amongst participants was the decisive "arena". Discussions were held at two (two- day) conferences, by way of preparation three (one-day) colloquia were held on:
evolutionary biology (risks of genetic engineering), on policy conditions and targets for agriculture and on regulation problems with respect to HR technology. All par
ticipants had previously received the expert reports and a short five-page summary.
(See appendix III for the procedural steps of the technology assessment.)
When discussing the reports the experts for that respective area assumed a key role.
Participants who were experts in other subjects were edged out into an observer role or restricted to putting questions of a factual nature. In order to guarantee the active involvement of as many participants as possible and to foster controversial discussion, 15 additional commentaries were commissioned which were to introduce discussion on the respective subjects of the expert reports. From time to time the circle of par
ticipants was supplemented by suitable representatives of the "other side". The aim of the commentaries was to illustrate the various approaches and the various positions covered in the problem area and to stress the points which were clearly of importance for the political evaluation and regulation of HR technology. More particularly, they were to comment on:
• whether the central findings of the expert report were substantiated,
• whether important aspects were not covered by the expert report,
• which implicit and unexpected preconditions the expert report laid down,
• whether the conclusions were plausible.
The members of the Coordinating Committee took turns acting as moderator at the conferences. They were not responsible for summarizing the findings of the discus
sions but rather for ensuring that no points or contributions were omitted. It was their task, from time to time, to pool the arguments in order to structure discussion. The WZB working group was to support the Coordinating Committee in this respect.
The evaluation discussions presumably suffered less than is normally the case at con
ferences from time pressure. But they had two special features which were also con
straints: the discussions were scientific rather than political and they were process- rather than result-oriented.
The relative "reticence" of participants in respect of normative and political questions could be attributed to a certain pre-adjustment to the procedural rules. The plan was for problems of legal and political evaluation of HR technology to be dealt with as a priority subject at the final fourth procedural conference. It was only at that confer
ence that the legal expert report was dealt with which took up a series of legal policy questions concerning the regulation of HR technology. On the other hand, the inten
tion was not to postpone political questions to the last conference. It was far more the case that the Coordinating Committee had expressly indicated that the expert reports and commentaries should contain conclusions based on value judgements which should be seen as the starting point for political discussions within the TA procedure.
This, however, was only done to a limited degree. With the exception of the expert report on the ethics of plant manipulation, which was explicitly oriented towards a value judgement, all the other expert reports and commentaries mainly contained empirical and scientific arguments. One explanation could be the obligation of neu
trality attached to the expert role. What had more of an influence was probably the fact that the participants, themselves, defined their controversies as debates about empirical findings and not about values and goals. What was to be classified as dam
age was not a subject of controversy, what was controversial was whether the damage was possible or probable.
In the TA procedure no-one advanced the argument that the problems were not empirical but political in nature because it was a question only of what one wanted and what one considered to be acceptable. This would have meant, among other things, that the argument of the special risks of HR technology would at least have been qualified. Adherence to the relevance of the empirical questions was for various reasons. First of all, there was, more or less, agreement on many normative ques
tions which meant that new arguments on the valuation level could not be introduced.
Furthermore, the political clout of purely normative arguments is seen as being rather limited. In our society value issues (beyond non-controversial moral judgements) can be attributed to private pluralism or publicly answered by majority decisions. As a strategy of political critique it is, therefore, often more effective to attack factual claims which are based on valuations rather than to call for alternative values. At the conferences on the evaluation of the expert reports lengthy political discussions were the exception.
The evaluation discussions worked through central claims in the expert reports, i.e.
substantiation and proof were called for, objections raised, counter arguments formu
lated and examined. Often the sequence of arguments (in line with the sequence of requests to take the floor) went to-and-fro or in circles. However, as far as the con
tents are concerned, there was a factual accumulation of arguments. But in the proce
dure this accumulation rarely led to a declared convergency of positions along the lines of dispute settlement. In individual cases arguments were explicitly withdrawn and replaced by arguments on a different level. Sometimes there was a call for the Plenary to record the result of discussions as a declared consensus or dissent. This demand was not taken up. The moderators intimated that it would not be possible to sum-up ad hoc in a reliable manner the non-transparent state of discussion. The dynamics of the evaluation conferences were, therefore, process- rather than result- oriented. The discussions were consultations without conclusions or, if you like: the taking of evidence without an ensuing decision.
To a certain extent it seems appropriate that discussions in the procedure were not primarily designed to record consensus or dissent between the respective opposing sides. The negotiations on the expert reports were not a form of bargaining by means of which the parties could test whether a balance of interests could be achieved through give and take. Bargaining would, for example, have been involved if indus
try and the environmental groups had got together to agree on which policy they both could uphold for dealing with HR technology.14 The negotiations in our procedure could indeed be equated with cognitive debates on the interpretation of reality: along the lines of the taking of evidence. In these negotiations, however, the opposing sides do not have full sovereignty over the findings. Whether an assertion of facts is correct, whether a causal relation exists, whether a. hypothesis is plausible is not decided by the opposing sides alone. Consensus between the parties leads neither to the validity of empirical claims nor does this validity exclude dissent. In "contractual bargaining" the parties have the final say. The determining factor is whether they can agree or not. In the case of the "taking of legal evidence" it is the judge who has the final say.
Of course, this immediately raises the question of who can assume the role of the judge in the TA procedure. The procedure has been set up as a discourse with no third instance. Therefore it is up to the participants themselves to judge. If they can
not agree, then, by definition, the discourse has failed to produce results. Thus, the
14 Such bargaining may sometimes be involved in policy dialogues or consensus conferences; see Hingel (1993).
participants have not only process control, but also decision control.15 The conflict
ing parties may use decision control to prevent the taking of evidence from leading to judgements within the procedure. Decision control does not entitle them, however, to act as judges on their own behalf. If the participants cannot agree on empirical mat
ters within the procedure, they simply leave the judgement to observers o f the proce
dure. Normally it is the competence of institutionalized science to judge empirical questions. If the competence of science is challenged, the dispute can only be pre
sented to the public.
It is true nevertheless that the procedure changes its character if results of the TA can indeed only be presented from an observer perspective. What used to be a discourse with decision control by the participants becomes a procedure that transfers final judgement to a third instance. Decision making by third instances remains outside the rules of discourse. Correspondingly, it cannot lay claim to the specific legitimacy and integrative power of discursive conflict resolution.