Technology assessment (TA for short) is an interdisciplinary field of research that focuses on observing, researching, analysing and evaluating the potential and impact of technical and scientific developments. The assessment and weighing up of opportunities and risks that technical developments can harbour for ecological, social and economic areas plays a major role here, as does the associated creation and publication of recommendations for action and guidelines.

1. Background

Technology assessment emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the USA and Europe in response to a need articulated by society and politics. Until then, there had been a prevailing optimism about progress, including the idea that progress was possible without limits, which began with the European Enlightenment and was reinforced by the Industrial Revolution. However, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, this idea took a turn for the worse with the emergence of a number of intensifying environmental, global social and economic crises, some of which were also linked to technological developments. The ambivalence of technology and technological progress increasingly came into focus, leading to a new understanding of it: innovation on the one hand as an inevitable and necessary means of solving problems, and on the other hand as causing problems, as the negative consequences of technology and mechanisation became increasingly visible (see section on Collingridge's dilemma). This ambivalence, which was then recognised, led to uncertainties and orientation problems in the evaluation of technology. Technology assessment should help to simultaneously utilise the opportunities of technological progress and avoid or reduce the risks, or at least enable a responsible and conscious approach to them. It should deal with the possible consequences with foresight and help people to make well-informed, considered decisions.

2. Characteristics and field of application

Historically and to date, technology assessment has not been a scientific discipline in its own right, but is understood as an interdisciplinary and problem-orientated socio-epistemic practice in a heterogeneous field of research. Today, it is primarily used in the following three areas, in which the demands placed on it and its methodology vary depending on the context:

1. Policy advice, consulting for parliaments, ministries and international organisations
2. Public technology dialogue and civil society inclusion
3. Participation in the direct design of technology, contributing to and advising on technical development projects

Technology assessment is not concerned with technology and its consequences as such, but is only involved when these may have implications for society, whether positive or negative. These meanings, for example for the areas of innovation, climate protection, health or the labour market, usually become clear in the context of controversies and conflicts of interest. The attributions of meaning are made equally by actors from science, technology and industry, as well as by those affected who articulate fears or assumptions regarding the consequences of certain technology for people and society. Technology assessment is both expected and required to identify the consequences of technology, opportunities and risks, and technology conflicts at an early stage, to overcome technology conflicts, to promote technology design in the interests of sustainable development and to strive for the democratisation of technology. Technology assessment is inherently prospective and future-oriented and aims to help shape the technological future in a desirable direction. Particularly with regard to the early identification of technology impacts, reference should be made to the precautionary principle (see module Precautionary principle and innovation principle), which is intended to create scope for political action even before there is clear scientific evidence of the risk. 

2.1 Intended and unintended consequences

In this context, consequences are not to be understood as the consequences of technology, because strictly speaking technology has no consequences. We are referring to the consequences that can result from the scope of human decisions and actions in connection with technology.

A distinction can be made between intended and unintended consequences - technology assessment focuses primarily on the latter. Unintended consequences include unintended, often unforeseeable consequences that can also occur with a significant time delay and are usually undesirable. Historically, these unintended consequences have become increasingly relevant as technological progress and the constant globalisation of the world have also significantly increased the spatial and temporal scope of the consequences. These consequences primarily affect the areas of non-human nature and (human) health, in which they have already had a serious impact in some cases, and can manifest themselves as social and cultural consequences, as dependence on technology and as anthropological consequences.

Furthermore, as a result of its use, technology can both open up and close off options for human action. While thinking in line with the optimism of progress usually only focuses on the opening up of fields of action, less attention tends to be paid to the closure that may accompany the consequences. This closure can occur through a shift in power and values, through familiarisation with and dependence on innovations and through the destruction and thus closure of entire options for people and regions (see module Precautionary principle and Innovation principle). The latter in particular is closely linked to technological conflicts that arise from constellations in which there are particularly strong discrepancies between the people who benefit greatly from the respective technical innovations and the people who are predominantly harmed by the technical innovations.

2.2 Policy advice

Technology assessment also plays an important role as an instrument of policy advice. The field of application ranges from parliaments, ministries and authorities to the healthcare system and international bodies. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the Office of Technology Assessment in the German Bundestag (TAB), established in 1990, is of great importance. Its purpose was to help improve the information base, especially in research and technology-related parliamentary consultation processes. Technology assessment is used to advise ministries and authorities, primarily in the form of accompanying research for ongoing scientific and technological research programmes. Another important branch of German technology assessment is the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), which has considered and involved technology assessment in its research and funding policy since the 1980s.

2.3 Participatory expansion

Motivated by the expectations and demands of democratic theory, the field of technology assessment was expanded in the 1980s to include participatory technology assessment (public technology dialogue), as it was demanded that the assessment of consequences, such as the acceptability of risks, should not be left to scientific experts or political decision-makers alone. Instead, social groups, the affected population and the general public should be included in the discourse in order to come closer to the ideal of democratising technology. In this context, numerous procedures were established, such as consensus conferences, citizens' forums and planning cells. However, these procedures were and still are criticised to some extent, especially in light of the unequal distribution of power between the interest groups, which in some cases proved the democratic-theoretical hopes of citizen participation at eye level to be unrealisable or naive.

3. Technology assessment today

At present, it is a matter of course in countries with democratic or near-democratic constitutions that the public or relevant social groups are included in consultations on future technology, for example in the form of industry associations, nature conservation groups, citizens' initiatives or non-organised civilians. In addition, the discourse takes place in public, which should also strengthen interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, see for example the open access journal Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis (TATuP, www.tatup.de/). The subject area has also shifted or expanded over time: today, the focus is less on large-scale technical facilities and more on technologies that can be used in a wide variety of ways in numerous utilisation contexts, on the combination of different technologies (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and neuroscience) and increasingly on major social transformations with a strong reference to technology.

In addition, a global and interdisciplinary community for technology assessment has formed, such as the Global Technology Assessment Network (globalTA), which has member institutions from 27 countries worldwide (www.openta.net/netzwerk-ta). In view of the equally global extent of the consequences, it is necessary to open up the global level, and there is also the hope that technology assessment can promote democracy and justice. Aspects of technology assessment are also gaining importance in neighbouring fields such as science and technology studies (STS), applied ethics and sustainability research.

3.1 Sustainability

Sustainability is a normative obligation of technology assessment. This is because the relationship between technology and sustainable development is also ambivalent. In this context, technology assessment should identify and evaluate possible sustainability-relevant consequences before, or at least during, the development of a new technology in order to enable the innovation process to be redirected towards more sustainable products or systems if necessary. From a global perspective, responsibility for the future and the fair distribution of opportunities to fulfil current needs should be taken into account in the context of each other. In addition, three so-called ecological management rules have been established in the context of dealing with the natural environment:

1. With regard to renenatural resources, the utilisation rate must not exceed the regeneration rate and must not jeopardise the functionality of the ecosystems concerned.
2. The release of emissions must not exceed the absorption capacity of the environment and ecosystems.
3. Non-renewable resources should be focussed on in particular.

One of many other important institutions in this respect is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the so-called "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", which brings together 195 countries as members and collates scientific findings and strategies on climate change and publishes them in the form of status reports.