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In this article, we use the COVID-19 pandemic to study governance through digital technologies. We investigate ‘digital contact tracing’ (DCT) apps developed in Austria and Norway and find their emergence, contestation and stabilisation as moments in which norms and values are puzzled through, and distributions of power change. We show that debates on DCT apps involved disputes on ‘digital citizenship’, that is, on the scope and nature of data that authorities are allowed to collect from citizens. Remarkably, these disputes were settled through the enrolment of a framework developed jointly by Apple and Google. Software became akin to a constitution that enshrined understandings of good citizenship into technological design, while also being a means through which geographies of power materialised. This article contributes to literature on technological governance by showing how the rising salience of technologies in governance transform political geographies and, as a consequence, democratic lives.

In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘the imagined scientist’. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with social responsibility. The article identifies what we call ‘deficit trouble’, when there is poor alignment of the deficits of different imagined scientists, which may lead to a stalemate in the communication between science policymakers and scientists. We argue that ‘the imagined scientist’ can function as sensitizing concept for further studies of science governance across a range of topics, bringing into view how different deficit logics operate in science policy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Transdisciplinarity is a much-used concept in research policy to emphasize a need for new collaborations beyond scientific disciplines to solve societal challenges. However, how do scientists interpret transdisciplinarity and what do transdisciplinarity policies mean for their work? This paper focuses on researchers’ definitions of transdisciplinarity. It is based on an empirical study of a Norwegian biotechnology centre founded to stimulate a transition in biotechnology research towards transdisciplinarity. Drawing on interpretive methods, we identify three interpretations of transdisciplinarity. In our case, the science policy idea of ‘transdisciplinarity’ faded away in practice in terms of collaboration with non-academic actors, but boosted the establishment of new interdisciplinary teams. By pointing to the multiplicity of ways in which policy recipients can interpret science policy, this study contributes to scholarship analysing the relation between transdisciplinarity in policy and practice.

This chapter is about the complex relations and techno-scientific work invested in the salmon fillet at our dinner table. It shows a dynamic of continuous destabilization and stabilization efforts accompanying the relatively new creation of farmed salmon. Technology and scientific knowledge make mass-produced farmed salmon possible. At the same time, new developments come along with side effects that continuously threaten to destabilize the salmon’s identity as a healthy source of protein. Therefore, new technology and knowledge are constantly being introduced in the stabilization work to maintain the salmon-like characteristics of the salmon. Political management and brokers, such as the Scientific Committee for Food Safety (VKM), are important players in this stabilization work, in the same way that scientific knowledge of nutritional content and technology, such as biotechnology, are.

This article addresses the practices of implementing science policies that involve science-society relations, such as funding policies on ethical, legal, and social aspects (ELSA) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). I examine how R&D actors translate such science governance. In particular, the paper focuses on possible tensions when scientists juggle competing policy demands. The paper draws mainly on interviews with scientists within biotechnology and nanotechnology in Norway. It shows that scientists try to accommodate rather than enact ELSA and RRI. They employ coping strategies of ‘following rules’, ‘dismissing’, and ‘contesting through talking the talk’. Thus, science-society policies fail to enter as a counter-logic to the hegemonic public management governing regime. The main argument is that RRI does not take hold because of a failure of meta-governance. Successful science-society policies should not focus only on encouraging scientists to adopt responsible behaviors, but on creating possible conditions for new practices. © 2019 The Author(s). Open Access. Published by InformaUK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

In Norway, the world’s leader in salmon farming, the aquaculture industry has become a profitable business. Drawing on critical policy studies, this paper analyzes a recent proposal to introduce resource rent taxation on salmon aquaculture for distributing its superprofit for the public good. By mapping actors and positions in the debate, the paper sheds light on the social reasons that led to the proposal’s rejection. It is argued that three positions emerged. The positions differ along two axes: rent and which community would benefit. The first position argues that aquaculture profits derive from natural resources and belong to local communities and to the national community. The second position denies that these superprofits can be categorized as rent and highlights issues of competitiveness. The third position seeks to distribute revenues locally as compensation for facilitating aquaculture. Although the debate about resource rent taxation was launched to debate the public-private issue, it turned into a fundamental disagreement about who should receive rents between the coastal municipalities and the state. The privatization of extraordinary revenue from common natural resources was no longer the focus. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In Europe, responsible research and innovation (RRI) has emerged as a science policy measure that demands the early integration of a broad range of social actors and perspectives into research and development (R&D). More collaboration of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) with science and engineering appears within this policy framework as a crucial element that will enable better technological development. However, RRI is new to both natural scientists and SSH scholars, and interdisciplinary collaborations are challenging for many reasons. In this paper, we discuss these challenges while suggesting that what RRI can be in a particular project is not a given but remains an empirical question. Natural scientists and SSH scholars need to coresearch RRI in an experimental mode. © 2018 Delgado, Åm. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Applications of biomedical R&D currently imply substantial societal concerns. This paper explores, based on semi‐structured interviews with scientists in Norway, how biomedical researchers experience and tackle such concerns in their daily work. It shows how ritualised routine responses to dislocatory moments help maintain order in the daily work of the interviewed scientists; they do not address directly but instead smooth over concerns by a ritualised way of using ethics. This may foreclose substantive reflection and function as a stabiliser for ‘business as usual’. Overall, the current way of responding to concerns as described by the interviewees may contribute to a depoliticisation of important issues. The paper contributes to sociological work on ethics by linking it to recent discussions on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and by the empirical research presented. The insights can also help improve science policies such as RRI. © 2018 The Author. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License.

