Frenemies: STS & Development

Is technological failure a good thing? This question crossed my mind when I attended a lunch lecturer on nano-technology and development. The way the presenter framed his narrative reminded me on dialectic where he played between critics and defenses where one of the defenses suggest the performativity of failure. While I like the way he made a balance between STS and development, at the end of the presentation, he felt into a typical STS conclusion. That we have to include more actors to make an innovation works. If I am using my (critical) development studies, my focus will not about how to make the innovation works but rather what kind of socio-technical change will emerge if the innovation works. My Foucauldian fellows would argue innovation as a form of governmentality, while my STS or my transition fellows would argue there is a sustainable justice that would benefit all the actors. The former sees the latter as naive, while the latter sees the former as negative.

Some scholars suggest to add politics into STS through interaction with development studies. For me, this suggestion is running out of stream. There are good STS scholars that are able to capture politics in innovation. The absence of politics in STS is not a matter of method but more about the scientist's sensitivity to capture what happening in the field. The main difference between STS and development studies lies on their ontology where STS, or to be more precise innovation scholars start from an assumption that human tends to help other, while (critical) development studies start from assumption that human tends to harm other.