Since political scientist James Carroll (1971) made a strong case for “participatory technology” in the leading scientific journal “Science” forty years ago, scientists, engineers, policy makers and the public at large have seen quite a number of different approaches to design and implement participatory processes in technology assessment and technology policy. As these participatory experiments and practises spread over the last two decades and some forms became almost standard operating procedures in some western democracies, one could easily get the impression that participation turned from a normative theoretical claim to a working practise that goes without saying. Looking beyond the well-known forerunners and evaluation the ambivalent experiences that have been made under different conditions in various places, however, the “if” and “how” of participation is still a contested issue when questions of technology are on the agenda.

The task of this introductory key-note is to review and re-consider the debate about the legitimacy of participation from the perspective of a political scientist. To be more specific, the normative and analytical points of reference of my approach are derived from democratic theory and public policy analysis. While the conference as a whole defines its subject area broadly as “questions of technology”, the perspective taken here will not address issues of participation that might arise in all societal fields which are or could be subject to processes of technization or technologization. Rather I shall focus on technology assessment and technology policy (and politics) as two different, but strongly interrelated domains claiming, on the one hand, that issues of participation should be considered differently in each of these domains with regard to problems of legitimation. On the other, as these domains are strongly interreIated in many policy processes, I argue that specific problems of legitimation in particular cases cannot be understood adequately without analysing and evaluating the specific ways of their interrelation in concrete contexts.

As far as legitimation itself is concerned, one can distinguish two basically different approaches to justify participation in technology assessment and technology policy.
Normative vs. functional.
Problems of legitimation: problem – is vs. ought
Normative theories of democracy, democratic practises and empirical research on democracy have always been in complex and sometimes conflicting relationships with each other. These different spheres and their interrelations require differentiated forms of interpretation. Deliberative democracy is no exception to this rule. Reviewing the debate on deliberative democracy in the beginning of the 21st century, Simone Chambers (2007: 307) suggested that deliberative democracy would be on its way from “theoretical statement” to a “working theory”. This “practical turn”, visible in a growing number of deliberative projects, seemed to have turned a democratic theory into practise. These deliberative practises became an object of empirical analysis and evaluation. If the normative theory of deliberative democracy was adopted by political actors and implemented in (new) deliberative practises, some observers suggested that the way these deliberative processes work and the effects they had would provide the empirical evidence for conclusions not only about the legitimacy and performance of these practises themselves but also about the theory guiding these practises. Looking at the explicit or implicit normative implications that some of the studies following the “empirical turn” in deliberative democracy research suggest, however, a warning against unmediated shortcuts and problematic assumptions concerning the complex relationship between theory, practise and empirical research is in place. Pointing to the seemingly self-evident state of deliberation “in the real world” before or beyond any conceptually and methodologically reflected approach to empirical analysis and its relation to theories of deliberative democracy is not adequate to the task of relating empirical research, democratic theory and democratic practise. Alt least three problematic aspects can be identified in the attempts to create a simplified relation between empirical observable deliberative practises and normative democratic theory. First of all, the relationship of externally ascribed justifications of certain deliberative practises and internally moving reasons and motives of the actors involved is not as unproblematic as some studies seem to suggest. This problem might be called projective interpretation. As not everything that goes on in projects that the actors call or observers classify as “deliberative” is inspired by theories of deliberative democracy or is implemented according to its principles, it is difficult to draw conclusions from their study with regard to the validity of the normative theory that supposedly has been put to an empirical test. A second problem concerns the functionalistic reformulation of normative requirements for deliberative settings. Some studies present their evaluation of deliberative and participatory projects by juxtaposing “normative expectations vs. empirical evidence”. Problematic are such juxtapositions since they presuppose that normative requirements for deliberative projects are to be interpreted as expectations concerning their empirically observable output or outcome.


Invited Keynote-Presentation