The Unravelling of Technocratic Orthodoxy?: Contemporary Knowledge Politics in Technology Regulation

Abstract

This chapter argues that the contemporary knowledge politics of technology regulation play out through a dynamic tension between the long-standing practice of portraying and organizing technology regulation as if it were an objective, technocratic exercise in risk management, concerned with optimizing singular pathways of technological progress, and countervailing pressures to challenge those reductionist framings and broaden out questions about technological vulnerability, and ultimately technological choice, for wider deliberation and collective decision-making. Case studies of the European regulation of transgenic plant varieties and pesticides are drawn on to show how, in certain political contexts, the uncertain, contested and provisional nature of much regulatory knowledge has been made explicit by actors and events, helping to force a partial ‘opening up’ of otherwise routine or opaque processes of knowledge closure, and potentially leading to a radical broadening of technology regulation. The cases also illustrate how such processes pose a fundamental challenge to the privileged position of incumbent industrial interests within orthodox regulatory practice, and how many institutions and industry bodies have responded by trying to reassert an orthodox technocratic depiction of regulation, and in doing so avert experimentation with more ambitious, potentially transformative, forms of technology regulation.