Cosmopolitan technology assessment? Lessons learned from attempts to address the deficit of technology assessment in Europe

Abstract

This article examines ineffective efforts to address the Technology Assessment deficit in Europe and asks how TA approaches can spread across diverse socio-political contexts while considering the specificities of receiving environments. Based on participatory observations and in-depth empirical case studies, we draw on Sheila Jasanoff's work and identify a discursive shift from an institutional deficit to a knowledge deficit of TA, co-produced with an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity. Our analysis highlights the epistemic supremacy of existing TA institutions, a situation in which newcomers fully consent to become reliant on foreign imports of TA practices and knowledge. We argue to carefully disentangle the normative dimensions and power inequalities of the standardization of TA approaches, as this can threaten the diversity of perspectives of the knowledge produced and, consequently, the effectiveness and legitimacy of public decision-making. We conclude by identifying research avenues into epistemic subsidiarity for TA practice and scholarship.

Full text

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Cosmopolitan technology assessment? Lessons learned from
attempts to address the deficit of technology assessment in
Europe
Pierre Delvenne and Benedikt Rosskamp
Spiral Research Centre, Department of Political Science, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
ABSTRACT
This article examines ineffective efforts to address the Technology
Assessment deficit in Europe and asks how TA approaches can
spread across diverse socio-political contexts while considering
the specificities of receiving environments. Based on participatory
observations and in-depth empirical case studies, we draw on
Sheila Jasanoff’s work and identify a discursive shift from an
institutional deficit to a knowledge deficit of TA, co-produced
with an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic
subsidiarity. Our analysis highlights the epistemic supremacy of
existing TA institutions, a situation in which newcomers fully
consent to become reliant on foreign imports of TA practices and
knowledge. We argue to carefully disentangle the normative
dimensions and power inequalities of the standardization of TA
approaches, as this can threaten the diversity of perspectives of
the knowledge produced and, consequently, the effectiveness
and legitimacy of public decision-making. We conclude by
identifying research avenues into epistemic subsidiarity for TA
practice and scholarship.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 16 January 2021
Accepted 29 September
2021
KEYWORDS
Technology assessment;
epistemic subsidiarity;
deficit; cosmopolitanism;
civic epistemology
Introduction
Nowadays, the production of anticipatory knowledge about the development of science,
technology and innovation (STI) is actively sought and organized through specific insti-
tutional arrangements and practices. A relevant example of such arrangements and prac-
tices has been institutionalized under the label ‘Technology Assessment’(TA) since the
1970s, first in North America and then in Western Europe. TA can be defined as a
process which includes policy tools and whose objective is the early identification of tech-
nological changes and their possible impacts. This process primarily aims to support
policy-making. ‘It combines an element of anticipation of future developments (of the
technology, and its relation to markets and society) and an element of feedback of this
anticipation work to relevant decision-making arenas’(Rip 2001, 15512), especially Par-
liaments (therefore the term ‘Parliamentary Technology Assessment’, PTA).
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
CONTACT Pierre Delvenne pierre.delvenne@uliege.be Place des Orateurs 3/8, B31, 4000 Liège, Belgium
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION
2021, VOL. 8, NO. 3, 445–470
https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2021.1988433

The first PTA that was established was the result of a ‘surge of pride’(Mironesco 1997)
on the part of members of the US Congress who wanted to rebalance the legislative and
executive branches of government by providing the former with an institution that could
advise it on science and technology issues. From the 1980s onwards, a European
approach to PTA emerged on the basis of what had been done previously in the
United States, but considering European specificities, for example by broadening the
recipients of the knowledge produced beyond parliament alone or by developing parti-
cipatory mechanisms (Vig and Paschen 2000; Delvenne 2011). As a result, the term
‘PTA’does not only refer to technology assessment institutions that are located within
the parliamentary arena, but to all those that serve parliamentary bodies, whether exclu-
sively or not.
The tasks of PTA institutions are manifold, whether they are to produce scientific
knowledge that can be directly used by policy makers, to reduce social controversies
related to science and technology, or to stimulate public debate on the issues that STI
poses for society. In some cases, a PTA is primarily concerned with producing reports
highlighting policy options for a particular technology choice. In other cases, a PTA
focuses more on the ‘scientific, interactive and communicative process, in order to con-
tribute to the formation of public and political opinion on societal aspects of science and
technology’(Decker and Ladikas 2004: 4), thus creating additional channels between civil
society and the policy-making process (Rip 2001; van Eijndhoven 1997; Joss 1998; Luci-
vero, Delvenne, and Van Oudheusde 2019).
Beyond their national activities, TA practitioners also invest resources in international
coordination and the production of joint expertise (Vig and Paschen 2000; Hennen and
Ladikas 2009; Joss and Bellucci 2002; Hennen 1999; Bütschi, Joss, and Baeriswyl 2002;
Jurgen and van Est 2012). At the European level, PTA institutions are represented in
the European Parliamentary Technology Assessment (EPTA) network within which
co-exist different TA organizational models, mission statements, methods and practices.
1
Furthermore, over the last 25 years or so, the successive EU Framework Programs
allowed for the development and consolidation of initiatives aimed at sharing experience
and exchanging ‘good practices’about TA.
2
The exchange of good practices in such
transnational spaces also raises the question of the transfer of so-called ‘best practices’
(Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff2017) to new countries and contexts, a concern that has
recently received considerable attention in innovation studies and science and technol-
ogy studies (STS).
For example, with regard to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Doezema
et al. (2019) were concerned with how such a global concept is translated and trans-
formed in heterogenous national contexts. They asked: ‘what values and practices
should remain constant as it moves into different contexts, and what elements should
emerge from localized engagement around these ideas?’(Doezema et al. 2019, 324). In a
similar vein, highlighting the potential reductions that occur when influential STI con-
cepts are reified rather than challenged or adapted to local contexts, Delvenne and
Thoreau (2012,2017)offered criticisms of specific applications of the widely circulated
National Innovation System framework that do not consider ‘the situated socio-political
contexts and local realities’(Delvenne and Thoreau 2012, 216). Lastly, Irwin and col-
leagues interrogated the dynamics of convergence of specific practices across research
and innovation policies. In particular, they drew attention to ‘the manner in which
446 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

ideas and practices not only travel but also emerge, develop, and are in different ways dom-
esticated’(Irwin, Vedel, and Vikkelsø 2021, 50). As they put it, ‘the question of how ‘stan-
dard’ways of thinking and working are enacted in particular settings –and how specific
settings have influence over standard practices and processes –assumes great relevance
for research and innovation policy’(Ibid). Standardization, in their account, means the
process by which ‘countries with distinctive traditions, institutions and historical contexts
adopt a common agenda and toolbox’(Ibid).
In this paper we want to contribute to these ongoing debates by highlighting the poss-
ible standardization TA practices and knowledge
3
norms and its consequences, at a time
when the TA community considers that ‘expanding the TA landscape to EU 27 is the
major challenge for European TA in the coming years’(PACITA part B: 12). We ask:
how can TA approaches spread across diverse socio-political contexts while considering
the specificities of the receiving environments? To address this research question, we
focus on the case study of a particular project funded between by the European Commis-
sion (2011–2015) under the 7th Framework Program: PACITA (Parliaments and Civil
Society in Technology Assessment).
4
Although PACITA is not the only initiative that
has worked to expand the institutionalization of PTA in Europe, it is relevant to focus
on this project as an empirical reference point. Indeed, it has been by far the largest –
and best funded –coordinated international initiative in the recent two decades, invol-
ving most of the PTA institutions that are allowed to participate in a European project.
5
Concrete examples also show the importance that this project has had for the European
TA community. First, during PACITA it has not been organized any more EPTA prac-
titioners training, despite the fact it was an organized tradition of this network, since
dedicated resources were provided for this purpose by the PACITA project.
6
Second,
the latter also revived a tradition that had fallen into disuse for two decades, that of orga-
nizing European TA conferences again, a platform that was considered instrumental for
the early development of the European TA community (Scherz et al. 2016).
7
Third,
PACITA’s popularity has spread beyond traditional TA networks such as EPTA,
which have more stringent membership criteria. As a result, an increasingly hetero-
geneous set of partners started to recognize themselves as belonging to the same episte-
mic community (Haas 1992), and the idea of creating a more flexible and open global TA
network materialized.
8
Lastly, no other European project has been funded on PTA since
then by the European Framework Programs.
Grounded in our involvement in the PACITA project and activities, we examine the
diagnosis of the TA deficit as it evolved within the framework offered by the project as
well as the responses offered for its resolution. By doing so, we do not seek to transform
PACITA into a generalizable example but rather to offer useful insights to an interdisci-
plinary scholarly community that will inform the design of further comparative studies
and establish key terms for dialogue with policy-making communities. In the next sec-
tions, we present our methodology and detail our approach to fieldwork, before we
outline the theoretical underpinnings of ‘civic epistemology’(Jasanoff2005; Miller
2005), i.e. the cultural differences in the production of knowledge and its use in decision
making, and ‘epistemic subsidiarity’(Jasanoff2013, 2014), i.e. the question at what level
knowledge is produced, legitimized, and understood. Next, we introduce the normative
architecture of PACITA, before we analyze the result of various activities initiated by the
project and carried out in different national contexts in order to ‘expand the TA
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 447

