogue. Initi-
ating such a dialogue allows the company to limit the extent of the topics to be dealt with,
to define the rhythm of meetings—and, for example, to debate endlessly without ever
restricting the company’s vital interests. Regularly reviving this dialogue allows the
company to choose its partners, to sponsor certain (notably environmental) activities in
areas that are of marginal economic importance while still being essential for the com-
pany’s image, and also to isolate those who do not wish to enter into a ‘reasonable’ dis-
cussion. As a decisive piece of advice by Harrison, it is also central to learn to speak
the language of the objectors, to show the company’s openness by using this very
language, e.g. ‘sustainable development’.7
In cases where the companies are not in control of the negotiation process, these same
communication consultants advise companies to create their own ‘interest groups’ (with
suitable names, such as the Global Climate Coalition set up by the oil industry), to
answer critical reports with new reports, to regularly demand the reopening of the discus-
sion while continuing to act on other levels. In this way, the company can have the dialogic
process stalled, permanently if necessary. This is quite an efficient way to decide and con-
tinue doing business without being limited by any formal rule [see Rowell (2002), which
includes the above quotations on communications advice].
In case you think that all this comes out of a second-rate spy thriller, I can assure you:
these practices have been theorized by professional people; you can find them on the Web
and in libraries. The scenario I just presented largely corresponds to the history of the
debate over climate change, as managed by the oil industry over the last two decades.
These practices in no way invalidate the importance of dialogic democracy or the neces-
sity to promote it. But they remind us not to be too naı̈ve—and to recognize the various
 110 D. Pestre

ways our contributions and actions can be used by other people. As another lesson, STS
may often have a politics despite itself—and despite us.

Statement number 4: New concepts and categories are at the core of our common
thinking—e.g. sustainable development or precaution. These notions may conceal
more than they reveal about what is at stake. Deconstructing them in a systematic
manner, and building genealogies of their deployment and acceptance, would be
helpful.

The discourse of ‘good governance’ is often combined with other discourses—that of ‘sus-
tainable development’ for example, a key concept of the last two decades. Certainly there
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was a good intention in promoting such an oxymoron in the mid-1980s. Certainly the
concept was historically decisive and heuristic in forcing us to change our way of
dealing with the difficult relationship between development and environment. But the
concept has also helped us to forget, to marginalize other forms of knowledge which
were formerly well-developed.
For example, the current all-encompassing discourse of sustainable development has
replaced a tension that used to pit the discourse of unlimited technological development
in the service of resource-intensive growth against those who advocated a different idea
of development. Over the last two decades, this opposition seems to have vanished—
even if the expression of ‘sustainable development’ forced recalcitrant people to take
the environment seriously into account, which is a good thing. At the same time, the
term has undergone more than a euphemization.8
As an extreme example, consider the definition given by the CEO of BP France:

Sustainable development is first and foremost about producing more energy, more
oil, more gas, and maybe more coal and nuclear fuel, as well as more renewable
energy, of course. At the same time, we need to make sure that this production is
not achieved at the expense of the environment (de Fabiani, 2001, my translation).

More precisely, the debate of the 1960s and 1970s has shifted ground. Voluntarily limited
growth is less and less seen as an option among official institutions. No doubt rich and par-
allel questions are raised today—through the thematic of industrial ecology, for example
(Erkman, 1998). Despite statements like Fabiani’s, we can hope that things might be chan-
ging among economic and political actors. In the same way, we could also hope that Das-
gupta (2000) will become wrong in the near future when claiming that markets are not the
most appropriate institutions for protecting the environment.
However, overly positive views concerning sustainable development might assist an
overly facile fusion of fish and fowl, reassuring everyone of their own environmental
and economic good sense. They might allow us to lead a comfortable existence in a
happy and reasonable world, since we now know how to progress in a healthy
manner—how to think about development and sustainability. Thanks to Hans Jonas and
Ulrich Beck, we are now aware of the profound uncertainties generated by technological
development and are thus able to reflexively assign both this uncertainty and our ignorance
to their appropriate places. Thus we can see ourselves as conceptually mastering the situ-
ation, as having finally discovered the means to reconcile what an ideology—apparently
much too conflictual and ‘political’—had formerly obliged us to regard as perhaps
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 111

