Cosmopolitan technology assessment? Lessons learned from attempts to address the deficit of technology assessment in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article examines ineffective efforts to address the Technology Assessment deficit in Europe and asks how TA approaches can spread across diverse socio-political contexts while considering the specificities of receiving environments. Based on participatory observations and in-depth empirical case studies, we draw on Sheila Jasanoff's work and identify a discursive shift from an institutional deficit to a knowledge deficit of TA, co-produced with an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity. Our analysis highlights the epistemic supremacy of existing TA institutions, a situation in which newcomers fully consent to become reliant on foreign imports of TA practices and knowledge. We argue to carefully disentangle the normative dimensions and power inequalities of the standardization of TA approaches, as this can threaten the diversity of perspectives of the knowledge produced and, consequently, the effectiveness and legitimacy of public decision-making. We conclude by identifying research avenues into epistemic subsidiarity for TA practice and scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology assessment
• epistemic subsidiarity
• deficit
• cosmopolitanism
• civic epistemology

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been possible without the conversations we have had over the past few years with our informants, both within and outside of the PTA community, whom we thank for their insights and time. We hope that this article will help build bridges between the different scientific and practitioner communities interested in Technology Assessment. Earlier drafts of this article also benefited enormously from feedback from our colleagues during research seminars at the Spiral Research Center (Liège University) and at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (TU Munich). In particular, we are very grateful to Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Joakim Juhl, Erik Aarden, Hadrien Macq, and Céline Parotte for their proofreading and guidance on previous versions. Lastly, we warmly thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive criticisms and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the EPTA website: http://www.eptanetwork.org/

2 These European projects include EUROpTA (European Participatory Technology Assessment⁣, 1998–1999⁣), TAMI (Technology Assessment: Methods and Impacts⁣, 2002–2003⁣) or PACITA (Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment⁣, 2011–2015⁣).

3 TA knowledge can be defined as knowledge produced to provide and support robust knowledge-based policy-making on societal topics related to science, technology and innovation (Klüver et al. 2016, 14).

4 See the project’s website: www.pacitaproject.eu.

5 PTA offices that are very much integrated within parliaments, such as the French OPECST, the British POST or the European Parliament’s STOA, cannot participate in a project funded by the European Commission for reasons of separation of powers.

6 With this we do not want to say that PACITA has eclipsed or replaced EPTA, certainly not, but rather to support the idea that there was a convergence of project, resource and opinion strong enough to organize in the framework of PACITA activities traditionally devolved to EPTA and reserved to its members.

7 ‘The first meeting of the European TA community under the label of ‘European Congresses of Technology Assessment’ dates back to October 1982 when the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany hosted a conference in Bonn that attracted some 60 experts from eleven countries – among them were representatives of the US Office of Technology Assessment. Congresses on TA later held in Amsterdam (1987), Milan (1990) and Copenhagen (1992) contributed significantly to the conceptualization, philosophy as well as institutionalization of TA’ (Scherz et al. 2016, 142).

8 The revived tradition of organizing European TA conferences continued after PACITA, with a third (counting the two organized by PACITA) conference in Cork in 2017 and a fourth in Bratislava in 2019, at which the global TA network was launched. A fifth one is planned in Karlsruhe in 2022.

9 ‘Unlike the participant observer, who tends to invent a new and somewhat transient role as a hang around, the observant participator is more likely to occupy and enact a preexisting role in the field. There are also important differences in passivity and proximity. Compared to participant observers, observant participators embrace a more active role in the field as they seek to minimize the distance between themselves and their empirical object’ (Seim 2021, 3).

10 Four practitioners’ trainings (in Lisbon in September 2012 on ‘selecting the TA issue’, in Sofia in April 2013 on ‘selecting the TA method’, in Vilnius in November 2013 on ‘involving actors in TA’, in Prague in September 2014 on ‘TA communication and impact strategies’) and two summer schools: one in Liège in June 2012 on ‘renewable energy systems and the role and use of PTA’, one in Cork in June 2014 on ‘the role of technology in the challenges and opportunities of the ageing society’.

11 At least two epistemological positions can be argued about the extent to which the researcher should be bound to the field. ‘There has been a long running discussion within the social sciences and humanities on how researchers engage with their fields of study and what this brings about. While some researchers argue that by engaging and being too close to the studied field, the researcher is compromising ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’ positions; others warn that by being too distant the researcher fails to understand or improve problematic or unethical conditions’ (Lydahl and Nickelsen 2022). The epistemological position of ‘careful engagement’ makes it possible to overcome this dichotomy by using the generativity of the embedded researcher position.

12 We have chosen to focus on these two modes of epistemic subsidiarity because they are derived from empirical observations that we have analyzed and which we discuss below. Further empirical work may uncover new regimes or modes of epistemic subsidiarity for TA. Jasanoff also mentions ‘constitutionalism’ as a third mode, which consists in defining a common general framework that transcends local differences and defines the reciprocities between different polities. It is important to note that these three modes are not intended to be exhaustive.

13 Equivalences are social practices that classify and establish what is like and unlike and accordingly, how it ought to be treated. Equivalences are necessary for rendering assessments and scientific results more generally ‘freely transportable across political boundaries’ (Jasanoff 2013, 139).

