Governance in Japan and Belgium: Building on Experiments with Technology Assessment and TA-like Activities

This poster presents a bilateral Belgian-Japanese research study that probes the direction and quality of science and technology governance within the context of new knowledge production and responsible innovation. Drawing on recent experiences with technology assessment (TA) and TA-like activities in the regions of Flanders and Wallonia (Belgium) and the country of Japan, it asks how future-oriented science and technology governance processes are locally enacted and how they compare.
Four research objectives are discerned: 1. To describe how TA concepts and practices, as well as related TA activities, have emerged in Japan, Wallonia, and Flanders since the 1960s-70s, and in what particular forms. 2. To describe how TA has evolved with, sustained, and/or countered, science, technology, and innovation policies on the regional, national, and international level. 3. To compare and contrast how TA is, or is not, institutionalized in the countries and regions, notably by taking into account initiatives to initiate or abolish parliamentary TA forms. 4. To situate the processes that are discerned through empirical analysis within a broader theory of, and movement towards anticipatory governance, and to assess the potential of TA of enhancing novel governance forms. The poster situates science, technology, and innovation policies in Japan and Belgium within the global shift towards a knowledge-based economy and the emergence of new science policy regimes, such as “strategic science” (Rip, 2002). Building on several TA case examples, it explains how the need for TA in science and technology emerges and is developed within distinctly different innovation contexts. The poster describes the project’s methodologies, working plan, and expected results, and provides suggestions for rendering comparative TA analysis useful to science policymakers and innovation actors, as well as to science and technology studies scholars.