irreconcilably opposed. All the same, despite this conceptual, ethical, and post-modern
leap forward, the putative solution may conceal a logic of unquestioned, unfettered
growth—without seriously considering alternatives (Jamison, 1996).
How can development become sustainable without questioning our modes of consump-
tion? Has individual consumerism (e.g. every car having air conditioning) lost all sense in
relation to any possible collective choice or in relation to global warming? Does the
market’s profit-oriented technophilia naturally lead in the direction of conservation, pre-
caution or prevention of risks? Does the redistribution of wealth have nothing to do
with socially sustainable development?
While it is clear that Communism is dead and gone (God rest its soul), does this mean
that such questions have lost all their interest? I fear not—even though I realize that such
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an outspoken comment might merit excommunication. On a more serious note, we may

too regularly forget, when in the middle of our ‘scientific research’, that there are too
many things that we do not and cannot know, and that we are busy actively producing
ignorance (Ravetz, 1993).

Statement number 5: These recent developments should induce us to reconsider

two key questions: how to talk positively about various kinds of knowledge, includ-
ing science; and how to understand the various links between science, the political
order and democracy.

During the post-War boom and the Cold War, public knowledge was said to be free and
autonomous, allowing the unfettered pursuit of the truth. That belief constituted the core of
what Brian Balogh called the ‘pro-ministrative state’, a close-knit system of professional
experts and state and business leaders, who found ways of managing society during the
first Cold War (Balogh, 1991; Dahan & Pestre, 2004). In recent decades, refusals and con-
testations of this model have become highly visible in the social sphere—in the context of
atomic energy, public health scandals, the Bhopal disaster, the French scandal of contami-
nated blood, asbestos hazards, etc.; likewise in the social sciences—with contestations by
feminism, science studies, cultural studies and so on.
A new style of governmentality has developed around the techno-sciences over the last
three decades. This has reversed the status which is officially accorded to knowledge.
Looking at how the major economic and political actors use the notion of knowledge in
societal controversies, we see a public inversion of positions. These actors have come
to play with the same ideas that STS developed: that all knowledge is partial and partisan,
that it is normal for experts to disagree, that all the parties need to express themselves and
‘negotiate’ agreement about theories and facts. Indeed, they find themselves promoting
this account of knowledge whenever convenient, though they might continue taking
‘decisions based on sound science’. In the spheres most exposed to polemics, wherever
the interests of large companies and of the world’s most powerful states are at stake
(e.g. atomic energy, biotechnology, agro-business, and public health), absolutely anything
and everything can be said and written under the cover of science.
Such behaviours were the target of the petition signed by 60 Nobel Prize and National
Medal of Science winners in 2004 and by the report of the Union of Concerned Scientists
in 2004. These texts aim to expose ‘the suppression and distortion of research findings by
high-ranking Bush administration political appointees’ (concerning climate change, air
quality, agricultural pollution, etc.), as well as ‘the undermining of the quality and integrity
 112 D. Pestre

