It was Hannah Arendt who once famously said that most evil is done by those who never make up their minds to be good or evil. In the Richard IIIs, Edmunds, Iagos and Don Johns we can readily recognize malice and intent. Indeed, they may even tell us they want ‘to prove a villain’. Arendt is talking about a different kind of villain: those who do not think, those who do not reflect on the meaning or consequences of their actions, or inactions. Those who choose not to choose.

Innovation can be defined in many ways, but for me the key thing is that it is about creating futures, in sometimes profound and disruptive ways. Innovation is a powerful thing, but it also has the propensity to be tragically banal. Think about all its promise, potential and power and then think about what it is actually being used for. At a time of great danger for our planet and the people and non-people who inhabit it, think about the futures innovation could create, and the ones innovation is actually creating. We desperately need innovation to help us secure a future on this planet that is sustainable, flourishing, just and equitable, but that is not what we are getting. Not all innovation, to be sure. But a great deal, and that is the sad truth.

With innovation I suggest the time has come to choose to choose. What kind of futures do we want (or rather need), and want innovation to help create? How can we collectively and substantively engage with those futures? And what does that mean for the re-framing and practice of innovation now? These for me are the departure points for taking responsibility for the future and for responsible innovation.

Responsible innovation, or at least the version I am familiar with, has always been cognisant and critical about the economic and political contexts within which it sits (I won't go on about second order reflexivity here, other than to stress its importance). This is a book that goes further. After reflecting on this context, the authors have made a choice. They contend that innovation is trapped in its ‘feed-the-market’ ties as the engine of an unsustainable, growth-led economic order.

The responsible innovation matrix presented in the introduction contrasts ‘responsibility’ with ‘irresponsibility’, and ‘innovation’ with ‘stagnation’. While the quadrant representing RI has been much discussed, we began with the idea that the quadrant of responsible stagnation (RS) had gone largely unexplored, and we wanted to know what that might mean and what kinds of activities it might describe.

As it turned out, this Fourth Quadrant was actually full of innovation, in a broader and wider sense than might be expected by the term ‘RS’. But thinking of RI as part of a matrix, of responsibility as having impact on both innovation and stagnation, and stagnation as something that could be beneficial in certain circumstances, allowed us to decouple our thinking from growth and markets, and focus instead on what we really need innovation to do.

We take the idea of RS seriously, as a means to try to grasp the complexity of the political economy of science, technology and innovation (STI), both as policy and as process, as we take the Fourth Quadrant seriously as a space for considering innovation in business models as well as in non-market-oriented processes, goods and services which may have strong societal benefit but do not necessarily contribute to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In our concluding section, we argue that RS offers its own innovative contribution to the growing global discussion about RI, recalibrated around responsibility as its focal point, rather than getting more things to the market.

Thus, it allows us to more carefully examine the conundrum of diminishing returns and increased environmental and social hazards associated with attempts to merely increase activities that can be measured by GDP.

As there is no one-size ‘how-to’ which will fit all, our aim with this last section is not a practical set of recommendations on how to innovate for RS. Instead, we offer a compass for the expansion of RI policies and discourses, pointing towards opportunities for creative thinking about the meaning of innovation and its relationship to prosperity and progress.

In the framework of responsible stagnation (RS), innovation is defined more broadly than bringing new or improved goods to the market or as the major means to increase productivity and growth following the Schumpeterian tradition. This means that innovations can take place within the market or they may directly challenge the market by promoting RS in consumption, in this case by encouraging people not to buy new goods but to try to develop other ways to meet their needs. In this sense, innovation is not pursued for its own sake, and is not primarily targeting economic growth. Nor is it only a science-and technologydriven endeavour, but rather it is oriented primarily at addressing societal problems using the best possible means, some of which may not involve technological solutions at all.

At the same time, responsibility in RS also reflects the value of engaging the public in science, technology and innovation (STI), as in other responsible innovation (RI) frameworks. Because innovation in RS is seen as inclusive and participatory regardless of purpose, it can even seek to give voice and power to those with no market shares, while at the same time being socially, environmentally and ethically more responsible. Thus, as previously argued, RS can be thought of as a further innovation on the RI frameworks which have arisen in the context of the failure of globalized free-markets to adequately address social needs.

Several innovation types already exist that encompass some of the a-growth orientation of RS. Take for example the ‘one laptop per child (OLPC)’ project. The OLPC project is a nonprofit initiative that was initiated by Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in 2005. The main aim was to transform education by enabling children in low-income countries to have access to content, media and computer-programming environments at affordable costs, thus bringing them into equity with the tools available to pupils in richer countries. Although the OLPC project has been criticized in terms of cost-efficiency, low focus on maintainability and training, and has had limited success thus far, it has also been praised for inspiring later variants of lowcost, low-power laptops such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks, for making computer literacy a basic part of education globally, and for creating interfaces that work in any language.

Having set the landscape and its challenges, it's time to journey across this landscape and see what ways there are to move forward.