14 The World or Europe Wide Views method has been used at the European and global levels to organize citizen consultations on various ⁣policy issues (www.wwviews.org). See also Jorgensen et al. 2016; Jorgensen and Juul 2015; and Delvenne and Macq 2020 for a critical analysis.

15 Initially, the parliamentary aspect was essential for the PACITA partners (hence the P for Parliament in the project acronym), but as the non-PTA partners informed all partners of their respective contexts, it became apparent that in most Central and Eastern European countries, lobbying to establish a new institution in a parliament, which is relatively weaker and seen as less central than the government, made little sense and gained no traction. Therefore, the project partners decided to allow themselves some semantic flexibility and to speak of ‘policy-oriented’ TA instead of ‘parliamentary’ TA⁣, while continuing to insist on the importance of organizing some kind of formal link with parliament. While this compromise might at first glance seem anecdotal, it turned out that the loss of centrality of the parliamentary character became an outcome of ⁣PACITA⁣. Thus, the book published at the end of the project, co-edited by the coordinator and his team and reporting on the main results obtained, was entitled: Policy-Oriented Technology Assessment across Europe. Expanded Capacities (Klüver, Nielsen, and Jørgensen 2016a).

16 http://technology-assessment.info/

17 Local organizers of these transnational participation exercises could hold additional panels on issues deemed of national interest, but only as a complement. However, the relevance, problematization and results of these national add-ons have not been discussed or reflected upon in PACITA. Until the last moment, it was also possible for third-party countries and/or organizations to take part in the exercise and organize a national workshop themselves, as the preparation material and methodology was designed to be easily scalable and replicable.

18 Even if citizen participation is not yet a widespread conviction in the EU, as the promoters of European civic epistemology concede, ‘such [an] assumption [is] necessary to justify an increased role for ordinary citizens in science-in-society [as] it may become a component of a European model, and reinforce the quest for a European political and cultural identity.’ (MASIS Report, Siune 2009, 65)

19 This term is inspired by the notion of ‘frugal innovation’ (Radjou and Prabhu 2015), often associated with developing countries, which refers to the idea that companies can develop high-quality products and create more value with limited resources. Applied to TA, frugality suggests that it would be possible to do TA without dedicated institutions, in a context of resource scarcity and uneven public spending on knowledge-based policy-making across Europe.

20 https://globalta.technology-assessment.info/images/docs/globalTA_Mission-Statement.pdf

21 See for example the special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change edited by Bimber and Guston (1997).

22 Delvenne and Parotte (2019) analyze that the closure of the Instituut Samenleving en Technologie (IST) bears striking similarities with the OTA story.

23 These developments follow a very relevant question from an anonymous reviewer, whom we thank by the way, asking whether PACITA’s critiques could be used as a basis for recommendations to achieve ‘better designed projects’. If ‘better designed’ means a greater chance of being funded by the European Commission, then riding the RRI wave until it subsides, with less emphasis on what constitutes the roots of the TA ethos, is probably a safe strategy in an era of scarce public resources. The reader will have understood that we have a more political reading of the question, and that it seems to us that the price to pay to have TA practices eclipsed by the RRI approach is much too high. Rather than focusing on micro-interventions for fine-tuning projects, in a time of political uncertainty and epistemic ambiguity, we believe that TA communities should become a bastion of democratic politics (cf. Delvenne and Parotte 2019) – and it seems that there is not much room democratic politics in RRI frameworks, which ‘largely ignore questions about the politics in and of deliberation, the authoritative allocation of values, and the institutional uptake of deliberative engagements’ (Van Oudheusden 2014, 67). Conversely, in the TA communities, several recent initiatives show that the politics and normativities of TA are at the heart of current debates: for example, the Austrian ITA recently finalized two projects on these issues: in March 2018 one titled ‘Practices and Paradigms of Policy Advice in TA’ and in December 2019 another titled ‘TA and Normativity’; and TATuP, the Journal for Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice, dedicated a special issue on ‘Normativity in TA’ in 2019.

24 Frahm, Doezema, and Pfotenhauer (2021, 29–31) recently argued that international organizations such as the OECD and the European Commission invest the language of politics and democracy in a particular way, by framing a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies and simultaneously presenting RRI as the solution to relocate democratization within their own transnational expertise, commitment to economic growth and market liberal political agenda. We are concerned that, according to their analysis, RRI becomes a vehicle for shifting democratic sovereignty away from the nation-state and demanding that locally grounded forms of reasoning about science and technology as objects of political consideration become primarily addressed in international arenas, which are characterized by their lack of democratic legitimacy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pierre Delvenne

Pierre Delvenne holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences of the University of Liège. He is currently Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), Lecturer at the University of Liège (Department of Political Science), and Director of SPIRAL Research Centre. Pierre has published extensively in his areas of expertise: Technology Assessment, bioeconomy in Europe and Latin America, more broadly, science and technology in society. Previously he was a visiting Research Fellow in King's College University (United Kingdom), Harvard University (USA), Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil), Universidad de Quilmes (Argentina) and University of Westminster (United Kingdom). Pierre is also a founding member of the Belgian Network for Science and Technology in Society Studies (BSTS).

Benedikt Rosskamp

Benedikt Rosskamp holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences of the University of Liège. His doctoral dissertation was about the futures and remakings of policy-oriented technology assessment, with case studies from Wallonia, Portugal and the Czech Republic. His research interests include technology assessment, public participation and responsible innovation in society.