of the appointment process’, and the ‘manipulation of the scientific advisory system to
prevent the presentation of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political
agenda’. Such conflict arises in several controversies, e.g. about the prevention of lead poi-
soning, health and diet questions, workplace safety, and so on (UCS, 2004a, 2004b).
No doubt we could read these texts as deliberate actions on the part of scientists to reas-
sert their authority. That may be true, but they also seem to be symptomatic of a major
social and political change that warrants close attention. Another recent example is the
intervention by the Bush administration into US and UN reports on obesity—especially
the conclusions that should be drawn in terms of diet, food, and soft drinks.9
The same instrumentalization has been theorized in political circles. Consider the Luntz
Research Company, which advises the US Republican Party on their public relations and
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helps them to justify their opposition to the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols. In order to ‘win
the Global Warming Debate’, the company notes that the American people believe that
there is no consensus (or something near consensus) among scientists. ‘Should the
public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their view about global
warming will change accordingly’, warns the Company.
Its report draws the following conclusion: ‘Therefore, you need to continue to make the
lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other
experts in the field’. You should also emphasize, says the document, the importance of
‘acting only with all the facts in hand’ and ‘making the right decision, not the quick
decision’. Presenting the ‘language that works’, the memo proposes the following
expressions—which were regularly used by US Republican leaders: ‘We must not rush
to judgment before all the facts are in. We need to ask more questions’. Or ‘Scientists
can extrapolate all kinds of things from today’s data, but that doesn’t tell us anything
about tomorrow’s world’. And rather than regulate, it is better to insist that ‘what we
need to do is to put American creativity and American innovation to work’. That way,
the memo concludes, we will have a greater chance of avoiding an international agreement
that would threaten the economy. At the same time, the United States will be able to
declare that they help ‘other nations save their forests and build safer energy sources’
(Luntz Research Company, 1994).
It is important not to misunderstand my point: I am not so naı̈ve as to doubt that all
knowledge is always and already caught up in the social, that it is always situated and
cannot become a view from nowhere. Knowledge, and scientific knowledge in particular,
is always enmeshed in broad networks; no such thing as ‘objectivity’ exists or could
exist—however we might wish this were the case in today’s context. It is crucial to
support the multiplication of knowledge institutions, to favour debate, to promote encoun-
ters as learning processes—in sum, to act on the idea that knowledge and ignorance go
together and are socially distributed. It is always better to promote the diversity of sites
for knowledge production and to maximize confrontation (Pestre, 2005, 2007b).
However, two other things are just as important. First, there is such a thing as deliberate
manipulation—which is becoming a rule, precisely to destroy any collective learning
process. Second, the control of legitimate knowledge is politically decisive; those in
power can easily remain satisfied with a view that ‘everything is relative’ when they
can alternatively produce facts on the ground. I do not pretend to have a simple solution
for the dilemma that results from this situation, but its greater urgency means that it must
be addressed strategically. Whatever the issue—the evaluation of drugs, comparisons
between GMOs and non-GMOs, the causes of obesity, or the health effects of bad
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 113

working conditions—the present tendency runs overwhelmingly against attempts at

‘objectifying’ expertise, e.g. by privatizing it or suppressing certain institutions.
Consequently, the weakest—e.g. those who are furthest removed from the dominant
orthodoxy or the mass media—have difficulties making their version of knowledge
heard. Given this problem, it will not suffice to keep re-opening the black boxes of knowl-
edge, as STS and history of science has done so effectively when confronting scientism.
As surprising as it may seem, therefore, we should also consider the tactical possibility of
helping keep some black boxes closed (at least for a while)—against their being rashly and
artificially reopened for instrumental purposes. In other words, we should become more
pragmatic in the public management of knowledge. These observations lead me to
make three proposals.
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First, we should return to a theoretical consideration of what makes knowledge differ-