landscape’.Wefind that, facing unsuccessful attempts to increase the number of TA
institutions, the diagnosis of institutional deficit (creating new TA institutions in newco-
mer countries), which was the cornerstone of the PACITA project, mutated into one of a
knowledge deficit (making ‘universal’TA knowledge available to more countries). We
show that this shifting deficit diagnosis was co-produced with the collective achievement
of an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity. We highlight that
insufficient attention to the power asymmetries that remain with the transfer of see-
mingly transnationally applicable TA practices (i.e. participatory formats) and outcomes
(i.e. studies or reports) can lead to reducing the diversity of policy advice and, hence,
undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of public decision making. In our conclusion,
we identify promising research avenues into epistemic subsidiarity, that we consider to be
crucial for the future of the European and international TA community, its practice and
scholarship.
Material and methods
To conduct this research, we opted for multi-sited ethnographic and in-depth empirical
case studies. We used an inductive and qualitative research approach based on a com-
parative case study (Yin 1994; Gottweis 1998; Jasanoff2005) and thematic analysis
(Braun and Clarke 2006). We explored and compared data collected in three different
sites: the PACITA project at the European level (spring 2011-spring 2015) and two
national sites identified within PACITA as ‘non-PTA countries’: Portugal and Czech
Republic. We sought a diverse sample (in terms of R&D structures and expenditures,
local debates on STI, and policy options for new TA institutions) and these two countries
were selected based on the national descriptions of the prospects for TA institutionaliza-
tion in seven non-PTA partners, which were analyzed and refined by the partners under
the task ‘Expanding the TA landscape’, in the first half of the project.
In Portugal, we followed a process in the Parliament that attempted to determine the
best organizational form that TA should take in the country, in the particular context of
the economic crisis and austerity measures. The country already has its own history of
TA (Böhle and Moniz 2015): in the course of PACITA, two groups of actors with
different approaches to TA influenced the process, which underwent a series of
changes over time, resulting in a flexible understanding and work on the boundaries
of TA taxonomies. We found that a rather instrumental understanding of knowledge
for ‘evidence-based policy-making’jointly emerged with efforts at institutionalizing TA.
In the Czech Republic, until the beginning of PACITA, explicit references to TA were
relatively rare. We analyzed how the practice of TA was taken up and combined in a par-
ticular organizational setting, the one of the Czech Technology Center located in Prague.
The practical arrangements within the institutional and organizational settings of this
institute contributed to redefine the local understanding, rationale and focus of TA,
for instance with less prominent attention given to negative implications of technology.
Furthermore, we found that the hybridization of the practice of TA with other knowledge
sources for policy-making was most important for stakeholders and we attend to some
possible implications for the broader TA practices and community.
The case studies conducted in Portugal and Czech Republic were based on two
research stays (in May-June and September-October 2014) conducted by one of us
448 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

during which data were collected with a focus on semi-structured interviews with repre-
sentatives of the political world (parliamentarians, advisory and regulatory boards, gov-
ernment officials, public decision-makers), local TA entrepreneurs, relevant scientific
experts, and other interest groups involved in the developments around TA in those
two countries. In total, 39 interviews were conducted (23 in Portugal, 16 in Czech Repub-
lic). In each case study, the collected data were transcribed and thematically analyzed
(Braun and Clarke 2006) along two dimensions that are key to the institutionalization
of TA. We examined the barriers (e.g. insufficient qualification of decision-makers,
level of political culture, state capture, inadequate system of management, inhibition
of civic engagement) and the opportunities (e.g. qualification of decision-makers, prog-
nostic and strategic studies, civic and professional engagement, communication skills,
experience sharing) for effectively institutionalizing a PTA in these countries. These
two dimensions were identified in the early analyses of the data collected at the European
level, coupled with a specialized literature review (Hennen and Nierling 2014).
At the European level, the two co-authors were equally involved in the PACITA
project for its entire duration (2011–2015). We conducted an ongoing ethnographic
field investigation for four years, combining on-site participant observation and obser-
vant participation
9
(Seim 2021). This resulted in active involvement in numerous inter-
national scientific and PACITA-related events: 15 consortium meetings, six specialized
workshops to acquire TA skills
10
, three parliamentary debates in which established TA
directors or practitioners interacted with Members of Parliament from diverse countries
(in Copenhagen, Lisbon, and Namur), and two European TA conferences (in Prague in
March 2013 and in Berlin in February 2015). In addition, we participated in all the pre-
paratory phases of two participatory cross-European projects, for which we organized a
national workshop-scenario on telecare and ageing societies (April 2014) and a national
citizen summit on sustainable consumption (October 2014). Both projects were finalized
by a policy workshop in Brussels where we participated in the organization and where the
results from the different countries were assembled to form European data and presented
to a delegation of national and European stakeholders and Members of Parliament.
In parallel, we realized a literature review dealing with theoretical and practical aspects
of PTA and we analyzed the official documents produced by PACITA partners (project
deliverables, reports, manifesto).
Approach to fieldwork: insertion and careful engagement
From the beginning, our data collection has been based on an assumed position of strong,
formal engagement in PTA communities. This position allowed us to collect a great deal
of data that would otherwise have remained inaccessible to the researcher, but it also
underscores the impossibility of taking a truly outsider position. To overcome what
could appear to be a limitation we adopted an original methodological set up to
gather and analyze relevant research data. We focused on what Lydahl and Nickelsen
(2022) call ‘careful engagements’, which refers to ‘a generative mode of knowledge pro-
duction that takes place between researchers and their research fields’.
11
We found heur-
istic value in the dynamic approach of ‘insertion’(Robinson 2010). Robinson defines
insertion as an approach ‘oriented towards data collection by being around, occasionally
probing, and towards creating legitimacy (or at least recognition)’(Robinson 2010, 30).
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 449

