Two distinct strategies seem to be crystallizing in relation to sustainable development, with characteristic patterns of public engagement, technical experimentation, and network building. On the one hand, in many of the various projects of so-called ecological modernization, participation is primarily conceived in a top-down way, with the public given the role of the environmentally-conscious consumer or offered opportunities for ecological employment. On the other hand, and opposed to this, are the bottom-up approaches emanating from locally-based initiatives, where forms of participation remain open-ended and highly diverse. The pursuit of environmental sustainability provides a catalyst in many of these cases for experimentation with new forms of sociality and community.
In the 1960s, as part of his two volume work on The Myth of the Machine, the American writer Lewis Mumford made a distinction between two fundamental types, or modes, of technological development, which he called “authoritarian” and “democratic”, and which resemble, in many ways, the two strategies that have emerged in the quest for sustainable development. Despite their being somewhat provocative, Mumford’s terms can be a useful way to characterize what might be termed the emerging þdialectics of sustainable technicsþ. Mumford’s argument was that the two types of technics had coexisted throughout history, and that they each had their advantages and disadvantages, but he felt that by the 1960s, the megamachine had become far too dominant. With the powerful “military-industrial complex” and the other large corporations dominating technological development, the opportunities for democratic technics were seriously threatened. And like many other writers and critics of the time, Lewis Mumford called for a reaffirmation, or reinvention, of democratic alternatives to the megamachine.
This idea of a democratic technics - which Mumford and other cultural critics, like Herbert Marcuse, Rachel Carson, Paolo Friere, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and many others articulated in the 1960s - was one of the sources of inspiration for a wide range of activities that came to take place in the 1970s, within the environmental and other social movements that developed at the time. In many ways, the alternative technology movement of the 1970s - like so many social movements before and since - was a victim of its own success. Many innovations - in renewable energy, environmental technology, organic agriculture, and ecological design - that were made in movement workshops and production collectives, in alternative “grass roots” organizations, showed themselves to be profitable. And the temptation became too strong for the entrepreneurial types in the movement to commercialize their work, to set up companies, to go into business.
Others set out on a long march through the institutions, seeking ways to translate their ideas about democratic technological development into the more instrumental, or authoritarian, language of policy making and management. In Denmark and the Netherlands, the term that was used most often was technology assessment. The way to change technology development into more socially desirable directions, many seemed to feel, was to examine the consequences in advance. If you could predict what the negative effects would be of a new product or process, then you could perhaps make it less harmful, both to the environment and to the eventual users.
Still others were won over by the charms and attractions of the new technologies that were coming out of the laboratories of the big corporations - the personal computers and the fascinating new ways to manipulate genetic material. Many were the former critics who became enamored with the new “high” technologies, arguing that they did not carry with them the same negative values and negative implications that nuclear technology and chemical technologies had. And so gradually, the alternative, or democratic, technology movement faded away, and a new “entrepreneurialism” emerged to take its place.
To return to Mumford’s language, there came in the 1980s a new period of dominance for the megamachine, for authoritarian technics. As a result, the balance was once again lost, and the commercial ethos, or spirit, spread to other societal domains. But, with the call for a more sustainable development that began to be heard in the late 1980s, there are signs of new types of democratic technics emerging here and there. They are fragile to be sure, and it is not at all the same kind of movement that it was in the 1970s. Rather, as we have come to understand them in our project, the experiments in democratic technics that are taking place across Europe are quite limited and do not make up a coherent, or integrated movement, as the experiments in the 1970s seemed to many of us - both then and now in retrospect.
The contemporary experiments are much more fragmented, and many of them appear, on closer examination, to be more rhetorical than real. They are more talk about what could be done - or should be done - than practices that are actually taking place on a wide scale. Many of them go under the name of technology assessment, but often with a new prefix attached: constructive technology assessment or interactive technology assessment or participatory technology assessment. Particularly in the Netherlands, but also in Denmark, a number of policy makers and academic students of technology and society have carried out projects that have tried to involve various public groups in technological development. There is the sustainable technology program in the Netherlands, and the Infralab that has involved those who are affected by infrastructural projects in scenario workshops and various planning activities. There are lay panels that have been established to formulate their ideas about technological development projects, through the auspices of Offices for Technology Assessment, and there are the consensus conferences that have begun to spread as an export product from Denmark to other countries. Recently, both Korea and Australia have held their first consensus conferences.
What all of these activities have in common is a democratic ambition, but so far anyway, there is still an enormous distance between the technology assessment activity and the dominant, authoritarian centers of technological research, development and innovation. The technology assessment activities have become institutionalized and, to a certain extent, professionalized, but they have not yet entered into the real world of technological decision-making.
A very different kind of public participation has been taking place around Europe in the name of local Agenda 21. In many places, particularly when local environmental activists have been able to exercise some kind of control over the process, a number of things have started to happen that, at least to me, look more like a movement of democratic technology development. New kinds of links, or horizontal networks, are being established, through local Agenda 21, between people from different places - small busines activities that are taking place across Europe that can be interpreted as seeds of a more democratic technology development. But they are rather weak and uncoordinated in relation to the dominant forces of “authoritarian” technics. What PESTO has indicated is that there is a good deal that we, as academic students of technology and society, can do, both to analyze the conditions and criteria for a more democratic technological development, but also to shape new kinds of linkages between experts and lay people. [1]
What was so central to the movements of the 1970s, I believe, was the fact that many academics stepped out of the universities and worked with labor groups and environmental groups and other kinds of activist organizations. Of course, it was a different social and political climate then, but it still should be possible to do more than is being done today. I think that we, who are at the universities, should think seriously about the roles that we play in relation to authoritarian technics, on their place. Many environmental organizations have come to play a consulting role, and act to a large extent as business firms, in relation to Agenda 21, but also in relation to such things as environmental consumption. Other former environmental activists have become promoters of renewable energy, cleaner technology or ecological food, which is certainly a positive development, but is not necessarily a part of democratic technology development.
A final personal conclusion, then, is that there are many activities that are taking place across Europe that can be interpreted as seeds of a more democratic technology development. But they are rather weak and uncoordinated in relation to the dominant forces of “authoritarian” technics. What PESTO has indicated is that there is a good deal that we, as academic students of technology and society, can do, both to analyze the conditions and criteria for a more democratic technological development, but also to shape new kinds of linkages between experts and lay people. [1]
What was so central to the movements of the 1970s, I believe, was the fact that many academics stepped out of the universities and worked with labor groups and environmental groups and other kinds of activist organizations. Of course, it was a different social and political climate then, but it still should be possible to do more than is being done today. I think that we, who are at the universities, should think seriously about the roles that we play in relation to authoritarian technics, on the one hand, and democratic technics on the other. The fragile experiments in democratic technology development need some help if they are to survive and continue to grow. And, as we discuss science and technology policy options, we need to bring about a better balance between the democratic and authoritarian modes of technological development.
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authorþs address: andy@i4.auc.dk