A Report on The Cultural Politics of Sustainable Technology Development: European Experiences at newMetropolis, Amsterdam, 3 December 1998, the conference sponsored by the European Commission.
Not since the 1970s has public participation in technology development been discussed as warmly and experimented upon as fervently than at present. Whereas a goodly portion of the 70s-style participation assumed the form of no-nukes-style direct action and frustrating public enquiries, with minor embellishments and delays to projects often being the notable achievements, the 90s have witnessed a conspicuous willingness on the parts of government, at least in northern Europe, to involve the public not merely in amending ex post but in conceiving new projects. Indeed, in the Netherlands and increasingly elsewhere, governments are rushing to implement new participatory experiments and techniques, in order to raise the political legitimacy and economic viability of new, state-sponsored or at least state-endorsed projects, large and small. Along the way they are hoping to gain a helping hand from creative, participating publics, ultimately shifting some sense of responsibility for the projects from the governmental experts to the publics.
Hence it appeared an auspicious time for discussing the value and, perhaps, effectiveness of all the new experiments and techniques, as was the stated aim of the recent conference at newMetropolis, Amsterdam’s Science & Technology Center. The three broad questions put to public participation researchers and practitioners were as follows. First, why public participation and still more public participation? As Andrew Jamison pointed out, in the 70s and 80s, alternative technology movements were victims of their own success; long march-style, the vocal went into business, government and academia, incorporating insights from the meeting houses and the streets into instutionalised thought and action. Isn’t that civil spirit constructively being built into new governmental technology policy today? Departing from Mumford’s ‘64 distinction, Jamison argued, contrariwise, that in the past institutionalisation of the democratic ambition only has led to more authoritarian-style managerialism.[1] As ever, public participation leads a fragile existence. If history be a guide, the participation projects will fade with the waning of funding, and the balance between the democratic and the authoritarian will tip towards the latter.
Secondly, where does public participation lead? Johan Schot, the constructive technology assessment theorist and conference co-organiser with yours truly, argued that the new experiments - Danish and British consensus conferences, European-wide Agenda 21 activities (inspired by Rio), German planning cells as well as Dutch public debates, infralabs, open planning procedures, and more - create a space for the public to influence technological change with government and industry, by commonly acknowledging and anticipating long-term impacts, and feeding that anticipation back in the design of the technologies. When technology policy meets the public there is also the prospect for collective value learning between policy-makers, planners, technologists and publics.[2] Thus public participation in theory would lead to two tangible results - better socio-technical outcomes through shared design processes, and (as Jamison also argued) better forms of collaborations and networks responsible for making new technologies. Such networks would aid in sustaining the fragile existence of democratic technics.
Thirdly, and more specifically, under just which conditions does public participation produce qualitatively better decision-making and projects? Here the empirical work from researchers and practictioners (either independent or sponsored by the European Commission) was queried. Philip Vergragt (of TU Delft), Maarten Hajer (University of Amsterdam) and Wolfgang Krohn (University of Bielefeld) first reported on their scholarly empirical work. Thereafter a number of public participation practitioners and technicians from the Netherlands came forward with word from the field. Having been reminded (by the work of Per Osby, available in the conference reader) that the public co-created the car culture and public involvement may only imply more cars and space consumption and less sustainable futures, one long-standing question concerned whether participation may only make matters worse, a point often made by project developers and contested by certain publics and participation proponents, sometimes with prejudice and little tangible experience to go on from either side. In other words, does more democracy lead to more sustainability? Other questions related to the authenticity as well as efficacy of participation. Has public participation been merely a guise behind which committee-room governance continues to operate (with an example being high-rise housing, effected by consortia of local governments and construction companies in 60s U.K., as Michael Thompson, with John Adams, related in the film viewed later in the afternoon). Finally, to answer the question about genuineness, do participatory procedures substantially influence official decision-making? Even if they do not currently have much of an impact, is a culture and spirit of participation being created, with knock-on effects for official policy-making down the line? Finally, are there instances when public participation should not be encouraged, owing, say, to a democratic overload? As Hans Harbers related, is the attention accorded to public participation the consequence of poor expertise on the part of government officials? Put more cynically, why else would government outsource creativity and planning to the new temps called public participants?
Krohn, speaking about participation (in German planning cells) in the decisions around trash incinerators in the Black Forest, found indeed that participation is only used as an alibi. While participating publics may be ready to attend the meetings and work hard on formulating their informed viewpoints within the organisational instrastructure and communication culture of the planning cell, and while that very interface exists to present the views to the institutional structures, the link between the public viewpoints and the official decision-making processes remains weak. As Brian Wynne said, stakeholders may be willing to take part in new forms of decision-making, but party politics are a conservative force. The unresponsiveness of parliament could undermine new participation experiments, leading publics back to social movements and direct action, back to yes or no responses to the fait accomplis produced by old-school technology politics. Thus much is at stake in the outcomes of the public participation experiments.[3]
From the presentation by Vergragt, Bronislaw Szerszynski related that public participation is helpful if not necessary in monocultural situations, when there is little variety in the socio-technical options currently under discussion and/or when there is only one or two rationalities (in a cultural theory sense) represented at the table and in the decision-making procedure. (Importantly for the future of public participation, the evaluation of public participation experiments similarly requires a variety of rationalities and stakeholder perspectives represented.) To ensure diversity in the proposals made by the publics, the procedures themselves must encourage not rule-following, but rule-breaking and new kinds of breaching experiments .