The strategy of probing is also advocated by van Oudheusden and Laurent (2013) when
problematizing the role of the social scientist vis-à-vis participation exercises. ‘Rather
than endorsing one approach to participation, we recommend a pragmatic attitude that
implies systematic probing of the roles the social scientist assumes vis-à-vis other partici-
pants, interests, and objectives, and that enables him to continually adjust his position
in view of the particularities of his situation’(van Oudheusden and Laurent 2013, 3).
Insertion consists of a succession of ‘moves’and ‘phases’that can be distant in time
and location. At first there is ‘moving about’that is concerned with entering ‘into the sub-
stance of the developments and concerns so as to be a legitimate partner’(Robinson 2010,
29). It consists of desk research, ‘visiting and participating in physical spaces where […]
development is taking place’(Robinson 2010, 149), doing interviews but also micro-inter-
actions and informal conversations up to ‘meso-level interactions, as in board meetings’
(Robinson 2010, 145). Second, ‘moving in’is deepening that interaction with the
actors of the studied fieldwork and perhaps contributing with one’s presence and analy-
sis. Third, Robinson mentions the phase of ‘aggregation and presentation of findings’.
This is often a requirement to be granted access to conferences and workshops. For
the researcher it is an opportunity to gather comments and feedback from within. It is
an added value compared to the (one way) interviews mentioned in the ‘moving
about’phase. However, aggregation and presentations also hold to risk of ‘going native
or being positioned in a service role’(Robinson 2010, 150). As a strategy to avoid this
from happening, Robinson suggests that it should be followed by moments of ‘moving
out’. Moving out is a necessary step to ‘maintain the role of researcher/analyst’(Robinson
2010, 150) and to (re)affirm that role through self-positioning in conversations or ‘visibly
moving out via aggregation and presentations outside’(Robinson 2010, 150) the world one
studies.
Theoretical underpinnings: civic epistemology and epistemic subsidiarity
Although the difficulties associated with the institutionalization of TA have already
received attention in recent STS literature, most studies identify certain prerequisites
or necessary conditions to be met in order for TA to be successfully implemented: ‘stra-
tegic science regimes’(Rip 2002) in the case of Delvenne (2011), ‘civic epistemologies’
(Jasanoff2005) for Hennen and Nierling (2014), ‘knowledge-based economies’for van
Oudheusden et al. (2015) or more generally ‘barriers and opportunities’(Hennen and
Nierling 2013,2014). While being very insightful, such research reflects a very ambitious
‘explicatory epistemology’(Colliot-Thélène 2004). In these analyses, TA is considered as
a dependent variable of which we know a defined number of possible states and vari-
ations (institutionalized or not; ‘participatory’or ‘technocratic’). The latter are affected
by explanatory variables such as strategic science, civic epistemologies, knowledge-
based economies, forms of government, etc. In such a context, thus, TA remains a rela-
tively fixed reality.
By contrast, in this paper, we subscribe to a co-productionist argument (Jasanoff
2004), according to which the needs for, and specific forms of, TA depend on changes
in knowledge regimes and associated forms of governance, and vice-versa. In addition
to finding the right institutional model for a particular polity, each PTA organization
needs to find its own way of getting policy-relevant knowledge to its own addressees
450 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

and according to politically negotiated procedures that are estimated adequate and
authoritative in its respective polity. Sheila Jasanoffcoined the concept of ‘civic epistem-
ologies’(2005) to highlight cultural differences in the knowledge generation process and
how that knowledge gets accepted and taken for robust in a given polity. Civic epistem-
ologies are generally defined as ‘publicly accepted and procedurally sanctioned ways of
testing and absorbing the epistemic basis for decision making’(Jasanoff2011, 8). They
refer to ‘the practices, methods, and institutional processes by which [a] community ident-
ifies new policy issues, generates knowledge relevant to their resolution, and puts that
knowledge to use in making decisions’(Miller 2005, 406). Despite trends of globalization
and convergence of technological and political processes, these ‘civic epistemologies’
differ considerably among modern Western nations and communities. Problems
appear when these different civic epistemologies come into contact or need to coordinate.
In the tradition of two and a half decades of TA project sponsorship by the European
Commission, there has been a certain cognitive convergence between the Science and
Society directorate, the TA community and a series of STS scholars around the idea
that TA is a vehicle not only for producing, validating and using knowledge for
decision-making on STI issues, but also for articulating a European political and cultural
identity. In 2009, the MASIS (Monitoring Policy and Research Activities on Science in
Society in Europe) report concluded that ‘the absence of a common understanding of
science in society issues at the European level [is] similar to the absence of a European citi-
zenship as a common identity. These cultural differences are, on the one hand, a challenge
for European unification and for further steps towards a European citizenship concerning
science in society issues. On the other, this cultural diversity can be (and should be!)
regarded as richness’(MASIS Report, Siune 2009, 16). The authors of this report advo-
cated experimenting with new forms of relationship between science and society in
different cultural contexts, and called for the production of a European space through
expertise. In the conclusions of the report, which discussed ‘the possible emergence of
European model for Science in Society’(Ibid: 64), TA figured prominently in articulating
this European space that was then –and arguably still is –lacking: ‘[Participatory Tech-
nology Assessment activities] can be seen as articulating a European political and cultural
identity. Thus, the European model of Technology Assessment is not just instrumentally
important, as a good way to approach science-in-society issues, but also normatively impor-
tant, as something that indicates what Europe desires to be, and might become’(Ibid: 67).
From this perspective, there has been the emergence of a civic epistemology on the
level of the EU and some EPTA members, standardizing ways of doing TA. As a
result, in PACITA, addressing the deficit of TA in Europe involved a normative
agenda of the type of institutional creation expected, with the parliamentary, permanent,
participatory and nationally-bound characteristics of existing TA institutions as a blue-
print (see next section). This civic epistemology came into conflict with other civic epis-
temologies established at the level of nation-states that were supposed to accommodate
‘standard’ways of doing TA and develop them optimally for their respective national
contexts.
To make sense of the coordination problems between different civic epistemologies, it
is useful to draw on another concept proposed by Jasanoff, that of ‘epistemic subsidiarity’
(Jasanoff2013, 2014) encompassing the ways in which societies organize their modes of
‘public reasoning’in order to respect their ‘communal sensibilities’(Jasanoff2013). In
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 451

other words, epistemic subsidiarity ‘respects ‘how’(and not merely the ‘what’)’(Jasanoff
2013, 136) of knowledge-for-action. ‘Epistemic subsidiarity would in principle allow to
subordinate segments of a polity, such as states in a federal union or nations in the inter-
national order, to hold on to their ways of knowing and their own collective knowledge on
contested issues’(Jasanoff2014: 1747).
Jasanoffidentified different modes of epistemic subsidiarity. Two are of particular
interest for our argument.
12
‘Coexistence’represents a rather relativistic mode of episte-
mic subsidiarity where different knowledge and governance norms exist in parallel. None
impedes on, or dominates the other. Attention is paid to the border management of the
different regimes so they do not interfere with one another and are each left intact. Coex-
istence is about ‘keeping things different’(Doganova and Laurent 2016, 143). This regime
builds on ‘strict classifications, permitting no mixing’(Jasanoff2013, 138). Difficulties
arise when those boundaries are crossed or cannot be maintained. When the border man-
agement of the coexistence mode becomes increasingly difficult, one alternative mode of
epistemic subsidiarity is ‘cosmopolitanism’. This regime explores the possibility of con-
vergence of knowledge practices in building a common world. Cosmopolitan epistemic
subsidiarity implies greater ‘mutual recognition and acknowledgement’(Jasanoff2013,
138) of reasons and regulatory choices between different polities. The construction of
this common world requires reflection about what needs to remain divergent and
‘polity specific’and what can converge or be harmonized. In other words, it is concerned
with the establishment of equivalences.
13
However, Jasanoffacknowledges that one major
issue in cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity is the unequal power between actors
(Jasanoff2013, 138).
Indeed, she underlines that negative effects are also to be expected regarding boundary
crossings, because epistemic cosmopolitanism is not always carried out in a balanced
manner, respecting the plurality of ways of knowing and modes of public reasoning.
While some see a great democratization potential in cosmopolitanism, power is not
necessarily equally distributed, nor has it vanished from the equation. Indeed, the risk
is that the recognition of mutual standards does not work in both directions and that
the standards of more powerful actors actually overrides those of less powerful ones,
leading at best to fragile and partial harmonization.
The PACITA project: expanding the TA landscape
The baseline of the PACITA project was the diagnosis of a shortage of Parliamentary
Technology Assessment (PTA) organizations in Europe, and PACITA was presented
as a coherent set of activities precisely aimed at reducing the deficit. From the outset,
the project was organized around the dichotomy between partners qualified as ‘experi-
enced’because their countries were already equipped with PTA units (those were
described as ‘PTA partners’), and partners considered as lacking experience because
they came from countries deprived of institutionalized TA capacities (those were
described as ‘non-PTA partners’). This initial framing defined the latter as needing to
‘learn from’,or‘catch up’with, more ‘experienced’partners endowed with appropriate
institutional and participatory expertise. In addition, although the whole consortium
was striving to achieve the general objective of promoting TA institutionalization, it
was not any institutionalization, as the project was conceived in terms that often took
452 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

