Broadening out and opening up technology assessment: Approaches to enhance international development, co-ordination and democratisation

Technology assessment (TA) has a strong history of helping to identify priorities and improve environmental sustainability, cost-effectiveness and wider benefits in the technology policies and innovation strategies of nation-states. At international levels, TA has the potential to enhance the roles of science, technology and innovation towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, effectively implementing the UN Framework on Climate Change and fostering general global transitions to ‘green economies’. However, when effectively recommending single ostensibly ‘best’ technologies or strategies, TA practices can serve unjustifiably to ‘close down’ debate, failing adequately to address technical uncertainties and social ambiguities, reducing scope for democratic accountability and co-ordination across scales and contexts. This paper investigates ways in which contrasting processes ‘broadening out’ and ‘opening up’ TA can enhance both rigour and democratic accountability in technology policy, as well as facilitating social relevance and international cooperation. These methods allow TA to illuminate options, uncertainties and ambiguities and so inform wider political debates about how the contending questions, values and knowledges of different social interests often favour contrasting innovation pathways. In this way TA can foster both technical robustness and social legitimacy in subsequent policy-making. Drawing on three empirical case studies (at local, national and international levels), the paper discusses detailed cases and methods, where recent TA exercises have contributed to this ‘broadening out’ and ‘opening up’. It ends by exploring wider implications and challenges for national and international technology assessment processes that focus on global sustainable development challenges.ESR

'Recruitment', 'composition' and 'mandate' issues in deliberative processes: should we focus on arguments rather than individuals?

Public participation in environmental decisionmaking has become an accepted part of Western societies over the last three decades. Whereas on a simple level every democratic process based on aggregating individual preferences contains an element of public participation, the literature on discursive democracy emphasises instead a more subtle, rich, and intense social process of deliberation. In this model, the spectrum of understandings, interests, and values expressed in different discourses is explored in detail by participants before a decision is reached. Although within an idealised model of discursive democracy such deliberations would involve every member of society potentially affected by the issue under discussion, a range of constraints mean that in practice this ideal model can only be approximated by discussions held in various forms of `minipublics', which contain in most cases only a tiny proportion of the relevant communityöfor example, citizens' juries and consensus conferences. We identify three problem areas concerning the choice of participants in such `minipublics', which we call the `recruitment problem' (how individual participants are chosen to take part), the `composition problem' (what the final composition of the minipublic is), and the 'mandate problem' (what role each of the participants assumes within the process). We suggest that most studies have not explicitly distinguished these elements, and consequently the rationale for why the results of such processes should be considered legitimate in either an advisory or a decisionmaking capacity is often unclear. We review the limitations of traditional recruitment methods and suggest a new alternative we consider appropriate for discursive processesöutilising Q methodology as a step in developing a purposive sampling frame for the recruitment phase. Although this approach is not without problems, we suggest that it could potentially offer a better basis on which to address the recruitment problem for those processes seeking to approximate discursively democratic ideals