Short abstract:

This paper considers co-creation as an emerging mode of participation in science, technology, and innovation. By reflecting on how co-creation transforms notions of participation towards economic ideals, it explores emerging roles for STS in remaking participation in responsible ways.

Long abstract:

Over roughly the past decade, co-creation has emerged within the participation discourse as an allegedly new mode of engaging publics in science, technology, innovation, and their governance. Despite being an ‘unlikely candidate’ with its origins in marketing and business contexts, co-creation entails a whole range of promises, such as aligning innovation outcomes with societal needs, taking into account different forms of knowing, or involving publics throughout innovation processes. From this perspective, co-creation seems to respond to decades’ worth of STS critique of public engagement with science and technology in many ways. A closer consideration, however, reveals that co-creation may contribute, in similar ways as public engagement, to the justification of pre-established decisions, deficit constructions of publics, and the configuration of certain perspectives as more or less desirable. At the same time, however, co-creation seems to rewrite previous notions of participation into a new troublesome economic guise that portrays economic growth through technological innovation as a self-evident objective and operates in narrowly framed problem-solution packages that tend to undermine alternative social solutions. Drawing on both a discourse analysis of co-creation at the European level and a three-year participant observation at a German municipality, this paper contemplates, how STS research, in light of its several waves of critique of public engagement, has contributed to the versions of co-creation that are currently circulating. In doing so, it explores how STS research may (or may not?) contribute to a remaking of participation within broader trends that subject enactments of democracy to increasingly economizing tendencies.