In this text, I respond to a paper by Erik Thorstensen (2014) entitled “Public Involvement and Narrative Fallacies of Nanotechnologies.” In his paper, Thorstensen critically reviews a previous ELSA project on engagement and nanotechnology known by the acronym DEEPEN. While I agree that the ELSA community could benefit from the critical examination of earlier research, I believe the approach taken by Thorstensen is not a constructive one. My response deals with three main issues: the character of the paper, narrative theory, and interdisciplinarity.

This is an [Original Manuscript] of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [Critical Policy Studies] on [28 Jun 2016], available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19460171.2016.1195084

This study contributes to transition studies through an empirical analysis of scientists at the Norwegian Research Center for Solar Cell Technology. From a policy perspective, this research center is a concrete undertaking within transitions politics. How do solar energy scientists make sense of this mission and what strategies do they adopt? The analysis adopts a bottom-up perspective focusing on the politics involved in actor-networks constructing and empowering sustainable innovations. I suggest the micro/macro divide characterising transition studies may be discarded, if we recognize that actors operate both on niche, regime, and landscape level. Instead of presuming a multi-level perspective, transition studies could analyse the multi-actor politics of translations in arenas of development. Adopting this approach, I argue that solar scientists pursue mainly two lines of activities: improving efficiency (translations to fit and conform) and challenging negative hegemonic representations of solar energy (translations to stretch and transform). Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until 2017-09-01.

This is the authors accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until 2015-08-04 This paper suggests a new theoretical approach to study intermediary institutions, particularly intermediary institutions at the science policy nexus. These intermediary institutions that have a mediating role between science and politics have often been approached from the perspective of ‘boundary organizations’. But this model, that incorporates assumptions of principal-agent theory, is not fit for capturing case studies (of intermediary institutions) in ambiguous governance contexts. I argue that to understand new intermediary institutions, we need a new theoretical vocabulary to grasp how intermediary institutions emerge and how they work in practice. For example, discourses such as ‘responsible development of innovation’ can sediment in new institutional settings, including for example new monitoring and observatory institutions. However, there is a lack of systemic studies of the material implications that the rise of these new governance actors –such as intermediary institutions—has for governing emerging technologies. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the shortcomings of a nanotechnology observatory project. Along the example of this observatory institution for nanotechnology, I will show that political discourse theory allows us to explain critically the conditions of possibility for the emergence of such institutions. Complemented with actor-network theory, these anti-essentialising approaches help us to see the materiality ofintermediary governance actors. (c) The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

This paper reflects on the change of relations among participants in nanotechnology governance through their participation in governance processes such as stakeholder dialogues. I show that policymaking in practice—that is, the practice of coming and working together in such stakeholder dialogues—has the potential for two-fold performative effects: it can contribute to the development of trust and mutual responsibility on the part of the involved actors, and it may bring about effects on the formation of boundaries of what is sayable and thinkable in nanotechnology governance. Three vignettes about the work of the German NanoKommission indicate the development of new relations of trust, recognition and mutual responsibility among actors. It is concluded that governance in practice can assemble new collectives in which relations of trust are the glue holding the complex structure together. While such a consensus-based progress may be favourable for smooth technology development, it can be considered problematic if evaluated against the ideals of deliberative democracy, which often form the premises on which public engagement is based. Stakeholder forums were set in place with the intention of including various actors, but this is Janus-faced: if a dialogue becomes encapsulated in new governance networks, new exclusions can arise. For example, a policing of which information is released to a wider audience can occur. (c)The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com