Slim Futures and the Fat Pill: Civic Imaginations of Innovation and Governance in an Engagement Setting

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation within techno-scientific governance seems necessary; though who is to participate in which form often remains unclear. Increasingly, when the innovation process is discussed in both policy and academia, the question of when public engagement should take place in the innovation process is addressed using common models such as ‘upstream engagement’. However, these discussions about public engagement often assume a top-down approach, and pay little attention to citizens' perspectives. To address this gap in the literature, this article will ask the following questions: what tacit understandings of techno-scientific innovation and governance do citizens have; and how do they relate their understandings of the form, structure and dynamics of these innovation processes to their visions of governance and participation? How do specific cultural forms of conceptualising innovation open up or close down particular possibilities of governance and public participation, hence privileging the involvement of certain actors and not others? To address these questions, we analyse the discussions in a long-term public engagement setting involving both genome scientists and citizens in Austria.