We begin this journey with an exploration of the notion of responsibility, and what the underlying values of responsible stagnation (RS) might be. We start by considering the challenge of uncertainty in innovation, and the centrality of process in decision-making. Specifically, we note the importance of allowing sufficient time and of acting with care in our decisionmaking process. We show how, at its core, RS offers a new lens for viewing the relationship between society and science, research, technology and innovation.

We then continue by taking a closer look at how RS interacts with three real-world contexts: social innovation, the Global South and corporations. First, we will look at a range of social innovations which are centred primarily on new ways of creating social value or responding to social needs often not met by standard market-based activities, reflecting a tacit commitment to care and connection as important motivating values.

Next, we turn our attention to the Global South as a way to think more deeply through the political implications of innovation on a wider scale. Starting with an appreciation that technology does not consist of neutral ‘mere’ tools, but can be used as an instrument of persuasion and domination, we discuss how innovation policies and our imagining of what counts as innovation can be (and has been) used as a form of colonial domination. The aspirations of RS, and especially a ‘commitment to care’, are used to reconsider the relationship between innovation and geo-political structures, recognizing that the Global South represents a great reservoir of localized, alternative ways of framing innovation.

Finally, we turn to the possibilities and challenges for RS in guiding corporate behaviour. While innovation policy is generally enacted through universities, research institutes and other state-funded initiatives, much of the research and development (R&D) that drives innovation actually takes place in the private sector. Issues here include the purpose of corporate social responsibility programmes, and demands arising due to shareholder-stakeholder dichotomies and public accountability measures.

Chapter 5 focuses on the domain of international trade. In this chapter, we claim that states often withhold economic information that is essential for adjudicating trade disputes because they fear harmful reactions by market actors. We demonstrate that properly designed international organizations can ameliorate this problem by receiving and protecting such information. After formalizing our theory, we assess our hypotheses using new data on information sharing with the World Trade Organization. We show that key reforms designed to safeguard sensitive information increased the provision of this information and boosted trade cooperation in relevant industries. We conclude by discussing how solving this pervasive issue puts international trade institutions in tension with the normative goals of transparency and accountability.

We argue in Chapter 4 that states often seek to reveal intelligence about other states’ violations of international rules and laws but are deterred by concerns about revealing the sources and methods used to collect that intelligence. Properly equipped nuclear international organizations can mitigate these dilemmas, however, by analyzing and acting on sensitive information while protecting it from wide dissemination. Using new data on intelligence disclosures to the International Atomic Energy Agency and analysis of the full universe of nuclear proliferation cases, we demonstrate that strengthening the agency’s intelligence protection capabilities led to greater intelligence sharing and fewer suspected nuclear facilities. However, our theory suggests that this solution gives informed states a subtle form of influence and is in tension with the normative goal of international transparency.

The effectiveness of transitional justice is hotly debated. We highlight a largely overlooked source of such war crimes evidence: intelligence provided by third-party states. We argue that such countries often wish to provide this information but withhold it to avoid revealing intelligence sources and methods. The adoption of confidentiality systems by war crimes tribunals can ease this tension. Courts can integrate national intelligence to gain insights into culpability for atrocities while protecting sensitive details. However, supplying states will constrain their disclosures based on their political interests. We analyze US intelligence disclosures to war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Drawing on newly reviewed archival materials, elite interviews, and secondary sources, we show that confidentiality protections elicited considerable intelligence disclosures when the United States had a political interest in prosecuting the case, thus increasing arrests and indictments.

The introduction provides motivation for our study, describes our approach to studying secrecy, outlines the contribution of our theory, and describes the plan of our book.

In Chapter 3, we provide an overview of sensitive information in global governance and important historical context. The chapter first describes new data on the confidentiality features of a sample of 106 IOs. We review variation in the frequency and form of such protections and show that measures to protect various forms of sensitive information are surprisingly common and vary in interesting ways. The chapter then describes the rise of the norm of transparency in diplomacy and global governance after World War I, which then deepened with the end of the Cold War. This is juxtaposed with early examples of IOs experimenting with confidentiality and sensitive information. The chapter concludes by explaining how changes in technology and broader cooperative goals have generally led to efforts to integrate sensitive information into IOs, despite the resulting tension with transparency.

In Chapter 8, we discuss the downstream impliactions of our argument and its scholarly, practical, and normative contributions. We first return to the themes of transparency and power, and assess our empirical findings and the related research. We analyze how the presence of a confidentiality function in an international organization (IO) may influence power dynamics and institutional transparency, and derive implications for understanding how IOs can manage such tensions. We also synthesize lessons from existing research on path dependence as well as findings from our four empirical chapters to reflect on the likely origins and decline of confidentiality systems. The chapter then discusses the broad relevance of our theory for other empirical domains and briefly reviews extensions to peacekeeping, international finance, cybersecurity, and environmental issues, which suggest the wide applicability of our framework. We conclude by analyzing the implications of our claims for scholarship on international politics.