Hajer, too, spoke about procedures and processes that erode formal procedures, but from a governmental and legislative point of view. Speaking about his previous work in Munich and in the Hague, and chiming with Krohn and Wynne s points above, one can only move away from feet on the table politics in back rooms by shifting discourses. Instead of attempting to intervene in technology, where market forces and proprietary knowledge cultures predominate, intervention should occur in a realm which is open to governments (and to the people) to control more directly. Shift the discussion from technology to land use, was the plea. There is a broader social agenda, concerning community and social cohesion, in any debate about land use than in any debate about, say transport, with its narrow sectoral focus. Participation in the name of civic culture would have more purchase in the land use and other broader discourses under direct national, regional and local legislative control.
The ensuing discussion was sharpened by Peter Fisch of the European Commission (DG XII), when he asked whether participation researchers could themselves shift discourses, from this meeting to a more official one, with higher stakes. As management studies and other policy-oriented researchers are wont to do, would participation scholars be willing and able to concoct action recipes for policy-makers and publics to digest? What if the Minister of Transport asks for a short book on how to manage participatory experiments?[4] While many asked whether recipe books are the only types of scholarly inputs with an impact on policy-makers, it was pointed out that any would-be recipe maker would have to be reflexive in creating and communicating his or her pie-chart. It remains important, in other words, to think through the normative consequences of one’s own participatory work. When participation entrepreneurs organise meetings, debates and social experiments, participation needn’t be discussed and evaluated for its own sake only.
Indeed, the practitioners tended to evaluate the procedures and experiments in terms of the tangible outcomes. Four were presented. Tineke van de Schoor from the National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (NCDO) described the procedures and outcomes of the 8 Dutch public debates on sustainability held every April since 1996. The debates are organised, it was said, to allow for the formulation of an informed public opinion, aimed directly at politicians. It is meant as alternative to the opinion carousel, whereby lobbying and the media end up being the most memorable inputs in political debate. Initially, social groups and journalists take stock of the sustainability debates in the Netherlands, and assemble a series of position statements and recommendations around a concrete issue. The debate method involves organising a panel of experts, which is questioned by two politicians, in front of members of the general public. (This switches the usual role of politicians, which has positive social learning effects.) Politicians then present what they ve made of the issues, and an open debate ensues between the politicians, the experts and the publics. An average of 800 participants have been attracted to the debates by newspaper advertisements, and the results are published in an annual Chronicle of Sustainability in the Netherlands (in Dutch). Here the distinction between stakeholders and the general public was drawn out, with the Dutch public debate really only reaching the segment of the population previously informed and interested in the issue at hand.
Henk van Zuylen described the Infralab experiments, applied by the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Water Management and Public Works. Transport infrastructure customers are asked to present their views on a problem, as traffic congestion on a particular motorway. Lists of experiences and problems are drawn up and handed to transport experts. The user and expert groups then meet in an Agora or idea marketplace , and together construct a series of proposed solutions for the Ministry to consider. Van Zuylen related that the most creative solutions do not survive consensus formation, as in the process the participants become more and more realistic. Participants do develop confidence in dealing with the different expertises and specific discourses, lowering the overall participation threshold for the future.
The final two experiments concerned new computer-based interfaces for participation and public understanding. Jeanine de Bruin and Michael Murtaugh of newMetropolis described their work on the debate engine, while Richard Rogers showed a conceptual tool, called DebateScape, under development at the University of Amsterdam and at Computer-Related Design at the Royal College of Art, London.[5] The newMetropolis debate engine takes science center visitors through a series of scenarios about the future spatial planning of the Netherlands, planned parenthood or other issues. Once the visitor views the position descriptions for each scenario or future situation, they are asked to vote for the most desirable one. The opinions are collected and forwarded to the relevant ministry, as a valuable input to the debate. (In the past, newMetropolis has assembled more opinions on the issues than the Ministry in its postcard campaigns.) DebateScape, currently at a conceptual stage, aims to create a socio-epistemological context for the public understanding of particular issues on the web. Departing from the lack of source context in search engine returns, it sees organisations websites as spaces where positions on issues are taken. The tool would landscape relevant organisations websites as a debate by displaying which organisations recognise other organisations as parties to the debate (the hyperlink map) and how these organisations spin or frame principal knowledge claims made in the debate (the discursive map). The presentation explained the empirical research done on the climate change debate, showing that relevant organisations in the debate do upload their general positions (which may be mapped) and .orgs, .govs and .coms hyperlink in particularly telling styles. The hyperlink and discursive maps made for the climate change debate reveal a kind of cybergeography of knowledge and power, as was explained. Participants in climate change or other debates would be well-served by learning where organisations stand on the issues, and vis a vis one another, in real web time. Such a tool could be used in the initial stages of consensus conferences, public debates and the like.
