Alexander Bogner
Abstract
In recent times, the introduction of new technologies has been accompanied by an increasing number of participatory and dialogue events. As science and technology become ever more interwoven, these events focus on ‘upstream’ technology development (‘technoscience’).
As a consequence, issues to be discussed in participatory events get highly abstract and practical applications become hypothetical at best. Against this background, participatory technology assessment faces three main challenges: exclusion, streamlining of the discourse and hyping. This article discusses implications of and possible solutions for these challenges.
Introduction
What are the current trends in participation in the field of new and emerging technologies?
How does the fact that new and emerging technologies are rarely subject to public debate affect the idea, the practice and the role of participation?
When talking about participation in a new and emerging technology, this implies a focus on a special kind of participation. In the following, we are not dealing with user involvement in the development or improvement of technologies, often referred to as open innovation (see von Hippel 2005). Rather, we are dealing with lay people’s involvement in the process of Technology Assessment (TA) at an early stage, which raises several challenges for TA (Bogner 2012).
The case of synthetic biology can serve as an example: by initiating public dialogues or citizen conferences, people are invited to discuss ethical and social implications; however, since concrete applications of synthetic biology are missing at the moment, people are not expected to contribute to a specific innovation. So, participation takes place under special conditions, changing the nature of public engagement and challenging profoundly the role of participation in TA.
Participation in Technology Assessment This observation is the starting point of my presentation: in the context of new and emerging technologies, the form and role of participation changes profoundly. Since it involves important challenges for TA, my main aim to sensitize for this change, to illustrate what lies behind and what results from it.
Technoscience and Upstream Engagement
First of all, we have to recognize that talking about new and emerging technologies implies talking about a new socio-technical constellation. This is mirrored in the notion of
‘technoscience’, which new and emerging technologies are often debated under ever since Bruno Latour popularized the term (Latour 1987).
Critical STS scholars characterized technoscience as a new era in which science is dominated by technology; science, in this view, is no longer legitimized through the pure gain of knowledge alone. Rather, its applicability and its innovation potential provide legitimation (Forman 2007; Nordmann 2011). In other words: science has to be legitimized with respect to societal values and expectations – seeking the truth is not enough any more.
In a broader sense, the term ‘technoscience’ implies that technology development does not follow basic research in a linear way; rather, principles of feasibility and marketability already influence basic research. Fundamental decisions on applications are taken early during research, possibly deciding the fate of a technology for good. STS scholars have therefore emphasized the progressive entanglement of basic research and technological development.
With a view to participation, this means that participation has to set in at an early stage – in order to influence technology development effectively. In other words, interpreting modern science as technoscience resulted in the quest for moving participation ‘upstream’. This has become particularly evident with nanotechnology. As soon as nanotechnology appeared on the agenda, scholars, such as Wilsdon and Willis (2004), argued for upstream engagement.
The central idea was to intensify public involvement through a stimulated dialogue much earlier than previously. From 2000 on, a series of public engagement events on nanotechnology took place in several countries. However, moving upstream public participation to an early phase of science and technology development entails some problems. It sets in at a point in time where there is no cause for public controversies; there are no concrete applications that could trigger citizens’ concerns or stimulate public imagination (Gaskell et al. 2005).
Consequently, the public tend to be little interested.
A paradoxical situation emerges: when a field of science and technology is new and decision-making agendas are relatively open to influences from the public, the public’s interest in engaging with these issues is low. The consequence is that lay people need to be actively interested and motivated to participate.
Engaging the Public in New and Emerging Technologies Project-Shaped Participation
In the age of innovation, public engagement is strongly encouraged for good reasons.
However, due to the abstractness or the virtual character of the emerging technologies at stake, participation has to be actively organized from outside – depending on external resources. In other words, such participation often takes the form of a project aiming at bringing people into a dialogue on technoscientific issues at an early stage. We call this new setting project-shaped participation (PSP). PSP means:
• Public dialogues and engagement procedures are initiated and organized by professional participation specialists, often from the field of TA.
• Participation often takes the form of a project funded by a third party (external funding agencies).
• Participation takes place largely without reference to existing public controversies, actual demands for participation or explicit individual concerns. Its role and function(s) are unclear to a large extent.
You may argue that we have already seen this new kind of participation experiments or projects in the late 1980s. And, in fact, the first citizen conferences were organized in the wake of the GM conflict and other technology controversies (Joss/Bellucci 2002). Since then, a variety of participatory methods developed into what we call today Participatory Technology Assessment (PTA).
Obviously, there is an important difference between PTA and PSP: PTA emerged against the background of public controversies and partly violent conflicts. PTA was expected to contribute constructively to finding political solutions in cases of manifest conflicts. PSP, in contrast, mostly aims at bringing people into a dialogue at an early stage (‘upstream’).
PTA was to channel open protest against technology, PSP is to raise people’s interest in new technologies.
In past technology controversies, there was no need to invite people because they organized themselves; the protests sometimes took militant forms as we have seen in the struggles over nuclear power plants in Germany and elsewhere (Radkau 1995).
In our times, info trucks instead of police cars enter the scene. Information is literally driven to the public to make people debate the chances and risks of emerging technologies. With a view to nanotechnology, for example, the German Ministry of Education and Research has launched a public-dialogue initiative by sending out a rolling communication centre (‘Nano Truck’) that visits up to 100 cities a year across the whole of Germany (www.
nanotruck.de/en/home.html).
Today, participation on technology issues is no longer protest-shaped but project-shaped.