ent—e.g. what makes it different than political discourse. Jasanoff (2003) and Wynne
(2003), rather than Collins and Evans (2002, 2007), are right in terms of epistemological
principles. Nevertheless, as Collins and Evans rightly note: while STS scholars claim that
politics and science are organically intertwined and continuous, scholars also know well
how to distinguish them. To say that science and politics are organically dependent
does not imply that they are identical, that all claims are worth the same, that we are
unable to make distinctions. This holds regardless of the case—when scientists assess
the effects of a pesticide on health, or when historians debate what was at stake for
Pasteur at Pouilly-le-Fort. Whatever the difficulty of the task, we need to put these ques-
tions back at the core of our theoretical concerns.
As my second proposal, STS scholars should accept the limits of our own science, be
ready to water down our certainties and, for example, introduce other differences which
we did not often consider in the past. Although we may agree that there is no such
thing as ‘objectivity’, nevertheless we can fight for it. We can promote attitudes and insti-
tutions that re-affirm the duty of objectivity—just as we fought for institutions that favour
attitudes of independence in expert processes. Norms differ from practices and attitudes,
but norms matter and have their efficacy. At that level, the key is to imagine the means to
translate the norm into institutional terms—which is not easy.
As my third proposal, we should be as pragmatic as possible because we are faced with a
real paradox and powerful actors. We will have to work with strongly context-dependent
propositions, and with considerations that are theoretically unsatisfying and contradictory.
But if the world we are facing is itself contradictory, then we cannot avoid such solutions;
in fact, even STS seems to be a human construction. In other words, as practitioners of
STS, we should withdraw ourselves from the reassuring beachheads that we have con-
structed and return, along with everybody else, to the cold waters of the new world that
is taking shape in front of (and with) us.

Statement number 6: Today, we are living at a time of maximal tension between

two great historical dimensions of the ‘modernization’ process—one linked to
democracy and its extension, the other to human invention and technophilic
business.

Gathering some strands of my argument, now I propose a more global reading. My initial
argument rests on a proposition made by Ravetz (2001) about the paradox in which we find
ourselves today.
 114 D. Pestre

My thesis can be summarized as follows: we face large-scale social disputes in

Europe—around techno-scientific – industrial products, around GMOs, stem cell research
or cloning, around nuclear power plants and nuclear waste, around the environment, etc.
These disputes express today’s sharpening of an historical tension of the ‘modernization
process’ that has shaped our societies over the last two centuries.10
That tension could be described as follows: on the one side is a democratization process,
the possibility of a dialogue that places the political at its centre; and on the other side, is
technological progress, human ingenuity and invention. On one side lie the demands (the
rights) for individual and collective recognition and control over oneself and one’s life; on
the other lie the demands (the rights) of science-and-technology-based activity and of
course business to promote innovation. On one side is ‘the political’, as the space in
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which the polis collectively decides its future; on the other side are the values of free entre-
preneurs and the free market that are entitled to rely on scientific and technological inno-
vation to devise new products and do business.
Both sides are based on a ‘rational’ understanding of the situation. On one side is the
political rationality of precaution, a rationality that wants to debate the individual and col-
lective consequences of actions before accepting the new techno-industrial-scientific
order and its products. On the other side is the technological and commercial drive that
up to now has always been under control and has been profitable to mankind. (Are you
opposed to new drugs?)
Note, finally, that both aspects simultaneously made our modern (and post-modern)
world and that both dimensions might be crucial: if societies were governed solely by
market rules, if nothing else were there to counterbalance them, then societies would prob-
ably disintegrate quickly and be exposed to constant violence. On the other hand, a world
whose allocation of goods would be carried out solely by political leaders (even if demo-
cratically elected) would lead to just as dramatic a disaster (Fitoussi, 2004a, 2004b). No
doubt democratic debate is integral to modernity, but twentieth-century history has
made us very cautious, and we now know how well-identified groups and minorities
can be systematically excluded by formally democratic procedures.
Many things have contributed to the emergence of this new tension over the last
decades. A key factor was the drastic expansion of proprietary rights in the early 1980s
United States—which developed in organic conjunction with the possibilities that
science and its associated technologies have opened up in terms of practical action: the
possibility of recomposing DNA, of large computational means, etc. This redefinition
of property took shape through a series of deliberate and political moves, but also
through a set of largely independent moves—the reorganization of Nasdaq and changes
in the pension funds regulations for example (Pestre, 2003).
Of course we cannot forget the weakening of the nation state as the central locus of
democratic decision, particularly in the South. Of course we should consider the
growing ‘technicization’ of decision-making processes and the multiplication of expert
advice (from economics to interdisciplinary activity around the environment), the prolifer-
ation of major techno-industrial failures (as in the case of mad cow disease), and decisive
sociological changes (the expansion of groups with high-level educational capital and the
growth of individualism and/or of identity politics). One element remains central,
however, the possibility to privatize what was hitherto defined as open, public knowledge.
The core of the new world we now live in is there, around a new definition of property. The
consequences include new modes of regulations on the international level (largely through
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 115