established PTA institutions (single, particularly dedicated to TA, permanent, participa-
tory-oriented, and nationally-bound) as a model.
In the project proposal, PACITA rehearsed a narrative of a certain evolution of PTA
practices toward more participation: ‘during the 1980s and 1990s in Europe the delib-
eration model gained importance [over the policy analysis model] and can nowadays be
regarded as being dominant in many European countries’(PACITA Part B: 10).
According to this narrative, some countries, and their PTA practices, are considered
to have advanced to different extents in this particular process. In addition, a ‘partici-
patory’model was regarded as more advanced and as responding to the ‘shortcomings
of a ‘technocratic’TA approach’(PACITA Part B: 12). The ‘consultation process toward
the public, stakeholders, societal groups and citizens can be regarded as the European
‘improvement’on the classical TA model [that first emerged in the US]’(PACITA
Part B: 11).
Likewise, major PACITA activities such as two cross-European projects (see below)
were considered ‘participatory’, i.e. they used methods of stakeholder engagement in
scenario workshops or induced citizens to deliberate and vote following the Europe
Wide Views (EWViews) methodology.
14
The policy report of the citizen summit on sus-
tainable consumption emphasizes the fact that these actions were designed to build
capacity and train the newcomers in such methods, in order to address their lack of par-
ticipatory expertise: ‘The EWViews citizen consultation involved countries with a long tra-
dition of citizen participation as well as countries with little or no experience in this field. In
other words, through practice, countries with little experience with citizen participation
processes learned from countries with extensive experience. Thus, the consultation aimed
at contributing to the institutionalization of such processes Europe-wide.’(Jorgensen
and Juul 2015, 10).
As the project materialized into specific activities, it soon became clear that if one
had to summarize the PACITA project, the spontaneous description by the project
partners would sound like: ‘Further institutionalize Technology Assessment in new
countries’or ‘Expand the TA landscape’.‘Expanding the TA landscape’was initially
a concise task comprising research and engagement activities in the non-PTA
countries/regions about the prospects and the obstacles to be overcome to establish
TA institutions. After a series of standardized actions (interviews, reports, national
workshops held in partnership with PTA partners) it was left up to the local partners
to decide on the next best steps to live up to the objective of ‘expanding the TA land-
scape’. It was negotiated with the European Commission’s project officer that this par-
ticular task would be ‘open-ended’and would continue until the end of the project. It
would allow the non-PTA project partners to independently and flexibly conduct
additional activities that would strengthen the prospects for addressing the institutional
deficit of TA in their respective environment. Expanding the TA landscape thus became
even more prominently the flagship of the project. The project proposal already men-
tioned ‘‘white spots’on the European TA map [and] while the European Union has been
growing steadily the TA landscape did not do so during the last 10 years.’(PACITA Part
B: 13).
As most activities became subsumed to that general goal, a crucial question rapidly
became how to best organize the mentoring of non-PTA partners in order for them to
find the appropriate way to institutionalize TA in their respective countries. Overall, it
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 453

was a matter of thinking of TA’s expansion while leaving the concrete issue of how to
institutionally organize a TA capacity to the appreciation and debate of local actors.
This idea was for instance captured by the coordinator stating that: ‘TA should be insti-
tutionalized in all European countries […] The diversity in cultures and political contexts
in Europe call for national implementation of TA in ways which are optimal for the single
nation’(Klüver, Nielsen, and Jørgensen 2016a, 15).
Facing the lack of success in installing new PTA units: from institutional to
knowledge deficit
At the beginning of the PACITA project, in a European parliamentary debate organized
at the Danish Parliament in 2012, one PTA director referred to the documentation of
existing practices as a ‘cookbook’of TA. Metaphorically speaking, it would contain a
list of inspirational recipes and procedures to apply in order to build a TA organization
adapted to national peculiarities and, by doing so, to resorb the deficit of TA in Europe.
The writing of this ‘cookbook’to document existing TA practices was achieved by pairs
of partners, gathering one PTA and one non-PTA partner each, and the results often
served as a blueprint for the exploration activities in the non-PTA countries. However,
moving to the culinary practice proved to be more difficult than expected: while
various activities were successfully conducted in the eight non-PTA countries rep-
resented in the PACITA consortium, and despite fruitful exchanges in documenting,
training and debating TA across Europe, no new PTA units were created in the course
of the PACITA project. The reasons for the lack of success in installing new TA insti-
tutions in particular national or regional contexts were often explained by cyclical and
contextual elements, such as the hazards of power politics, the aftermath of the
financial crisis or temporary measures of budgetary austerity. But they also led the part-
ners to change their narrative.
At the European level: at least, make the TA knowledge travel
In light of persistent institutional absences, ineffective efforts at institutionalizing
(P)TA
15
ended up as a fundamental challenge for the partners, who were eager to
show that, in one way or another, it was more necessary than ever to continue efforts
to expand the TA landscape. Toward the very end of the project, a ‘TA manifesto’was
written to argue ‘for the necessity of European political support of future efforts to
expand technology assessment (TA) capacities in the European member states’(Klüver,
Nielsen, and Jørgensen 2016b). In 2015 at PACITA’s European TA conference in
Berlin, in a welcome statement imbued with epistemic cosmopolitanism that was
intended to summarize the results of the entire project, the coordinator insisted on the
mutual and bidirectional learning to stress that equivalences were created via flows of
experience in both directions. The situation was presented to the audience as if everyone
had learned equally from one another.
To a considerable extent, independently of the obstacles encountered in ‘spreading the
TA gospel’(as the often-heard expression puts it), the PACITA project itself contributed
to raising particular expectations, i.e. that it is possible to produce generic knowledge that
is valid and useful across all the partaking countries. For example, with a view to creating
454 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

a European platform of expertise in TA, one task led to the establishment of a TA portal
16
aimed at aggregating an online repertoire of TA experts, projects, publications and other
resources for use by the international TA and policy-making communities.
Furthermore, the way transnational project collaborations were conducted contribu-
ted to the disembedding and standardization of participatory TA formats. In two of the
PACITA cross-European projects (the scenario workshop on ageing society and telecare
[Barland, Delvenne, and Rosskamp 2016], and the European Wide Views on sustainable
consumption [Jørgensen, Kozarev, and Juul 2016]), local peculiarities were considered in
an ad-hoc fashion and did not fundamentally challenge the common problem framing.
17
In the design of these cross-European participatory exercises, only surveyed citizens’
opinions or stakeholders’visions were expected to vary from one country to the other.
However, this context sensitivity was designed distantly in time and space from the
common pre-established problem framing and standardized methodological approach.
Rather than making the case for national-specific models of new PTA units, PACITA
partners gradually promoted generic and ‘universal’TA knowledge, which is standar-
dized and increasingly able to travel and be taken up in various decision-making
arenas. One statement in the TA manifesto reads: ‘TA can through strong knowledge
sharing and collaboration contribute to knowledge exchange and synergies, which
provide for widespread use of the independent and knowledge-based advice from TA.
Countries should help each other by sharing TA knowledge and outcomes (Klüver,
Nielsen, and Jørgensen 2016a, 15). Hennen, Nierling, and Judit Mosoni-Fried (2016)
share the same idea, even if they express it in slightly different terms: ‘To further
promote TA, one viable pathway would be continued collaboration –for example,
through starting TA projects together with experienced TA countries’(Hennen, Nierling,
and Judit Mosoni-Fried 2016, 38). Despite its innocuous appeal, this proposal can lead
to strong political tensions, for instance when assessing sensitive technologies. It
means that countries with no experience in TA would be left with little agency to nego-
tiate the terms, relevance, framing, problem definition, methodology, and to appropri-
ately discuss the implications of the results of specific collaborations with experienced
TA partners.
Conflicts with established civic epistemologies at the national levels
In the civic epistemology of the Czech Republic, the perception of future-oriented knowl-
edge suffers from a bad reputation inherited from the socialist period, as it is associated
with central state planning. According to the interviewees, this perception still ambigu-
ously connotes forward-looking practices, including TA. Moreover, instead of the parlia-
ment being the privileged recipient of TA knowledge, as the PACITA narrative predicted,
in the Czech Republic a greater impact on STI policy is expected if the TA institution is
directly and solely responsible to the government. Quite pragmatically, as a Czech project
manager put it: ‘We have to do it our own way, what we usually do and what we are good
at: write reports, papers, strategies, sometimes lobby a bit. But usually we don’t get involved
with the Parliament’. This quote summarizes the situation and perspectives in the Czech
Republic, which served as a backdrop for the local non-PTA partner to consider the
uptake of TA in its portfolio of activities. In this context, members of the same organiz-
ation admitted to frequently encountering problems in engaging parliamentarians in TA-
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 455

