Means to an End Participatory Methods in Technology Assessment

This contribution builds on results from the EU-Project TAMI (Technology Assessment in Europe: Between Method and Impact). The general question to be answered in TAMI was ”How can TA-institutions optimise the impact of their projects?”. TAMI tackled this issue from two perspectives. The first one was straight forward: TA-practitioners must optimise their projects in order to increase their (?) impact. The second one took a more indirect approach by categorising the potential impacts of TA in order to identify concrete goals for TA-projects. TAMI has developed a “from method to impact” structure which starts with an appraisal of the current social, political or ecological situation or problem and the definition of the concrete impact the TA-practitioner wants to aim for. According to both the current situation and the general stated goal, the TA-project will be designed to employ the combination of TA-methods that can be justified as the most promising one to reach this specific goal, while taking general TA criteria of good practice into account. In this structure the means to an end aspect of TA-methods is obvious. The consideration of a certain method in the TA-project design can be justified referring to three aspects: 1. to the current situation, 2. to the impact to be reached, and/or 3. to general quality criteria of good practice in TA. This is true for participatory methods as well. Referring to the typology of impacts developed in TAMI, the relevance of public participation will be reflected upon referring to the PATH-conference topic “nanotechnology”.