Paper long abstract:

This paper makes a contribution to academic debates on the governance of responsible research and innovation. The focus of these debates is how to increase the beneficial effects of new technologies whilst reducing the potentially undesirable effects. Attention is mainly directed at the funding and conduct of scientific research. Less attention has been paid to the governance of innovation towards 'responsible' outcomes. The process by which governments attempt to govern innovation - a highly distributed, complex and unpredictable socio-economic activity - has been particularly underexplored. Yet, as representative bodies, regulatory agents and economic actors, government plays a key role in shaping technological innovation.

The aim of this paper is to address this imbalance. It focuses on a process of re-balancing an innovation pathway as a result of intense global contestation around the 'responsibility' of an existing technology, where rapid scaling-up created unintended and undesirable effects, instigating a shift in the direction of the technological innovation system. We use biofuels, particularly corn-based cellulosic ethanol, as our empirical case and select the U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) as a probe to examine the governance arrangements underpinning this re-direction.

The paper contributes to the debate on the governance of RRI by drawing lessons from the empirical data in two main areas:

- how the 'responsibilisation' debate was re-opened and how contestation was mediated.

- how the broader societal debate was linked to political processes and the re-definition of hard law.