related activities, as PACITA advocated. As an executive explained: ‘We’ve had huge
debates here. We were struggling with the PACITA focus on parliament. Not because it’s
irrelevant but there is no effective collaboration. It’sdifficult to approach the Parliament.
Thanks to PACITA we build some contacts and collaboration activities with MPs or sena-
tors. But the approach of MPs listening to [us] is not satisfactory […] They say they are
interested but nothing happens. It’s a long-term challenge with short-term politicians.
It’s easier to work with the Ministries’.
Instead of institutionalizing a function of ‘political knowledge brokering’(PACITA
Part B: 46) with Parliament and civil society as key actors, as envisaged by PACITA,
the Czech partner saw itself in a role of ‘intermediator among different government
bodies’and other innovation stakeholders, as a service to businesses (Hebakova et al.
2016, 58). This is probably not the preferred strategy of established TA practitioners.
Hennen and Nierling (2013:, 47) agree that, in such a scenario, ‘the best chances, if
any, to build up a TA institution are for TA being integrated into already existing insti-
tutions which act at the governmental level with responsibilities in monitoring and evalu-
ation of S&T’. Finally, foreign epistemic practices of participatory TA activities including
citizens were considered inspiring but difficult in the Czech context, where despite the
activities undertaken in the framework of PACITA, it remained difficult to invite citizens
to participate in the production of TA knowledge for free. As a project manager put it:
‘We try to increase people’s involvement in STI issues. But it will most probably not be like
the Danes’people involvement.’
18
Likewise, in Portugal, a country ruled by a dictatorship hostile to science until the
1970s, civil society has little experience with citizen participation in STI, and the poli-
ticians we spoke to did not indicate that a change was expected in this area. Since the
democratic transition, and especially since the mid-1990s, when J. M. Gago became
the first dedicated Minister for Science and Technology, the predominant style of
science policy can be characterized as ‘policy-for-science and not science-for-policy’
(Almeida 2012, 228). The governance of STI has been described as ‘science-oriented or
science-led science policy, defining a limited number of stakeholders, [which] has as its
underside the underdevelopment of science for policy, particularly in areas associated
with (or likely to generate) public controversy.’(Hagendijk et al. 2005, 60).
Several interviewees from academia and policy-making emphasized that Gago
strongly believed that science policy should be an exclusive prerogative of the executive
branch. He was therefore reluctant to transfer powers to Parliament in these areas. As a
result, MPs in Portugal gradually sought to rebalance access to expertise unequally dis-
tributed in favor of the executive branch. Such a development resonated with the surge of
pride that led members of the U.S. Congress to decide to institutionalize the OTA, but
there it is not part of an effort to maintain competitiveness and global leadership in
science and innovation, but rather to facilitate and organize the democratic transition
in STI policy. These efforts culminated in 2009, when the Standing Committee for Edu-
cation, Science and Culture (CECC) published a ‘Report on Science’which examined the
role of national R&D structures for economic and social growth. This report gave rise to a
parliamentary resolution (60/2009) entitled ‘Deepening the activities of the Assembly of
the Republic in the fields of science and technology’. It suggested the establishment of an
institutional platform for meetings between politicians and scientists in order to provide
the MPs with anticipatory knowledge to support public policies. It also requested a
456 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

feasibility study on the establishment of a PTA. However, the discussion of establishing
(and funding) a TA capacity in Parliament has been overshadowed by more pressing
issues, notably dealing with the consequences of the 2008 economic crisis, which made
the TA concept ‘a hard sell to constituents,’as one MP told us. Another key MP to
this process explained to us that as a result ‘[in Portugal] we are lagging behind from
the point of view of other countries’, a view that was also reflected in the minutes of the
parliamentary hearings to which we had access, where almost all the experts mentioned
the need to join EPTA in order to benefit from the ‘best practices’of other countries.
Interviewees in Portugal often mentioned ‘the context of global competitiveness and the
threat of emerging powers’for the Portuguese economy. This threatening environment
fuels the tendency to institutional isomorphism (Di Maggio and Powell 1983), i.e. follow-
ing foreign trends in STI policy in the name of greater efficiency, which automatically
puts Portugal in a ‘deficit’position with a lot of ‘catching up’to do compared to other
European countries, and especially the so-called ‘PTA countries’. When naturalized
and even internalized by the actors, whether PTA or non-PTA countries, these ‘iso-
morphic pressures’prevent ‘isomorphic differences’from being opened up to larger
analytical and empirical scrutiny (Irwin, Vedel, and Vikkelsø 2021).
The lowest common denominator: at least ‘frugal’TA
19
based on foreign
imports of TA knowledge
During our fieldwork conducted in Portugal and the Czech Republic, we found strong
expectations of imports of foreign TA knowledge for national policy making. In Portugal,
for example, the context of adverse economic conditions and austerity politics justified
the search for alternative avenues for TA, in particular low-cost solutions to nevertheless
provide parliamentarians with some TA knowledge. In 2013, a dedicated parliamentary
committee reflecting on national prospects for TA concluded that it would be necessary
to set up a digital library for TA, ‘an instrument that would only require minimum
funding and could build on partnerships and synergies’(Santos 2013). Content-wise,
the library would constitute a historic repository of pertinent experiences and policy-
oriented work carried out in other countries as well as academic publications relevant
for TA, recent foresight studies and documents on the consequences of technology trans-
fers. Hence it would be a source of inspiration and guidance for parliamentarians. Rather
than a ‘glass and concrete TA organization’(Ely, Van Zwanenberg, and Stirling 2014)as
initially envisioned by the PACITA partners, as a tentative solution (which is still not a
reality in July 2021), the digital library would have been the only permanent organization
with minimal and uncertain staffand a coordination and support board that only meets
sporadically.
The library idea conveys a universal conception of TA knowledge, as non-contextual,
transportable, and adaptable between countries. Under this conception, the framing con-
ditions and original context-related research questions are not reflected upon. The main
idea is to profit from work being done elsewhere to save costs, sometimes based on the
justification that some technological developments are taking place over and above
national borders.
Yet Portuguese actors also expressed the need to go beyond compilations of TA
knowledge produced by established TA units: by appealing to ‘TA-like’research
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 457

(originating from backgrounds as diverse as STS, foresight, evaluation, innovation econ-
omics, technology management and transfer, etc.), the library idea shows little sensitivity
to context sensitive problem-framing, or even the TA labeling of such knowledge (and
perhaps more importantly, the theoretical and methodological peculiarities of this com-
munity of practice). While there is perfect awareness that such documents were not orig-
inally designed or tailored for Portuguese members of the national Parliament, it reads as
if no additional efforts would be required to render this information useful to the MPs, as
if it could be understood directly and subsequently used for policy discourse or to
legislate.
Another example illustrating the discursive shift from institutional to knowledge
deficit comes from some partners’discourses in the Czech Republic (and Central-
Eastern European countries more broadly), with their characterization of TA as ‘an
eye opener’and ‘knowledge sharer’(Hebakova et al. 2016, 62). The role of TA as ‘knowl-
edge sharer’is envisioned as follows: ‘There will always be a constant need for various
examples of how one or another issue is solved in other countries. If Germany, Austria,
the Netherlands or some other TA country can afford large-scale research on the impact
of technologies developed in their countries on society in general –in the case of Eastern
European countries and their budgetary constraints and undeveloped R&D systems –
then adapting already existing EU knowledge into the local context might be a more feasible
solution. That’s why cross-European cooperation of TA-like institutions is so important.’
(Hebakova et al. 2016, 62).
In such a view, more equivalences are being created between TA and other knowledge
sources (such as foresight, evaluation, policy analysis, STS) and between foreign and
national sources of TA knowledge. Such foreign knowledge can ad minima be an inspi-
ration or learning experience and ad maxima a quick and cheap way to locate ‘knowl-
edge’upon which policy-making can be based and avoid so-called unnecessary
duplication of TA work.
In order to reap the benefits of enhanced standardization, international networks are
particularly valued for knowledge exchanges. EPTA membership is considered to be of
critical importance, as attested by Portugal becoming an Associate member of EPTA
in 2017 (after a failed attempt in 2016), one year after Wallonia was granted the same
status. Other PACITA partners less advanced along the path of institutionalization,
such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Lithuania or Bulgaria, successfully applied for
observer status in the EPTA network. More recently, a global TA network was created,
with the objective ‘to transcend the existing, mainly national, tools and approaches
towards opportunities for collaborations and networked solutions’. It also aims ‘to facilitate
the exchange of know-how and codification of principles of good practice, but also to serve
as an incubator of future global cooperation through an array of networked organizations
that can exchange information and collaborate on issues of joint interest’.
20
Discussion: the rise of an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic
subsidiarity and its consequences
As the PACITA project went on, the partners were tempted to temporarily abandon the
normative imperative of expanding the landscape of TA institutions, and instead address
adeficit articulated in terms of knowledge gaps, rather than institutional gaps. Although
458 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

