From Bio to Nano: Learning From The Past to Shape the Future of Technology Assessment

摘要: In many Western countries over the last 35 years, the quest for more scientific governance on crucial technological issues led to a broadening of the political world’s sphere of competences. Indeed, various countries decided that dealing with global, invisible, irreversible and irreparable risks had to be handled by an appropriate tool of management of technological innovations. So the usefulness to institutionalize parliamentary Technology Assessment (PTA) offices emerged. Nowadays, PTA is an instrument particularly suitable to study the new shape of science and society’s interface and it represents a remarkable attempt to reform the institutional settings of innovation. However, while the overall uncertainty surrounding science and technology has been used by public actors like parliamentarians or ministers in the past to legitimize a first generation of PTAs, the emergence of a second generation in the 1990’s – centred on the constructive, interactive or participatory TA approches – emphazises the co-evolution of technology and society rather than the former linear determinist rationale. In this context, the STS community of scholars is increasingly called upon by the public authorities to provide a “professional service role” (RIP, 1994), that is to say to take a step into action out of the border of their intellectual engagement. Then, we suggest to compare two successive periods by looking at the institutional management of two distinct-but-complementary technological issues: biotechnology and nanotechnology. The former has been taken into account by public actors at a time when the second generation of PTAs was not yet rooted in the political …