Deepening the Field, Raising the Stakes: Generating Technologies for Inclusive and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Members of the Sociology of Technology and Innovation Area of the Institute of Science and Technology Studies of the National University of Quilmes (the Quilmes team), Buenos Aires, remember 2009 as a turning point. In that year, a group of researchers began to transform their research praxis. The transformation included a series of analysis objects and questions, new ways of engaging nonacademic actors, and explicit political positioning regarding a positive intervention in the dynamics of inclusive and sustainable development. Little over a year earlier, the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Productive Innovation (the S&T Ministry) had been founded with the goal of “deepening a productive and social development model based on generating value through knowledge.”1 The government’s promise to invest in science and technology to create greater social and economic well-being confronted a lack of specific public policies and tailor-made management instruments. What could it mean to deepen a productive and social development model? In particular, what science and technology (S&T) policies could possibly generate inclusive development processes in a country that had undergone thirty years of destruction in its productive matrix, a systemic downgrading of innovation, and significant increases in unemployment and structural poverty? Would it be possible to develop technological solutions for what were widely considered to be the chief social issues in Argentina—for example, lack of access to drinking water, housing, and energy; high costs of medication; and prevalence of regional diseases that still had no cure? These were some of the issues that officials wanted to solve, leading them to invite us to take part in the public policy design process for the new ministry...