A short response to van Lente, Swierstra and Joly’s essay ‘Responsible innovation as a critique of technology assessment’

I set out to read this thought experiment by van Lente, Swierstra, and Joly (2017) as a constructive critique of technology assessment (TA) with a view towards making TA better suited to the needs it attempts to address. As the authors do not seem to come from inside the TA community, I hoped for a fresh external look at our endeavour. However, the piece is too short to do justice to all the variants of TA and their current practice, so probably most TA practitioners will read it as a caricature of TA. Nonetheless we can learn something from this essay. But let’s start at the beginning.

TA has been on the move for more than five decades. It is adapting to changing political contexts and cultures, to emerging topics needing new approaches, to different types of demands from various addressees, to the rising complexity of our societies and socio-technical environments, and not least to the evolution of the normative fabric of our societies. Against this background it is not surprising that TA comes in various shapes; frequently it is not even called TA, and the prefixes to TA are numerous: expert TA, participatory TA, constructive TA, parliamentary TA, discursive TA, argumentative TA, anticipatory TA, rational TA, interactive TA, public TA, hermeneutic TA, etc. However, the mission stays the same, namely to contribute to understanding the interrelationship between (new) technologies and society by analysing possible impacts and policy options with a view to inform innovators, policy-makers and the public in the best possible way. It does so by being eclectic when it comes to approaches and methods, choosing what seems best suitable given the available resources of time and money; in general, it relies on collecting disciplinary knowledge, but has a long tradition in inter- and transdisciplinary discourse to grasp aspects for which individual disciplines are blind and to integrate other bodies of knowledge, for example, from stakeholders and lay people. For this, TA has developed quite a number of TA-specific approaches and methods to fill these gaps (e.g. Ornetzeder, Bechtold, and Nentwich 2009; Degelsegger and Torgersen 2011; Gudowsky et al. 2012; Bechtold, Ornetzeder, and Sotoudeh 2012).

So my first reaction to van Lente et al. is that their presentation of TA is quite narrow, I assume because they needed a straw man for their argument. To begin with, there are by no means ‘generations’ of TA, it is simply not empirically founded to speak of ‘old’ and ‘new’ TA. In Europe and worldwide, all of those forms listed above are applied in practice in parallel, depending on the context, the subject, the addressee, etc. In particular, there is a lot of expert TA out there today and rightly so; the ‘old TA’ is nowadays not done in the same way as in the ‘old’ days; in many cases expert TA is combined with participatory TA in a single project. So these ideal (?) types or categories do not help to grasp the diversity of TA practice. Contrasting RRI with so-called old TA, new TA and constructive technology assessment (CTA) is just too ‘sketchy’ (the authors’ word) to lead us far (e.g. Ganzevles, van Est, and Nentwich 2014).

Let’s continue with the table on ‘assumptions and perversities of TA and RRI’. TA practitioners would rather not characterise ‘old’, that is, expert TA as having its main knowledge source in economics and engineering with the possible perverse effect of missing relevant aspects. No doubt, for pragmatic reasons, there admittedly is more limited and less ‘full’ TA out there (although it usually does not focus on economical questions). However, the central mission of TA always was and still is to include those bodies of knowledge that are deemed relevant for the topic at stake. Indeed it is the central ethos of a TA practitioner not to leave out anything which may be relevant.

Another point of debate is the purpose of participatory technology assessment (pTA). I doubt that the main goal of ‘new’, that is, pTA is inclusion for the purpose of serving democracy. There is a long tradition in critically reflecting participatory methods of various forms. Certainly, there are some who see participation as a tool mainly serving democracy (Sclove 1995); I question however whether this is a rightful characterisation of most pTA. In my perception the main purpose of participation of stakeholders and in particular citizens (ordinary people, non-experts) is to get access to and include in the TA process particular types of knowledge that would otherwise not be available. Furthermore it is an explicit goal of pTA to avoid being high-jacked by stakeholder interests (one of the alleged ‘perversities’) by including laypeople with no obvious link to interest groups and no individual stakes. In any case, whatever the ratio between democracy-oriented or ‘public’ TA and methodologically oriented pTA, my point here is that this table can be read as a caricature of the real TA practice around the world.

Finally, I do not think that the characterisation of CTA is adequate or universally acceptable when the knowledge source is set as the ‘TA agent’ (this term of the authors remains undefined). The TA practitioners are indeed heavily involved, but to me it seems that the (first or potential) users play the central part in this concept.