the partners’strategy was imbued with cosmopolitan intentions, we identify this shifting
deficit as co-produced with an asymmetrical form of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiar-
ity. Once rendered explicit, issues of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity open up a series
of research avenues, not only for the European and international TA community, but also
for analyzing the power asymmetries in the more traditional and institutional con-
ceptions of subsidiarity.
Firstly, we wish to dig deeper into the issue of cosmopolitan subsidiarity and see what
kind of unforeseen challenges it poses for power relations. We also ask how a cosmopo-
litan subsidiarity of knowledge can be envisioned that would nonetheless respect, rather
than transcend, different civic epistemologies. In the case of PACITA, although tremen-
dous efforts were dedicated to pretend that TA knowledge may be equally valid and
useful across all the European countries, regardless of a persistent institutional deficit,
the distribution of roles and power remained very uneven. Instead of being an inspiration
or blueprint for creating institutions, as the cookbook metaphor implied, existing TA
organizations become knowledge providers for smaller or less experienced actors in
countries where such capacities do not exist.
During the course of the project, several non-PTA partners complained and resisted
the classification and practices imposed on them by the PTA partners. To reduce the
conflict, the latter agreed to reward non-PTA countries with a slightly attenuated descrip-
tion of their deficit, acknowledging that they had become ‘emerging TA countries’, and
could be recognized as carrying out ‘TA-like activities’. Intended to be less polarized,
such a narrative continued to represent and compare all European countries based on
their state of advancement in TA practice and expertise. The idea that some countries
suffer from a deficit and have some ‘catching up’to do becomes even more entrenched,
which naturalizes hierarchies and describes as retrograde everything that is asymmetrical
with respect to what is declared advanced (de Sousa Santos 2012). ‘We cannot remain on
the sidelines of this [TA] movement that is developing throughout Europe. It is a sign of
political incapacity’, as a Portuguese MP put it. Thus, deficits do political work by indi-
cating how different civic epistemologies are treated asymmetrically. This relationship is
expressed in terms of subsidiarity, which in the case of PACITA not only made the coex-
istence mode almost impossible, it also installed a very unequal cosmopolitan order since
the epistemic standardization of TA practices left little or no room for alternative epis-
temologies and local reconfigurations.
In these cases where power differentials are underestimated, cosmopolitanism cannot
keep its promises and equivalences are hardly possible. Indeed, when cosmopolitanism
takes this guise, this mode of epistemic subsidiarity enshrines the epistemic supremacy
of the most powerful actors and requires less powerful actors to import and adopt
foreign practices and knowledge. Power must here be understood in relational terms
and should not be treated as inherently bad or oppressive, but as essentially part of
human interactions in a collaborative research project. According to this conception,
‘the exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and in ordering the poss-
ible outcome. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others’
(Foucault 1982, 790). From conception to completion of the PACITA project, the actors
who exercised the most power were from the beginning, and have remained, the PTA
partners. They were the ones who were primarily involved in writing the project propo-
sal, and they were subsequently in charge of leading all the substantial work packages as
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 459

well as of the training of the non-PTA partners (e.g. in the summer schools and prac-
titioners’trainings). For obvious reasons, it was also their institutions that served as blue-
prints to ‘documenting TA’. In addition, they were also responsible for shadowing their
‘less experienced’partners by being ‘paired’with them in the work package dedicated to
expanding the TA landscape. Finally, it was the PTA partners who were tasked with coor-
dinating the methodologies and the implementation of the major cross-European parti-
cipatory events.
Yet it is too simplistic to consider that the non-PTA partners were simply dominated
by their more powerful counterparts. What we identified is, first, a division of labor in
which some actors standardized a set of norms (e.g. problem framing, research design,
methodology, analysis grid, report structures, communication strategy) that were
adopted by all PACITA partners. The latter then produced knowledge locally, which
was then aggregated to also exist in a ‘European’form from which additional policy rec-
ommendations were made. Second, we have shown a more obvious pattern, which is the
fully consented and desired import and adaptation of knowledge produced by more
resourceful actors by those who suffer comparatively from a TA knowledge deficit and
can make do with a ‘frugal TA’. The narrative of a TA knowledge deficit was thus a col-
lective achievement that was successful enough to reduce or silence any alternative. This
situation can be characterized as ‘narrative salience’(Claisse and Delvenne 2017), that is,
when a narrative is so dominant that there appears to be no serious counter-narrative
anymore. ‘Paradoxically, salient narratives can lead to a sense of powerlessness even
among its promoters and beneficiaries’(Claisse and Delvenne 2017, 260). These collective
commitments to certain ideas or ways of knowing, such as framing the TA deficit in
knowledge terms rather than in institutional terms, were not, however, just achieved
through free and unconstrained adherence. Epistemic subsidiarity implies that power
is exercised (intentionally or unintentionally) by the prevalence of certain knowledge
practices over others, which always already delimit the field of action and reduce the
scope of possibilities. The epistemic standards of TA practices were enculturated in
the countries of the most powerful actors, and they ended up by delegitimizing and dom-
inating the cultures and practices of the epistemic communities they actually intended to
support.
The project to solve the deficit of TA institutions in Europe was not rooted in the
omnipotence of PTA institutions, whose merits would be obvious to decision makers
expecting evidence-based policy making. The reality experienced by members of the
TA community is quite different. For a quarter of a century, it has been marked by
the trauma of the elimination of several TA institutions. The demise of the American
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is a well-documented emblematic case.
21
But
during the PACITA project, the consortium also had to survive the abolition in 2011
of the Flemish PTA
22
, and at the same time face the political attacks that nearly elimi-
nated the project coordinator, the Danish Board of Technology, removing its formal
link with the Danish Parliament. Therefore, the shift to a knowledge deficit co-produced
with an asymmetric form of cosmopolitan epistemic subsidiarity is a fragile survival
strategy that risks undermining the results that the TA community has a right to
expect from ‘true’cosmopolitanism. In a sense, TA is caught between a rock and a
hard place, by being threatened in certain places, while at the same time seeking to
persist by contributing to a European, and even global, agenda.
460 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

Underlining this possible downfall of cosmopolitanism should in no way be inter-
preted as a call for a return to coexistence as a path of epistemic sovereignty (or to
put it more bluntly, phobia of foreign knowledge). On the contrary, we want to raise
awareness of the asymmetries of power that remain in the cosmopolitan order, and of
the fact that the standardization of norms of knowledge can threaten the diversity of per-
spectives, as this is an important springboard for the effectiveness and legitimacy of
public decision making.
Conclusion
In this paper our goal was to contribute to ongoing debates in STS and innovation studies
about how STI discourses and practices today circulate across diverse socio-political con-
texts. We researched how and to what extent TA approaches could spread across various
national contexts outside the core of European TA, Western Europe, while considering
the specificities of the receiving environments, in Southern and Eastern Europe. As an
empirical reference point, we studied an FP7-funded project, PACITA, which developed
as a set of activities aimed at addressing the deficit of TA institutions in Europe. In this
framework, the pursuit of TA institutionalization was subsumed under the banner of a
common agenda and standardized toolbox for documenting, debating and doing TA.
Our analysis showed that over the course of the PACITA project, partners gradually
abandoned the normative agenda of expanding the landscape of TA institutions, and
instead invested in a deficit narrative articulated in terms of a knowledge deficit. This
process took place in a context of budgetary austerity in which TA was again (threatened
to be) de-institutionalized in Flanders and Denmark. Beyond the contextual factors, it is
important to consider the central role that ‘projects’, especially those funded by European
framework programs, acquired over the years for European TA collaborations. As the
salient form of engagement and cooperation in TA networks organization today,
‘project’is a concept that reveals a productive polysemy: it refers the idea of a (shared)
endeavor, a plan, something to commonly strive for (like the project of installing a TA
institution in each country) while at the same time it crystalizes a temporary organiz-
ational form defined by limited time-horizon and allocated resources. As a result, the
ambition to push out the horizon of the TA landscape is always already limited by the
project form of doing TA that has become a sort of permanent status. TA is thus not
only conceived as, it is also heavily dependent on, an accumulation of ever-renewing
projects.
In the case of PACITA, it meant that the window of opportunity to stick to the original
plan, a normative imperative underlying a deficit of TA institutions, was very limited in
time because the European TA collaboration is so dependent on the project’s form. The
expansion of the TA landscape, the emblematic goal pursued by PACITA partners,
because of its lack of immediate success, was thus overshadowed and subsumed under
the hope of a hypothetical ‘PACITA 2’which never saw the light of day. In other
words, it seems that collaborations in the form of ‘projects’have a structuring effect
on the politics of addressing the deficit of TA in Europe.
Finally, with the benefit of time since the end of the PACITA project, we can step back
and reflect not just on why a follow-up to PACITA was never funded, but also on the
kinds of new European projects that have emerged. Many of them have one thing in
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 461

