Building the future of European sustainability governance: a critical self-reflexive approach to a participatory Technology Assessment exercise

Europe Wide Views (EWV) on Sustainable Consumption is a cross-European citizen consultation providing unique insights into the views of ordinary citizens across Europe on sustainable consumption and policies connected to this complex issue. The consultation took place simultaneously in 11 EU member states on October 25th 2014 and involved 1035 European citizens. Throughout the day, the participating citizens deliberated with fellow citizens and voted on issues relating to future policy-making on sustainable consumption. Overall, EWV was framed as a participatory Technology Assessment (pTA) exercise. Following the hypothesis that TA practitioners do not enough question the design of their projects’ and their own normative assumptions, we suggest to put the consultation we organised in Wallonia (Belgium) to the test. The aggregated results of the consultations point to the fact that “citizens are [now, after the EWV] strongly in favour of policy-makers taking ambitious steps in order to foster a more sustainable consumption in society, and want to personally take action in this process”. Relying on our previous work on dystopia as empowerment, we suggest a self-reflexive experiment to inquire into how much the design of the consultation (including the materials that were circulated) and the messages that we conveyed pictured a threatening present that would lead to an apocalyptic future ‘if nothing was done’, thereby potentially biasing the results that will are to be translated into political recommendations. Our analysis will benefit from cross-breeding future studies and science and technology studies to think afresh invisible normativities induced by pTA of sustainable governance.