The plenary discussions revolved around a number of issues, such as whether the participation experiments and techniques only provide those involved with the feeling and experience of participation. For participants this may be satisfactory in the short term, but without governmental follow-through on the publics suggestions and creative proposals, trust in the participatory process will be lost. Having begun to shift the responsibility for the new projects to participating publics, government should see to its own responsibility in co-constructing not only the procedures but the resultant material culture.
NOTES
Andrew Jamison presented his paper, “On the Dialectics of Sustainable Technologies.”
A portion of the meeting was devoted to reviewing the Commission-sponsored PESTO project, Public Participation and Environmental Science and Technology Options , from whence the formulation of technology policy meets the public . On the project, see Jamision, A. (ed.), Public Participation and Sustainable Development, PESTO Papers 1, Aalborg University Press, 1997; and Jamison, A. (ed.), Technology Policy Meets the Public, Pesto Papers 2, Aalborg University Press, 1998.
Wolfgang Krohn presented his paper, written with Volker Vorwerk, “An Evaluation of a Participation Procedure in the Field of Waste Management in the Northern Black Forest.”
Such books exist. For example, John Grin, a conference participant, has written a how-to guide to Interactive Technology Assessment, published recently by the Rathenau Institute.
Jeanine de Bruin (debruin@newmet.nl) has a paper available. The second presentation is written up in Rogers, Richard and Noortje Marres, DebateScape: Landscaping Science & Technology Debates on the World Wide Web, Public Understanding of Science, forthcoming.
CONFERENCE READER LITERATURE LIST
Bijker, Wiebe, Democratisation of Technology. Who are the Experts?, unpublished ms., 1995, available through Univ. of Limburg, Technology & Society Studies, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, NL.
Bijker, Wiebe, Dutch, Dikes and Democracy, Technology Assessment Texts, no. 11, Unit of Technology Assessment, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, 1993.
Cramer, Jacqueline, Total Design: Towards a New Approach to Decision-making on Infrastructure, unpublished ms., in connection with the recommendations on infrastructure planning published by the Council for Transport, Public Works and Management, The Hague, 1998.
Goncalves, Maria Eduarda, Science, Controversy and Participation. The Case of the Foz Coa Rock Engravings, Journal of Iberian Archaeology, vol. 0, 1998, pp. 7-31.
Jamison, Andrew, Memories of PESTO: Exploring the Cultural Politics of Sustainable Development, EASST Review, vol. 17, no. 3, 1998, pp. 7-12.
Krohn, Wolfgang, Recursive Learning: Experimental Practices in Society. The Case of Waste Management, unpublished ms., University of Bielefeld, 1998.
Murtaugh, Michael, Integrating Content and Comment: Toward a New Form of Electronic Public Debate, abstract, newMetropolis, Amsterdam, 1998.
Osby, Per, A Car Named Desire: Reshaping Transport for a Sustainable Future, unpublished ms., Centre for Technology and Society, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gloshaugen, 1998.
Renn, Ortwin, Birgit Blaettel-Mink and Hans Kastenholz, Discursvie Methods in Environmental Decision- making, Business Strategy and Environment, vol. 6, 1997, pp. 218-231.
Renn, Ortwin, Thomas Webler and Hans Kastenholz, Procedural and Substantive Fairness in Landfill Siting: A Swiss Case Study, in Loefstedt, R., and L. Frewer, The Earthscan Reader in Risk and Modern Society, Earthscan Publications Limited, London, 1998.
Rogers, Richard, Playing with Search Engines, and making lowly information into knowledge, Mediamatic, vol. 9, no. 2/3, 1998, pp. 122-126.
Vergragt, Philip, The Back-casting Approach: Sustainable Washing as an Example, in Roome, Nigel, Sustainable Strategies for Industry, Island Press, 1998, forthcoming.
Waagmeester, Kees, Enkele Noties over de Nationale Duurzaamheidsdebatten en de Opiniecarousel, unpublished ms., 1998.
van Zuylen, Henk, Effectivity and Impact of Participative Learning, unpubished ms., 1998, available at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, PO Box 5048, 2600 GA Delft, NL, h.j.vanzuylen@avv.rws.minvenw.nl
van Zuylen, Henk et al., A New European Approach to Transport Technology Assessment, paper for the WCTR conference, July, 1998.
van Zuylen, Henk, From Scientific Computation to Decision Support, Delft Hydraulics, vol. 6, no. 1, March, 1993, pp. 3-10.