Sociotechnical Imaginaries as a Resource for Transformative Innovation Policy: The Case of Extractive Industries in Colombia

• In Event: Exploring Regional Innovation Cultures

Abstract

Socio-technical regimes drawing on the extraction of non-renewable natural resources are not sustainable. Government innovation policy instruments investing royalties from oil and ore extraction aiming to develop science, technology and innovation activities in related regions can only become transformative in regions depending of non-renewable natural resources if local sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) and understandings of innovation are taken into account seriously. On the one hand, the imagination of policy-makers, officials, and scholars working on innovation and transformations apparently should be more sensitive and aligned with such local imaginaries; on the other hand, transitions must be locally ‘dreamed’ by relevant social and economic actors who have deployed their lives in regional industries busy with extraction of ore and oil. These actors could be mobilized and coordinated to anticipate ‘endogenous’ socio-technical transformations and related innovation policy designs and instruments.
For this research, key governance actors were identified in two extractive-regions in Colombia. They were brought together for two-day Sociotechnical Imaginaries Workshops in each region. Also, a workshop was carried out with scholars working on Transformative Innovation Policy at University of Sussex in Brighton (UK). The conceptualization of these workshops and their achievements will be presented. Additionally, numerous in-depth interviews were carried out with policy-makers, officials, scholars and social movement leaders in Colombia.
This paper tackles the question how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can inform and improve methods and heuristics to steer post-extractive transitions, in the southern hemisphere and beyond. Arguably sociotechnical imaginaries can be made performative to incept and conduct post-extractive transitions with the help of related transformative innovation policy instruments.

Authors

• Ernesto Andrade-Sastoque, University of Twente

• Gonzalo Ordonez-Matamoros, Universidad Externado de Colombia

• Stefan Kuhlmann, University of Twente