Siting the Nuclear Waste Repository in the Czech Republic: Twists and Turns Towards Technical Democracy
Abstract
We present a story of a double turn: first, the turn toward deliberative procedures orchestrated by the implementer; this turn came after the initial period of expert driven decision making had led to public protests and failed. Second, we describe a turn back toward more authoritative and technocratic decision making after several-years long attempt at "technical democracy", to use this famous term (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe 2009), did not bring expected results quickly enough.
While the former kind of turn appears relatively frequently in literature, the latter does not seem to be discussed too often - although similar failures may not be so rare. We want to show that a misunderstanding about the meaning of the notion of "socio-technical" can be seen behind the described double turn.
Socio-technical, at least as far as its STS origin implies, does not mean simply just adding a list of "social issues" to the technical agenda. Instead (and in accordance to the work done within STS), the notion of socio-technical refers to analytical determination to approach and understand social and technical processes together, as a single network, i.e., going hand in hand, inseparably (i.e., Callon 1991; Latour 1991 and elsewhere).
Something like this, of course, is hard to translate into policy practices and formalized public involvement - which is valid even more for policy cultures that have remained practically untouched by "the emerging interest in scientific citizenship today and multiple new forms of public participation in science and technology" and in which scientific expertise still very much enjoys the status of politically neutral authority, external to societal life. In a way, we are convinced that the siting process in the Czech Republic has fallen victim to the simplified understanding of what "socio-technical" means for technical democracy in the making.