common: they are no longer about TA but about a more recent approach, at the heart of
this journal’s scientific concerns, responsible research and innovation. This evolution was
certainly already present in the background of PACITA. As soon as the project was
launched in May 2011, we were struck by the opening keynote of the European Commis-
sion’s project officer, who came to Copenhagen for the occasion. Instead of speaking to
us about what was planned to be done in the project, he kept telling us that we needed to
integrate the way forward and think of TA in terms of RRI –terms that were totally
absent from the initial PACITA proposal. Four years after that, the above-mentioned
TA manifesto, released at the end of PACITA, ended on the following note, which
exuded anxiety about an uncertain future:
‘Responsible Research and Innovation has shaped the last year’s policy discourse in Europe
related to the societal role of research and innovation. It has given key concepts in TA, such
as participation, forward-thinking, reflexivity and policy action, greater focus. TA can and
should be a key carrier of the concept and play a light-house role in RRI.’(PACITA
manifesto)
However, it seems that responsible innovation does not need TA to play such a light-
house role. A number of other European projects have indeed been launched on RRI
since then, such as the implementation of a monitoring system for RRI in Europe
(i.e. MoRRI) or the production of RRI indicators or tools for research organizations
and programs (i.e. RRI Practice or RRI Tools), mostly without the participation of
most of the PACITA partners. Despite the possible overlap between the two approaches,
TA and RRI are not interchangeable concepts; they do not relate to the same epistemic
practices; they are not intended for the same audiences; and, most importantly, they do
not encompass the same vision of a desirable future for STI policy-making. In a short
essay published in this journal, Delvenne (2017) warned that ‘under the spell of RRI,
TA risks being reduced to a role of mere provider of ex-ante impact assessments’(Delv-
enne 2017, 284). He quoted Von Schomberg (2011), the most visible originator of
this concept at the EU level, who does not make any mystery of the future he envisions
for TA: ‘In the context of European policy making, Technology Assessments, ideally, have
to merge with other types of impact assessments, as the success of major public policies
increasingly depend on the anticipated impacts or the selected scientific and technological
options’.
The deeper issue is that this shift from TA to RRI tends to undermine the added value
of TA knowledge, compared to foresight or other strategic intelligence bodies called upon
to foresee and legitimate the possible outcomes of planned innovation activities. By
putting themselves in the position of a(nother) champion of RRI, the TA community
risk sawing offthe branch on which they are sitting. Ironically enough, they participate
to the creation equivalences that undermine the uniqueness of their epistemic practices
in relation to other communities of practice that are not concerned with civic values of
democratizing technologies and policy-making processes.
23
As a result, the civic epistem-
ology identified at the European level and associated with TA may change permanently,
and it will be up to future research to determine whether this changes the relationships
with other civic epistemologies at the national level, and how these relationships translate
and are expressed in terms of subsidiarity.
24
462 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

At the theoretical level, this article started with what happens when we face problems
of coordination between civic epistemologies at different levels and then analyzed
PACITA’s unfolding in terms of ‘epistemic subsidiarity’(Jasanoff2013, 2014), an analyti-
cal perspective that remains a blind spot in TA practice and scholarship. Although cos-
mopolitan TA appeals to ambitious goals, such as democratization or deepening
convergence and harmonization, PACITA produced mixed results. First, cosmopolitan
epistemic subsidiarity resulted from, and reflected, weakened ambitions and the heigh-
tened awareness of the failed attempt to remain entrenched in a coexistence mode of sub-
sidiarity. Second, instead of giving due respect to the different civic epistemologies and
ways of public reasoning, the promotion of ‘universal’TA knowledge installed an asym-
metric mode of cosmopolitanism.
At least three important conclusions can be drawn. First, TA practitioners and
researchers should accept and openly talk about power asymmetries. Second, as TA
(re-)makes community, the idea of engaging newcomers should be taken seriously as
a political process —not as something that fixes a universalist approach to TA, but
as something that itself is locally situated, co-produced, and that requires an elaborate
and outspoken political and epistemic subsidiarity regime. Third, whereas the construc-
tion of ‘deficits’with regard to science and technology has been a target of STS critique
for several decades (Wynne 2006; Pfotenhauer, Juhl, and Aarden 2019; Frahm,
Doezema, and Pfotenhauer 2021), the construction of a deficit in the PACITA
project vehicled normative dimensions that, at least a priori, many STS scholars
would probably endorse. However, without due attention, the reflection about TA is
at risk of being trapped in a vision whereby standard TA approaches, for instance
some ‘participatory’forms of TA, are mastered by a transnational space of experts
who project their epistemic authority onto local contexts, leaving little room for situ-
ated reconfigurations, ad hoc refinements and ‘reflexive engagements’(Voß and
Amelung 2016). While the benefits of transferring best practices to the international
TA community, for example for coordination and professionalization purposes,
should not be overlooked, it is important to carefully disentangle the normative dimen-
sions and the inequalities of power that accompany the enthusiasm for transnationally
applicable TA practices.
Notes
1. See the EPTA website: http://www.eptanetwork.org/
2. These European projects include EUROpTA (European Participatory Technology Assess-
ment, 1998–1999), TAMI (Technology Assessment: Methods and Impacts, 2002–2003) or
PACITA (Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment, 2011–2015).
3. TA knowledge can be defined as knowledge produced to provide and support robust knowl-
edge-based policy-making on societal topics related to science, technology and innovation
(Klüver et al. 2016, 14).
4. See the project’s website: www.pacitaproject.eu.
5. PTA offices that are very much integrated within parliaments, such as the French OPECST,
the British POST or the European Parliament’s STOA, cannot participate in a project
funded by the European Commission for reasons of separation of powers.
6. With this we do not want to say that PACITA has eclipsed or replaced EPTA, certainly not,
but rather to support the idea that there was a convergence of project, resource and opinion
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 463

