Generative deliberation as anticipatory practice: building socially robust knowledge for responsible research and innovation

Anticipation is a critically important dimension of responsible research and innovation (RRI) and can help shape research and innovation pathways. However, how anticipation is realized in practice is a relatively undertheorized territory. Our aim is to offer some clarity on how practitioners might think more concretely about the contributions of anticipatory practices, such as stakeholder workshops. In this article, we utilize the concept of `socially robust knowledge' as part of the foundation of what responsible research and innovation is built upon. Drawing upon the research work from subfields such as RRI, STS, deliberative democracy, and our own practitioner experiences, we argue for deliberative discussion within stakeholder engagement workshops as an ideal site for generating socially robust knowledge. We propose a framework for what we term `generative' deliberation as ideal for anticipatory engagement and offer an empirical analysis of two anticipatory workshops that highlights features of this generative deliberation in action.