markets and the control of the ‘technological frontier’), massive redistribution of wealth,
major threats to forms of life, etc. That explains why the tension is again between demo-
cratic politics and the market’s technophilia, as the two major spheres of reference.11
So, in the debates that occupy large parts of our societies, at stake is an antagonism
between (at least) two different definitions of the collective good, two different emphases
on what is important in terms of political regulation today. Of course, many preoccupa-
tions are de facto intertwined in such a process: the question of trust in science, in exper-
tise, in administrative and economic regulations, in political and economic elites, in the
kind of progress the techno-industrial world promotes when opening one Pandora’s box
after the other and bringing about faits accomplis through market systems. But the core
is largely around property. So we should look at how more complex notions and practices
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of property could emerge.12

3. Importance of Widening our Agenda

What conclusions can we draw from these remarks about our way of working and acting,
about what we can do as intellectuals and social actors? As my first suggestion, we need to
avoid some excessively ‘pacified’ descriptions of the world and, for example, broaden our
understanding of the growing demand for the democratization of techno-scientific – indus-
trial choices. Many things are at stake—not only political issues, but also practical and
conceptual issues. As my second suggestion, we should abandon the quest for responses
that would be universally applicable, and instead tactically alternate the levels of
approach—from theoretical to pragmatic and back again, from the order of principle to
that of compromise, from the universal to the local, from the propositional to the critical,
from the constructive to the deconstructionist, and vice versa. We should learn to be
mobile in terms of our positions, presuppositions, objectives, tools, and preoccupations.
This could mean, for example, accepting in part the Habermasian version of the picture
and helping public debate to flourish where it might lead to positive reappropriations and a
productive learning process. At the same time, this could mean criticizing debate in radical
ways whenever instrumentalization seems to prevail. When considering the debate around
biopiracy and ‘indigenous knowledge’, we could enter the substantive debate and thus
develop a more complex understanding of property rights than those that have expanded
over the last two decades (Boisvert, 2005; Hermitte & Kahn, 2004).
This might also mean launching critiques against both governance and extreme forms of
neo-liberal governmentality, e.g. by pointing out the policies of the World Bank or the
inconsistencies in the social and environmental governance of business. We need to
analyse how the tangled power structures affect agro-food politics, what the Codex Ali-
mentarius has become following its political transformation by the WTO, as well as the
possibilities of alternative legal frameworks that would serve other ends. Similarly, it
might be interesting to assess the consequences of the new Private –Public Partnerships
which have been put in place in Africa over the last decade (Romi, forthcoming; Reich,
2002; Buse & Walt, 2002).
This also implies describing how one governs today by means of words, how battles
over governance have largely become battles conducted on a global scale to win over
minds.13 It also implies a reflexive look at ourselves, at the roles we play, whether con-
sciously or not, in the globalization process. Here, I am thinking of the transformation
that anthropology has undergone as a discipline since being regularly called upon to
 116 D. Pestre

help with introducing good governance in the South. This situation has sparked lively
debates within the anthropological community—about how it has been co-opted by
‘good governance’, the consequences for populations that are supposed to be reordered
with the help of anthropologists, and the consequences for anthropology as a discipline.14
A similar self-reflection could be started in the STS field.
In my view, we must take up these difficult and contradictory questions, while not
restricting ourselves to what may be instrumentally realizable. Probably this kind of reflec-
tion will not result in any solutions that can be put into practice in a straightforward way.
But this does not mean that we should avoid or postpone the task. Contradiction is a con-
stituent element of the world; avoiding it does not make it disappear. Reflexivity in the
social sciences requires an acceptance that one cannot always be in a position to offer a
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solution, and that critical thought is part of the tools we should develop. The alternative
would be a surrender to the ideology of positivist science.