strong enough to organize in the framework of PACITA activities traditionally devolved to
EPTA and reserved to its members.
7. ‘The first meeting of the European TA community under the label of ‘European Congresses of
Technology Assessment’dates back to October 1982 when the Ministry of the Interior of the
Federal Republic of Germany hosted a conference in Bonn that attracted some 60 experts
from eleven countries –among them were representatives of the US Office of Technology
Assessment. Congresses on TA later held in Amsterdam (1987), Milan (1990) and Copenhagen
(1992) contributed significantly to the conceptualization, philosophy as well as institutionali-
zation of TA’(Scherz et al. 2016, 142).
8. The revived tradition of organizing European TA conferences continued after PACITA,
with a third (counting the two organized by PACITA) conference in Cork in 2017 and a
fourth in Bratislava in 2019, at which the global TA network was launched. A fifth one is
planned in Karlsruhe in 2022.
9. ‘Unlike the participant observer, who tends to invent a new and somewhat transient role as a
hang around, the observant participator is more likely to occupy and enact a preexisting role in
the field. There are also important differences in passivity and proximity. Compared to par-
ticipant observers, observant participators embrace a more active role in the field as they
seek to minimize the distance between themselves and their empirical object’(Seim 2021, 3).
10. Four practitioners’trainings (in Lisbon in September 2012 on ‘selecting the TA issue’,in
Sofia in April 2013 on ‘selecting the TA method’, in Vilnius in November 2013 on ‘involving
actors in TA’, in Prague in September 2014 on ‘TA communication and impact strategies’)
and two summer schools: one in Liège in June 2012 on ‘renewable energy systems and the
role and use of PTA’, one in Cork in June 2014 on ‘the role of technology in the challenges
and opportunities of the ageing society’.
11. At least two epistemological positions can be argued about the extent to which the
researcher should be bound to the field. ‘There has been a long running discussion within
the social sciences and humanities on how researchers engage with their fields of study and
what this brings about. While some researchers argue that by engaging and being too close
to the studied field, the researcher is compromising ‘objective’or ‘neutral’positions; others
warn that by being too distant the researcher fails to understand or improve problematic or
unethical conditions’(Lydahl and Nickelsen 2022). The epistemological position of
‘careful engagement’makes it possible to overcome this dichotomy by using the generativity
of the embedded researcher position.
12. We have chosen to focus on these two modes of epistemic subsidiarity because they are
derived from empirical observations that we have analyzed and which we discuss below.
Further empirical work may uncover new regimes or modes of epistemic subsidiarity for
TA. Jasanoffalso mentions ‘constitutionalism’as a third mode, which consists in defining
a common general framework that transcends local differences and defines the reciprocities
between different polities. It is important to note that these three modes are not intended to
be exhaustive.
13. Equivalences are social practices that classify and establish what is like and unlike and
accordingly, how it ought to be treated. Equivalences are necessary for rendering assess-
ments and scientific results more generally ‘freely transportable across political boundaries’
(Jasanoff2013, 139).
14. The World or Europe Wide Views method has been used at the European and global levels
to organize citizen consultations on various policy issues (www.wwviews.org). See also Jor-
gensen et al. 2016; Jorgensen and Juul 2015; and Delvenne and Macq 2020 for a critical
analysis.
15. Initially, the parliamentary aspect was essential for the PACITA partners (hence the P for
Parliament in the project acronym), but as the non-PTA partners informed all partners
of their respective contexts, it became apparent that in most Central and Eastern European
countries, lobbying to establish a new institution in a parliament, which is relatively weaker
and seen as less central than the government, made little sense and gained no traction.
Therefore, the project partners decided to allow themselves some semantic flexibility and
464 P. DELVENNE AND B. ROSSKAMP

to speak of ‘policy-oriented’TA instead of ‘parliamentary’TA, while continuing to insist on
the importance of organizing some kind of formal link with parliament. While this compro-
mise might at first glance seem anecdotal, it turned out that the loss of centrality of the par-
liamentary character became an outcome of PACITA. Thus, the book published at the end
of the project, co-edited by the coordinator and his team and reporting on the main results
obtained, was entitled: Policy-Oriented Technology Assessment across Europe. Expanded
Capacities (Klüver, Nielsen, and Jørgensen 2016a).
16. http://technology-assessment.info/
17. Local organizers of these transnational participation exercises could hold additional panels
on issues deemed of national interest, but only as a complement. However, the relevance,
problematization and results of these national add-ons have not been discussed or
reflected upon in PACITA. Until the last moment, it was also possible for third-party
countries and/or organizations to take part in the exercise and organize a national workshop
themselves, as the preparation material and methodology was designed to be easily scalable
and replicable.
18. Even if citizen participation is not yet a widespread conviction in the EU, as the promoters of
European civic epistemology concede, ‘such [an] assumption [is] necessary to justify an
increased role for ordinary citizens in science-in-society [as] it may become a component of
a European model, and reinforce the quest for a European political and cultural identity.’
(MASIS Report, Siune 2009, 65)
19. This term is inspired by the notion of ‘frugal innovation’(Radjou and Prabhu 2015), often
associated with developing countries, which refers to the idea that companies can develop
high-quality products and create more value with limited resources. Applied to TA, frugality
suggests that it would be possible to do TA without dedicated institutions, in a context of
resource scarcity and uneven public spending on knowledge-based policy-making across
Europe.
20. https://globalta.technology-assessment.info/images/docs/globalTA_Mission-Statement.pdf
21. See for example the special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change edited by
Bimber and Guston (1997).
22. Delvenne and Parotte (2019) analyze that the closure of the Instituut Samenleving en Tech-
nologie (IST) bears striking similarities with the OTA story.
23. These developments follow a very relevant question from an anonymous reviewer, whom we
thank by the way, asking whether PACITA’s critiques could be used as a basis for rec-
ommendations to achieve ‘better designed projects’.If‘better designed’means a greater
chance of being funded by the European Commission, then riding the RRI wave until it sub-
sides, with less emphasis on what constitutes the roots of the TA ethos, is probably a safe
strategy in an era of scarce public resources. The reader will have understood that we
have a more political reading of the question, and that it seems to us that the price to pay
to have TA practices eclipsed by the RRI approach is much too high. Rather than focusing
on micro-interventions for fine-tuning projects, in a time of political uncertainty and epis-
temic ambiguity, we believe that TA communities should become a bastion of democratic
politics (cf. Delvenne and Parotte 2019)–and it seems that there is not much room demo-
cratic politics in RRI frameworks, which ‘largely ignore questions about the politics in and of
deliberation, the authoritative allocation of values, and the institutional uptake of deliberative
engagements’(Van Oudheusden 2014, 67). Conversely, in the TA communities, several
recent initiatives show that the politics and normativities of TA are at the heart of
current debates: for example, the Austrian ITA recently finalized two projects on these
issues: in March 2018 one titled ‘Practices and Paradigms of Policy Advice in TA’and in
December 2019 another titled ‘TA and Normativity’; and TATuP, the Journal for Technology
Assessment in Theory and Practice, dedicated a special issue on ‘Normativity in TA’in 2019.
24. Frahm, Doezema, and Pfotenhauer (2021,29–31) recently argued that international organ-
izations such as the OECD and the European Commission invest the language of politics
and democracy in a particular way, by framing a lack of societal engagement in innovation
governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies and
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION 465

simultaneously presenting RRI as the solution to relocate democratization within their own
transnational expertise, commitment to economic growth and market liberal political
agenda. We are concerned that, according to their analysis, RRI becomes a vehicle for shift-
ing democratic sovereignty away from the nation-state and demanding that locally
grounded forms of reasoning about science and technology as objects of political consider-
ation become primarily addressed in international arenas, which are characterized by their
lack of democratic legitimacy.
Acknowledgements
This article would not have been possible without the conversations we have had over the past few
years with our informants, both within and outside of the PTA community, whom we thank for
their insights and time. We hope that this article will help build bridges between the different
scientific and practitioner communities interested in Technology Assessment. Earlier drafts of
this article also benefited enormously from feedback from our colleagues during research seminars
at the Spiral Research Center (Liège University) and at the Munich Center for Technology in
Society (TU Munich). In particular, we are very grateful to Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Joakim Juhl,
Erik Aarden, Hadrien Macq, and Céline Parotte for their proofreading and guidance on previous
versions. Lastly, we warmly thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their perceptive
criticisms and helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Pierre Delvenne holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences of the University of Liège. He is cur-
rently Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), Lecturer at the University of
Liège (Department of Political Science), and Director of SPIRAL Research Centre. Pierre has pub-
lished extensively in his areas of expertise: Technology Assessment, bioeconomy in Europe and
Latin America, more broadly, science and technology in society. Previously he was a visiting
Research Fellow in King’s College University (United Kingdom), Harvard University (USA), Uni-
versidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil), Universidad de Quilmes (Argentina) and University
of Westminster (United Kingdom). Pierre is also a founding member of the Belgian Network for
Science and Technology in Society Studies (BSTS).
Benedikt Rosskamp holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences of the University of Liège. His
doctoral dissertation was about the futures and remakings of policy-oriented technology assess-
ment, with case studies from Wallonia, Portugal and the Czech Republic. His research interests
include technology assessment, public participation and responsible innovation in society.
ORCID
Pierre Delvenne http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3052-6252
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