Political Patronage for Technology Development

Technology development is crucial for the growth of nation-states. Globalisation has made technology central to the process of development. Technology helps to improve leaving standards, increase productivity, generate new industries and employment opportunities, and create more competitive products in world market. In general, technology is knowledge applicable to the practical problems.[3] Technol­ogy development necessitates investment from both the public and private sector. Particularly, the public sector Research and Development (R&D) has played a vital role in developing some of the key technologies of the twentieth century both globally and in Asia, including aeronautics, electronics and nuclear power.[4] It has also played a significant role in the development of space technologies. The bulk of the space technologies in various parts of world have been developed in response to the explicit and strong government support.

Technology programmes are as vulnerable to the pulls and pushes of politics as other socioeconomic programmes. The governmental stake in developing tech­nologies indirectly plays a role to decide the future of these technologies. Both political and financial backing is essential for any large-scale development of technology. It is important for the space agency managers (technocrats) to control their political environment or their programmes become its victims. It is important for them to negotiate the process of developments of technical programme with the political system. For this purposes, many a time they engage in certain metaphorical and coalition-building strategies. The metaphorical strategies allow them to garner wide public support by making a technology compatible/comparable with some overarching value that is easily understood. The strategies of coalition building also involve expression of another kind where an idea and requirement of collaborating with other states is presented to the political authorities [5, p. 64].

Developing a new technology is mostly a complicated affair, given the myriad technical uncertainties. The expense of large-scale technologies increases economic uncertainties. When a technology has government as its primary developer, a host of political uncertainties arise. This could happen mainly when various government departments are involved simultaneously in the process of technology development. Such situation at times ends up in making design of technology problematic. Also, political conflict can stop a technology from being successfully developed or, if developed, productively applied. A process of technological change is also dependent on political decision-making concerning that technology [5, p. 47].

It is important to appreciate that certain technological experimentation has faced the favour from of the world, and in certain cases, the world has overlooked few inventions. The availability of technology with one state has brought in a paradigm shift into the policies of others. The ‘Space Age’ was born with the launch of first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik by the erstwhile USSR in the autumn of 1957. The only event in recent history which can match Sputnik in general public awareness was the exploration of atom bomb in 1945 [6, p. 555]. Sputnik launch had shaken the USA’s confidence about their technology and military strength [6, p. 570].

It perhaps reversed the foundations of the post-World War II international order. ‘The launch promised imminent Soviet strategic parity, placed the US under direct military threat for the first time since 1814, triggered a quantum jump in the arms race, and undermined the calculus on which European, Chinese, and neutralist relations with the superpowers had been based. The space and missile challenge was then mediated by massive state-sponsored complexes for research and development, in the US and throughout the industrial world, into institutionalized technological revolution and, hence, accelerating social, economic, and perhaps cultural change. Space technology altered the very proportions of human power to the natural environment in a way unparalleled since the spread of the railroads’ [7, p. 1010]. This concept of having a technology which could view the Earth dispassionately from a distance brought a momentous change in both policy and scientific thinking. The idea of operating and experimenting in negligible/zero gravity was caught on by the scientific community. It probably made a major impact in regard to growth of natural sciences.

The four areas most often cited as the loci of revolutionary change in the Space Age are ‘(1) international politics (2) the political role of science and scientists (3) the relationship of the state to technological change and (4) political culture and values in nations of high technology’ [7, p. 1011]. In early years after the launch of first satellite, the growth of space technologies was rapid. During 1961, with the first human visiting the space, the USSR supremacy in this field was restated. Yuri Gagarin’s space flight came as a ‘bolt from space’ for the USA. This ‘loss of face’ forced the USA to significantly increase NASA’s budget. One positive outcome of the superpower rivalry in space was the Apollo programmes, which led to the overall development of space and rocket science. When Neil Armstrong became the first man to reach the moon, the USA believed that it had stolen a march on the USSR in the space race. It could be said that in the Cold War era, the relevance of space supremacy had social, political and scientific tenets.

In present era, the interest of various governments towards supporting any technology development is essentially dependent on its assessment about its utility mainly for socioeconomical progress. The Cold War era race was the outcome of the superpower rivalry and the investments in technology were made from the one – upmanship standpoint. In the post-Cold War era, particularly in Asian context where the developments in space technologies started much later, such compulsions were non-existent. The political support in Asian context towards the development of space sciences emerged mainly out of the social and scientific reasons. In twenty – first century, this development is also found taking place for the economic and military reasons. Also, states are attempting to find the availability of resources on the other planets, and certain space efforts are directed in that direction too.