Acknowledgements
This paper was first written at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in early 2004. It would
have been impossible to write it without the many discussions I had with colleagues:
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Gil Anidjar, Peter Hall, Zhiyuan Cui, Susan James, Beate
Rössler, Heike Paul and Pascal Grosse. This version is a slightly revised version of that
early paper. Rewriting it to take into account all that was published since that period—
and my own evolution on the topics—would have meant writing an altogether different
article. I nevertheless added several more recent bibliographical citations. Finally I
would like to thank Les Levidow for his crucial help in putting that paper into acceptable
English.

Notes
1
For the politics of STS, see Pestre (2004) and Pestre (2006), Chapter 3 and Conclusion; the special issue of
Social Studies of Science 26(2), May 1996; Halffman (2003) and Fuller (2000).
2
For a parallel version about colonial and post-colonial studies, and notably the ambiguities of the pro-
motion of ‘hybridity’ per se, see Shohat (1992).
3
I have modified the name Boltanski and Thévenot give to the various cités de justice they identify. I made
their analysis specific to the period of the first Cold War (because their sources provide evidence for doing
so)—not an analysis of cités de justice in general. These points would deserve a detailed justification that I
cannot provide here.
4
On the necessarily complex relationships between interest groups and politicians, see Lochard and
Simonet-Cusset (2003), notably the very pertinent remarks of Jean-Michel Belorgey in this book, on pp.
129–133.
5
According to Beck (2002), this meta-power is cosmopolitan. Its interests are only pacifist and cosmopolitan
as a first approximation, however, since it is always ready for war to save civilization (see Huntington,
1997, 2004).
6
Apparently this has nothing in common with the assertion of various clashes of civilizations (Huntington,
1997, 2004) or with the battle of Good against Evil (Bush junior).
7
During the Johannesburg ‘Earth Summit’ in 2003, BMW advertised their cars as ‘la voiture durable’ in the
French press.
8
An early insightful article with this critique was Dovers and Handmer (1992). Also see the exemplary book
edited by Lash et al. (1996).
9
US House of Representatives (2003). According to articles in the Financial Times (2004) and the Herald
Tribune (2004), the American Academy of Pediatrics asked for the ban of the sale of sugared soft drinks
 Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience 117

during school hours. Faced with this, the companies selling soft drinks replied by contesting the data while
promising to withdraw their distributors from schools. Simultaneously, William Steiger, special assistant
for international affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services of the American administration,
challenged the findings of a parallel WHO report arriving at the same conclusions. He wrote the following:
‘The assertion that heavy marketing of energy-dense food or fast-foods outlets increases the risk of obesity
is supported by almost no data’. He also questioned a WHO assertion that increased fruit and vegetable
consumption reduces the risk of obesity and diabetes. The CEO of Coca-Cola made similar assertions
in the Wall Street Journal Europe (Tehune, 2004).
10
These tensions manifest themselves when decisions have to be made about techno-scientific-industrial
matters perceived as possibly affecting us in an irreversible way (us as individuals, social groups or eco-
system); when decisions have to be made in a context in which the consequences are unknown or hotly
debated; or/and when stakes are considered high (as with global warming) or in which certain key
values are at stake (they might be ethical, social, political, or environmental).
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11
Discussions in WIKO, notably with Zhiyuan Cui, helped me get to the point more sharply than in Pestre
(2003).
12
As we all know, the ‘modernization process’ could (and should) be described in many other ways, but my
point is not the ‘modernization process’ as such.
13
On this decisive issue in the battle of words, see the 1999 issue of Ethnologie française, particularly Abelès
(1999), Kalaora (1999) and Bellier (1999).
14
The Association Française des Anthropologues has organized Paris seminars reflecting on the practice of
anthropology in the context of globalization. See also Goldman (2005).

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