Abstract :
[en] In this article we question the roles and engagement of the French Parliamentary office of Technology Assessment (PTA) in governing Nuclear Waste Management (NWM) over an extended timeframe (1990-2017). We argue that the trajectories of the PTA and the NWM program are so intertwined that we gain analytical purchase from understanding them together. Our empirical analysis looks at three episodes of co-production of technological and political practices: (1) the PTA as an independent assessor (1990); (2) the PTA as a regular follower (1996-2005); (3) the PTA as a whistle-blower (2007-2017). We find that maintaining or redrawing boundaries between science and policy have increasingly been necessary but difficult in the course of the PTA’s mainstreaming into the policy-making landscape and the nuclear establishment. We conclude by examining the implications for PTAs of a possible shift from concerns about democratizing expertise to politicizing knowledge for policy.
Commentary :
Article accepted for publication. This article was supported by Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique — FNRS. The authors want to express their gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments on a first version of this article. They also thank Tom op Het Veld very much for his careful proofreading. Lastly, many ideas defended in the article greatly benefited from the first author’s affiliation with the STS Program at Harvard University (Kennedy School of Government). Her special thanks go to Sheila Jasanoff and the research fellows at Harvard STS.
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