Let’s take the citizen conference as a prominent example again. Today, this procedure primarily aims at interesting lay people in technology issues and stimulating a public debate.
In 2006, we saw the first transnational experiment in engaging lay citizens (‘Meeting of
Participation in Technology Assessment Minds’). In several meetings, 130 people from 9 EU member states discussed ethical and social aspects of modern neuroscience (Boussaguet/Dehousse 2009). On a global level, the first participation experiment took place in 2009, in preparation of the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Organized by the Danish Board of Technology (Rask et al. 2011), 4400 people from 38 countries from all over the world discussed the implication of climate change and related policy options in 44 citizen conferences (http://globalwarming.wwviews.org/
node/259.html). In 2012, a second global citizen deliberation followed, this time dealing with biodiversity.
Challenges for TA
If participation gets project-shaped, TA institutions – as a central actor in initiating and organizing participatory events – face several challenges. First of all, if denoted a project, the procedure has limitations in the following areas: time (i.e. a defined beginning and end), issue (i.e. a clear task definition) and social reach (i.e. discussing the problem among a defined range of participants). In addition, the organizational setting of PSPs often creates an experimental situation. Participants are surrounded by scientific observers and microphones. Organizers as well as evaluation teams gaze at the lay citizens and keep analysing how the citizens master their tasks.
Since I am a scientific observer as well, I will discuss several challenges PSP is facing today, based on several case studies carried out in several research projects (Bogner 2012).
With special regard to TA, the key challenges encompass three aspects called a) exclusion, b) framing and c) hyping.
a) Exclusion: Dialogue and deliberation among citizens result in the exclusion of certain participants.
In the course of PSP deliberation, norms become established that lead to the exclusion of those participants who cannot, or do not, want to fit in with those norms (see also Young 2000). Often the number of participants decreases significantly over time. Among those who drop out are people who often hold extreme or exotic views. They are afraid of becoming complete outsiders within their group. This is one of the most obvious problems we have to deal with in TA. This problem has been addressed frequently.
b) Framing: The citizens’ deliberation process results in a streamlining of the discourse.
As a rule, PSP events deal with new and emerging technologies, i.e. issues that lack an established perspective they can be debated under. Synthetic biology or cognitive enhancement are relevant topics today but not debatable as such or as a whole. Such abstract issues need to be made interesting and debatable to a lay audience. In other words, any upstream debate needs a dominant frame that determines which aspects are relevant (for example risk or ethical aspects) and which arguments are legitimate (Nisbet 2010).
Engaging the Public in New and Emerging Technologies Such frames tend to be based on previous debates over other technologies (Torgersen/
Schmidt 2013). Relying on past technology debates means to restrict the actual debate to well-known aspects, structuring it along the typical ethical, legal and social aspects previous expert panels already raised on other technologies. The danger is, in other words, that the lay people’s discourse becomes mainstreamed (or streamlined or narrowed).
This effect can be observed empirically in the course of a PSP. In PSP events, the lay people’s exchanges, even though initially covering a broad range of aspects, become increasingly focused on the experts’ discourse. Lay expertise becomes a copy of expert expertise, failing to open-up the discourse by introducing new aspects. This is paradoxical in some sense:
the successful involvement of laypeople results in a mainstreaming of the discourse. This problem has not always been addressed sufficiently.
c) Hyping: TA has to elicit public attention while resisting the hype.
From our observations of participation becoming project-shaped, an additional challenge for TA arises: if nobody is interested in participating, the TA organizers have to mobilize.
Thus, it becomes especially important to raise public attention. Frans Brom, the director of the TA department at the Rathenau Institute, says:
“For getting attention, a perspective needs to be formulated that can be disputed. In order to stimulate social debate and formation of political judgements, we need to evoke objections and, at the same time, remain scientifically and socially reliable.” (Brom 2009, p. 1) This statement formulates the basic problem of TA. On the one hand, TA has to address technology issues in a polarizing and controversial manner to stimulate a public debate. TA has to dramatize the issue at stake using utopian imaginaries and exaggerated expectations (positive or negative). On the other hand, TA is dedicated to providing a scientifically sound basis for technology policy and contributing to a rationalization of the discourse over technology.
To foster public engagement without uncritically echoing the hype – this constitutes a central challenge for TA in the era of PSP.
Conclusions
The term PSP was coined to capture a somewhat irritating situation: the increasing demand for involving citizens in technology-assessment processes meets little interest ‘from below’, which has unintended consequences. I mentioned the exclusion of people involved and the mainstreaming of discourse.
With a view to emerging technologies, the impact on the discourse caused by providing certain frames for citizen deliberation must be considered carefully. We have to rely on frames to make new technologies debatable, but the introduction of frames determines the image and the imagined future of a technology. This calls for a careful dealing with
Participation in Technology Assessment the framing issue when organizing PSP events. Perhaps the participants should already debate the way they themselves prefer to frame the issue at stake. Possibly, this will lead away from traditional TA involving well-informed (or expert-instructed) lay people to more experimental forms of addressing options and expectations.
That said, and despite the challenges mentioned, we should not underestimate the usefulness of lay people’s involvement in TA. However, the participation must not be an end in itself.
We need to better assess its precise role in each case, especially when it comes to new and emerging technologies.
To do so, we could use a twofold approach. On a theoretical level, possible roles of participation could be determined with regard to different strands of the theory of democracy.
This could lead to theoretically founded expectations of benefits. On an empirical level, we could analyse interaction processes taking place in PSP. This would reveal the participants’
worldviews and motives underlying the concrete outcomes. This may provide better clues with regard to their properties and performances.
References: Page 392