De-politicizations of Technology in International STI Cooperation

Imaginaries about STI Cooperation with China,” has shown that national ^S&T policy-making needs to be understood as a dynamic and situated response to the power changes in global orders: We have argued that the rise of China as a global player in ^S&T, mirrored also in its changing image – from the world's workshop for low-level technological goods towards a potential innovation leader – has created both hopes and fears among stakeholders in international ^S&T policy-making. On the one hand, China was (and still is) often framed as posing a threat to Western countries’ political and economic dominance and welfare, a narrative that has also been a central element in the formation and stabilization of discourses among ^S&T stakeholders in Austria. On the other hand, Austrian stakeholders were trying to find common ground for Austria’s relationship with China. This was eventually achieved by referring to the country as an ‘unavoidable opportunity’ (Bruijn et al. 2012: 16), allowing stakeholders to mainly focus on benefits. As a way of discursively evoking proximity to China, stakeholders in Austria constructed and stabilized a narrative of close ties between the two countries, envisioning enhanced bilateral ^STI-relations by referring to green technologies as a specifically promising field for cooperation. Green technologies, we have argued, seemed to offer a particular opportunity for promoting international technology transfer and ^S&T cooperation while at the same time keeping the likelihood of public dissent and controversy relatively low (see also Felt 2015).

The case discussed in this paper offers a good starting point for thinking about how different representations of sociotechnical imaginaries are harnessed for different purposes in different contexts: For instance, China’s lack of successful policies for sustainable development is often portrayed in Western media through images of people wearing gas masks while rushing through smog-filled, crowded streets. In contrast, the specific Austrian imaginary of environmental expertise and success is represented in pictures of small, tidy villages surrounded by forests with clean air and crystal clear water. Austria, it seems, is thus offering a natural solution to China’s problems through its obviously proven environmental awareness.

However, it is worthwhile to ask what is invisible within such an imaginary of national identity as linked to nature and sustainability, and in particular, what kind of work does such an imaginary do for certain actors? It seems prudent here to pay closer attention to the ways in which actors, in particular those involved in international STI cooperation, frame technologies for different purposes and to trace how certain technologies may be ascribed as neutral objects that foster international partnerships.

Clearly, the importance of context and specificity for understanding how societies relate to certain technologies has been a central concern for work in STS from its beginning. This is even more so when it comes to the role of S&T in state-making processes and (political) identity formations, where the same technological assemblage is likely to embody different and even contradictory political connotations. For instance, when Austrian stakeholders referred to green technologies in an Austrian context, they framed them differently with regard to how they should be applied in China. In the discourses among Austrian STI stakeholders that were part of our investigation, green technologies were related to identity formations having to do with Austria as a pioneer in this specific field. On a broader societal level, they also evoked notions of civil disobedience when it comes to the protection of (Austrian) nature from governmental politics (cf. Felt 2015). Here, one of the key narratives for national identity formations is that civil society movements fundamentally rejected the already-built nuclear power plant in 1978 through protests, occupations, and a national referendum. As a consequence, the power plant never went into operation, and today serves as a national monument to civil society’s engagement in (energy) politics.

However, the sociotechnical imaginary about the strong entanglements of environmental awareness and cultures of resistance that can be found in the narratives about Austrian techno-political history does not surface in discourses on cooperation with China. In the processes of being offered and transferred to China, green technologies lose the (potentially) resistive qualities they seemed to have in an Austrian context. At first glance this may seem surprising, given the current state of environmental pollution in China and the potential local and global consequences this has for climate change and living conditions.

In particular, as green technologies are seen as improving not only living and working conditions but as a means to empower non-state actors, oftentimes in relations to the government. Green technologies in the Austrian context are also entangled with and discursively framed as related to, green politics -characterized by a focus on the local or regional level, the activities of grassroots-movements and an appreciation of participatory decision-making processes, including different forms of civil obedience. However, when it comes to China, Austrian stakeholders in the field of green technologies have rather chosen not to comment on sensitive topics such as indecent living and working conditions that are also a consequence of severe environmental pollution, the contamination of water, or forced displacements of people to make way for large infrastructural projects.

This can be read as a discursively created absence of politics in the making of international STI cooperation with China. We can see here how a certain imaginary is constructed and then reformulated and re-contextualized in order to fit certain political purposes. In these envisioned futures, bilateral cooperation between the two countries is deliberately kept free of sensitive political issues, thus constructing an imaginary that responds to global politics through a process of making some of its aspects invisible and therefore enabling cooperation.

I suggest understanding this process as the de-politicization of technologies in international STI cooperation. Of course, much valuable work in STS has dealt with the politics of technologies, and has developed an understanding of science and technology as being intrinsically political (Latour, 1992, Winner, 1986, Blume, 1974, Frickel and Moore, 2006, Collins and Evans 2002).

However, I fully agree with Brown’s notion that, of course, many artifacts “have politics,”

but most do not all the time. Rather, the extent to which technologies are characterized as having politics is, in many cases highly dependent on how they are actively politicized.

Politicization, in the words of Brown, can be understood as a “process whereby people persistently and effectively challenge established practices and institutions, thus transforming them into sites or objects of politics” (2015: 7, cf. Palonen 2006: 292). In short, without any kind of contestation, there is no politicization. De-politicization, in this context, would then refer to the absence of deliberations, debates or protests in favor of good (e.g. profitable) relations based on routine, custom, intimacy, collegiality or consensus (cf. Brown 2015). The notion of “in favor of relations” could then easily be applied to the context of international relations and international STI cooperation, too. In this sense, it

would allow for tracing how actors discursively de-politicize certain technologies in the context of international cooperation, and actively make them a means that serves the purpose of enhancing bi-lateral or international relations – or at least to keep the status quo by disregarding potentially more contested aspects.

3.1.2.International STI Cooperation as Foreign Policy by other means