Sebastien Brunet, and Pierre Delvenne, Univ. de Liege
Our current society has just been the playground of many changes structural as well as cultural. That evolution has had an impact on the way of developing an office of Technology Assessment (T.A.) well adapted to the new realities. Indeed, starting from an industrial society in which the main dynamic is inequality, we argue that, around the period including the 1970’s and the 1980’s, we moved to a risk society where the main dynamic is uncertainty. This change of societal structure is not without any effect on the citizens, sub-political actors informed and active who nowadays claim for a better place in the public management of technological innovations.

The end of the industrial period has witnessed the first two parliamentary T.A. offices, first in the United States and then in France, both drawn towards an instrumental model which has as a foremost mission to “enlighten” the members of Parliament on complex technological issues. Ever since, other T.A. offices were created in Europe and most of them took a more participative shape, based on a discursive model which also has to foster the social acceptability of technologies by associating all the stakeholders to the decision-making process through various participatory methods (consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, scenario workshops…).

We plan to concentrate on five parliamentary Technology Assessment offices in order to compare their roles, responsibilities and achievements in each historical and political context until the present time. Following the dates of establishment, we will chronologically focus on the American “Office of Technology Assessment” (1972), the French “Office Parlementaire d’Evaluation des Choix Scientifiques et Techniques” (1983), the “Danish Board of Technology” (1985), the European “Scientific and Technological Options Assessment” (1987) and the Flemish “Vlaams Instituut voor Wetenschappelijk en Technologisch Aspectenonderzoek” (2000). Of course, our attention will be drawn by the particular fact that among these five offices, the American is the only one to have closed its doors in 1995.

For each case study, we will center on the main characteristics of the T.A.’s way of working to spotlight the parliamentary, constructive and participatory aspects. We will underline how, over the last 35 years, it has been providing intelligence on technological innovations, keeping in mind the developments of the modernization process.

Has the society of the democratized risk become a society of the participative cult? Is the modern risk a myth for participative action in the framework of T.A.? In which proportion are the societal changes shaping the impact of Technology Assessment? We propose to replace the elements in a temporal context to bring the T.A. evolution to light from the early beginning to nowadays compared to the emergence of new social movements.