Participation in ‘big style’: first observations at the German citizens’ dialogue on future technologies

Abstract

In 2010, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research started a series of citizens’ dialogues on future technologies. In the context of the German history of public participation in technology-oriented policy making, these dialogues are unique for at least two reasons: The Federal Ministry retains the responsibility for the entire process and is heavily involved in its planning, organization and communication, and the number of participants and process elements is significantly higher than in most other participative events. The paper presents insights into the political background of the citizens’ dialogues, its general concept as well as first observations from the dialogue rounds on energy and high-tech medicine. In addition, it discusses reactions of other political actors and expectations regarding legitimacy and representativeness of the dialogue results.

The Many Faces of Participation in Science

“…The consultation consisted of several aspects: for each topic six to eight citizen conferences with around 100 randomlyselected participants in cities across Germany, accompanying smaller citizen workshops, an open online-platform for comments and discussion, and a final citizen summit for each topic with participants from the earlier events. A roundtable with representatives from science, civil society and industry accompanied each process (Decker and Fleischer, 2012).…”

PACITA: Book Proceedings from the PACITA 2013 Conference in Prague (Prague,--15 March 2013)

“…The process itself was designed by the CDFT consortium in accordance with a generic model for dialogues (Decker/Fleischer 2012). In the first phase, the contextual basis and socially relevant themes were identified and reflected using the method of focus groups (e.g.…”

Unlocking participation

“…My review presents a range of methodologies that account for diversity and inclusion, from deliberative focus groups (Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013), to situational analysis (Glück 2018), Q-method (Brown andDillard 2015, Kurian, Munshi, andBartlett 2014), and multi-criteria analysis (Stirling 2010). Stirling's concept has also been deployed in the context of assessment approaches, including risk assessment (Stirling and Scoones 2009), innovation assessment (Hasselbalch 2018), sustainability impact assessment (Martinez and Komendantova 2020), technology assessment (Decker and Fleischer 2012), or vulnerability analysis (Rossignol, Delvenne, and Turcanu 2015). With regard to theory, STS and social sciences have discussed Stirling's concept in relation to actor-network-8 This section is based on a systematic literature review (for a description of the method see annex), complemented by individual publications identified via snowball system.…”

“…Forms of knowledge define which kind of expertise and which knowledge claims are accepted in deliberation, and hence, are being operationalized. In the literature, both aspects are considered closely intertwined and are primarily addressed in relation to methods, i.e., as pleas to better integrate different forms of knowledge or assessment approaches (Stirling and Scoones 2009, Stirling 2010, Decker and Fleischer 2012, Ely, Van Zwanenberg, and Stirling 2014, Rossignol, Delvenne, and Turcanu 2015, Hasselbalch 2018, Martinez and Komendantova 2020.…”