Boundary Work and Transversality: Cataloguing Typologies of North-South Governance of Emerging Technologies

• In Event: Exploring Regional Innovation Cultures

Abstract

For decades, emerging technologies have promised to resolve major developmental challenges, particularly in the Global South. Enthusiasm by scientists in the North and South alike was based on high degrees of scientific novelty. However, organizational, business model, policy, institutional and social approaches that enable emerging technologies have not been commensurate with either the promise or the scale of the investments. In the face of this impasse, this research draws from two perspectives namely, Innovation Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). We first explore the bifurcation of these two related, though generally disparate, academic traditions. Then we explore core concepts from each. We draw upon multilevel governance and national innovation systems, which together constitutes transversality from innovation studies. Philip Cooke defines transversality as overlapping and sometimes interacting multi-level innovation systems. Then, we turn to boundary work from the STS literature. Thomas Gieryn explored questions of what constitutes “science” and “non-science”. That concept is extended to explore boundary work that demarcates exogenous and endogenous knowledge and how that relates to “high tech” university research (exogenous) and “low tech” community-based techniques and practices (endogenous). Drawing from four cases studies of emerging technology that promises to greater access to clean water, we offer four typologies of of North-South Governance of Emerging Technologies. This paper reconciles the theoretical and analytical tools of Innovation Studies and STS in general, and specifically, as they relate to transversality and boundary work.

Authors

• Ogundiran Soumonni, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

• Thomas S Woodson, Stony Brook University

• Rider W Foley, University of Virginia

• Susan Cozzens, Georgia Institute of Technology