Although in my reply I focus on TA rather than RRI, the essay authors’ presentation of RRI is also very sketchy and hence not convincing. RRI is a rather young and weakly defined concept, mainly introduced by the EU’s research policy bureaucracy replacing the old-fashioned term of ELSI (ethical, legal and societal implications) research; the research community was asked to define RRI for their purposes. The Grand Challenges are older as a concept than RRI (see for instance the global challenges for humanity developed in the framework of the UN-related Millennium Project since 1996¹); so TA has dealt with this kind of challenges- or mission-driven innovation for quite some time. I would also argue that ethics is not the main aspect of the RRI concept, unless by ethics one means everything from including diverse publics to gender sensitivity to transparency and so on. Therefore ‘ethical brokers’ are not the only or even main knowledge source in the RRI approach.

The first main assertion of van Lente et al.’s essay is that RRI would take a broader set of values seriously as compared to TA. TA would ignore what they call ‘soft impacts’, that is, impacts that cannot be measured quantitatively, that are controversial and with no direct link to the technology at stake. Based on my knowledge of hundreds of TA projects of the last two decades or so I cannot but strongly disagree with this description. Any relevant TA study will focus on hard impacts related to health or assets, etc., if there are some to expect after in-depth scrutiny. For instance, the results of numerous studies by toxicologists are an important knowledge source for any serious TA on nanotechnologies. No doubt, TA should do this in the future as well. However, it is simply not true that TA overall has a blind spot on the ‘soft’ side. I assume that this assertion has been made against the background of the above-mentioned belief that TA is mainly conducted by engineers and economists. It is, however, my perception that in typical TA teams social scientists of all kinds – sociologists, lawyers, ethicists, political scientists, etc. – are involved whose explicit interests are with exactly what the essay authors call soft impacts. While the early TA studies on green biotechnology certainly focused on possible harm on human health and the environment, they quickly started focusing also on legal and ethical aspects such as the patentability of living matter or phenomena such as the societal consequences of economic dependencies between the farmers and the biotech firms etc. Many TA studies explicitly address these ‘soft’ aspects only. It is mainly the controversial soft aspects that are at their core, not the establishment of undisputed knowledge from the hard sciences (as important as they certainly are). Note that the political system has developed a growing awareness of these soft facts over the last two decades; not least because of that interest TA has developed tools and methods to adequately deal with them, for instance the CIMULACT project² (see also Peissl et al. 2014; Gudowsky and Peissl 2016).

Based on this, in my view misleading, account of the relationship of TA to soft aspects the authors find that when TA is addressing ethics or moral conflicts it would not include those ‘between values that are less well entrenched in the spheres of technology and policy actors, like for instance friendship or peace of mind’, it would not address ‘questions about the importance of “naturalness”, about whether modern life becomes too accelerated, about what real friendship is’, leaving ‘the determination of what is desirable to the market’. By contrast, TA would point ‘to conflicts between economic and environmental values, or by articulating trade-offs between health risks and efficiency standards’ and would restrict ‘itself to conflicts between well-established, public values that are linked to the no-harm principle’. While I admit not having seen a reference to ‘true friendship’ in a TA report so far, overall this alleged self-restriction of TA is not at all what I find in TA studies, particularly not in those that involve citizens: the laypersons do not discriminate between the types of norms when they discuss issues, they bring up whatever they think important in the context. So talking about the impact of, say, new social media on ‘real friendship’ would be a topic to be expected in a participatory TA on that subject matter. To be sure, any TA team is well advised not to over-stretch, not to over-interpret the findings as they may be ambiguous, while those related to the ‘non-harm principle’ or those related to politically accepted societal goals (e.g. sustainability) may lead to more concrete recommendations. Yes, TA is cautious with conclusions based on soft aspects, because of the inherent ambiguity and difficulty to tackle it and certainly because of the need for and shared claim of TA to be non-partisan in its conclusions. But it is empirically not true that TA has a blind spot here. What TA can learn, however, from this critique is that we should focus even more on these crucial societal aspects and make the inherent limits and challenges of TA more explicit. Incidentally, all RRI approaches would be well advised to do likewise.

