Whose look into the future? Participation in technology assessment and foresight

Abstract

Technology assessment and foresight are instruments that aim to anticipate future developments and conditions and, therefore, are intended to provide orientations for present decision-making. Although to different extents, both instruments procedurally and methodologically rely on participatory procedures for anticipation. Building on the analytical concepts of co-production and boundary work, we analyze the practices of participatory knowledge production in ten technology assessment and foresight projects in Austria. In the first step, we examine the conceptualization and realization of participation by identifying their underlying rationales. In the second step, we show how different rationales influence the selection of participants and their interactions. We then show how particular actors and related role expectations are assigned to specific modes of anticipation. Finally, we highlight the covert domination of experts and project managers in the overall framing of problems and the challenges that they face when their framings are questioned by other participants.

Keywords:

• technology assessment
• foresight
• participation
• anticipatory knowledge

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research conducted in the framework of the doctoral school Sustainable Development (DOKNE) at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). We are very grateful to Anna Horvath and Thomas Pfister for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the article and fruitful discussions at the 2009 ECPR General Conference. We also thank Dana Wasserbacher who conducted the interviews related to the foresight cases. Furthermore, we like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the article.

Notes

1. Interviews are randomly numbered.