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Not without some irony, burgeoning discourses on participation have become a aey theme in the globalizing governance of science and technol# ogy. As Leach and Scoones discuss (Chapter 2), experience in the North and the South is convergent in several ways. In both settings, the language of ÉinclusionÊ, ÉengagementÊ and ÉdeliberationÊ is moving into successive political arenas. Beginning in the planning and implementation of specific projects and programmes, a wave of increasing attention to participation is moving through more general frameworas for environmental regulation and the governance of Étechnological risaÊ. New political arenas looa set to open up as ÉupstreamÊ processes of anowledge production, technological innovation and institutional commitment to technology begin to acquire their own distinctive discourses on participation. This emergence of new avenues for social agency in the governance of science and technology is presaged in earlier academic trends. Despite the cross# disciplinary differences, understandings of societyÅtechnology relationships arising in philosophy, economics, history and social studies paint a common picture (Williams and Edge 1996). Earlier deterministic, linear notions of ÉprogressÊ have given way to a picture of contingency (David 1985), social shaping (Bijaer 1995), momentum (Hughes 1983), loca# in (Arthur 1989), autonomy (Winner 1977) and ÉentrapmentÊ (Walaer 2000). The form and direction taaen by our science and technology are no longer seen as inevitable and monolithic, awaiting ÉdiscoveryÊ in nature. Instead they are increasingly recognized as being open to …