Having said this, I nevertheless appreciate the authors’ implicit call that TA should not cease to reflect on its normative assumptions. This is in fact a continuous and important task. TA generally draws on what society at large and politics in particular share and has materialised in written form such as human rights, constitutional goals, long-term visions and programmes, for example, in the form of white books, etc. At the same time, TA (and RRI) is well advised to challenge the normative assumptions of its practitioners as well as of how politics and society as its addressees function.

In the second main part of the essay the authors deal with three limitations of stakeholder involvement in TA. Again, the critique starts with an oversimplified picture of participation in TA, contrasting two models, namely the ‘Danish (public debate)’ and the ‘Dutch (co-production)’ model. For the public debate model they refer to the consensus conference. However, this is but one of many methods and in particular not very popular any more for the last decade or so; what is even more important, many if not most of today’s pTA procedures are not public in the same sense. For the co-production model we cannot speak of one model either as there are many varieties of constructive or interactive TA. So the conclusions drawn by the authors apply only to a small fraction of the TA scene.

Against this background, I have no problem admitting that the issues detected with regard to stakeholder involvement (limited scope, representativeness, relationship to governance) are worthwhile to reflect on. However, if we can learn something from this, it is less by the – so far still hardly empirical – RRI lens, but by the practice of the many stakeholder processes carried out in numerous TA studies (e.g. Rask, Worthington, and Lammi 2011; Gudowsky et al. 2012; Ornetzeder and Kastenhofer 2012; Bechtold and Sotoudeh 2013; Ornetzeder, Wicher, and Suschek-Berger 2016). As stated above, TA is always eager to learn and to adapt. It is difficult to see, however, how we could learn from a (or which?) RRI concept in-the-making. Hence, the authors conclude that ‘these limitations of stakeholder involvement should not be viewed as a definitive rejection of TA, but instead as a critique that becomes apparent in the frame of RRI. Moreover, it also provides new tasks for RRI as well’. I would rather assert that this critique is not new and there is a long-standing debate on participation in general and TA in particular. Given that RRI is still a young concept, undefined and ‘in the making’, it has not much to say about it so far.

Somehow based on their critique of stakeholder involvement, in particular the allegedly ill-defined link to governance and the state, van Lente et al. argue that ‘TA can be said to […] downplay the desired direction of innovation’. We shall still see how the fuzzy concept of RRI will do in that respect. My personal opinion is that, as a general rule, TA was and is well advised to stay separate from governance and rather to focus on well-grounded input to the political and societal processes derived either from expert knowledge or from stakeholder or citizen participation. It is there and not in the sphere of research, development and innovation, neither in accompanying activities and research (such as TA) where genuine deliberations (as opposed to input to them) have to take place about the ‘good life’, etc., and how to bring it about as a society. And TA is not the place where decisions have to be made with regard to the general principles and values that should guide the development of our societies. Yes, TA (and RRI for that matter) will contribute to tackling ‘normative concerns about the societal goals of innovation’, but one should not over-burden TA (and RRI) beyond the subject matter of a particular project with the overarching societal debate to be staged in the political sphere. What is more, a unique focus on ethical questions, on norms and values – while important, no doubt – at the expense of expert and factual knowledge, would neither serve the cause of TA nor RRI.

So, like the essay authors, I conclude that TA and RRI can learn from each other, as they have, in principle, a lot in common: every characteristic usually attributed to RRI also applies to TA. In my view, the RRI concept forms the wider framework in which TA and other advice activities such as the bioethics councils’ work are embedded. I hold that despite all shortcomings (and continuous attempts to overcome them) ‘TA can and should be a key carrier of the concept and play a light-house role in RRI’, as formulated by the 2015 Parliaments and Citizens in Technology Assessment Manifesto. Indeed I would advise RRI practitioners and theorists to look carefully at the TA practice and approaches of the last five decades and – because much of it is implicit or tacit knowledge – to engage in exchange with TA practitioners. I assume that, in the end, the former will learn more from this exchange than the latter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr habil. Michael Nentwich is director of the Vienna Institute of Technology Assessment (Austrian Academy of Sciences). He previously worked at the Vienna University of Economics, in Warwick, Essex and the Max Planck Institute in Cologne. He studied law, political science, economics and science & technology studies. His current main research interest is technology assessment, in particular of ICT. His latest book is ‘Cyberscience 2.0. Research in the Age of Digital Social Networks’ (2012).

ORCID

Michael Nentwich http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2269-0076

Notes

1. http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/challeng.html.

2. http://www.cimulact.eu.