The epistemic politics of TA institutionalization and international TA collaboration – a cosmopolitan perspective

When addressing the issue of further institutionalization of TA, two assumptions need to be empirically confronted and conceptually revisited. A first one considers the evolution of TA as a linear progression leading to new institutional creations in an increasing number of countries. Despite a series of calls for distributed, networked, multi-level and multi-actor TA capacities, the idea of creating more single, national, specialized and dedicated TA organizations remains dominant in TA discourse. A second assumption concerns the rationale of Technology Assessment and its performance in terms of “opening up” and “broadening out” (Ely et al. 2014) or “the reflexivity pathway” (Delvenne 2011), notably by resorting to participatory Technology Assessment. Results from case studies in Wallonia, Portugal and the Czech Republic require reconsidering the above-mentioned evolutionary assumptions for a more complex and paradoxical understanding of the future of TA. While the TA achievements in each case study are still uncertain to a high degree, we can sum up these respective TA developments under the banner of “evidence-based governance”. This particular understanding of knowledge and decision-making is coherent with a simultaneous observed shift away from the institutional deficit of TA (creating new institutions in newcomer countries) to a renewed strategy of resorbing a knowledge deficit (making TA knowledge available to a wider number of countries). This renewed approach to TA collaboration and capacity building increasingly gains traction both from a bottom-up perspective where actors try to organize themselves into a critical mass and in a top-down perspective of neoliberal and austerity policies. In such a constellation, positivistic science provides an evidence-base, which supposedly supports multi-level, multi-actor governance as it allows knowledge produced in one place to travel and serve a wide spectrum of actors and decision-making arenas. The consequences of this shift are crucially important to explore the re-makings and futures of Technology Assessment, as they put to the fore the issue of subsidiarity of both the production and the use of TA knowledge. Finally, we identify a shift from coexistence to a cosmopolitan mode of epistemic subsidiarity (Jasanoff 2013, 2014). The latter raises a series of new theoretical, practical and normative questions for the TA community.