Anticipatory Governance

Anticipatory governance is predicated on the notion that co-production of technology for the benefit of society is possible and relevant during the formation of new scientific discovery and technical invention. Anticipatory government strives to identify relevant social issues and develop mechanisms for handling the conflicts that will occur as new systems of products are pushed or pulled into the marketplace. But can this be controlled from a societal viewpoint? The implementation of infrastructures has seldom been about the long term impacts of technology. Electricity and internal combustion engines are subject to physical laws that define how they must be implemented. Transmission lines and oil wells may be scars upon the land, but the benefit of the underlying technology to society and the power of large industry to implement their business models were too great to stop the industries from having their way with the environment.

Real Time Technology Assessment and other tools will help identify potential future risks and guide policy makers in putting the concerns of society alongside benefits and profits of the implementing organizations. The unpredictability of future outcomes will ensure that worse case scenarios are discounted and downplayed and future benefits will employ the novelty principle in ways that new technologies will be demanded even as they present us with new risks. But as these ensembles of new technology identified in the Barben reading manifest themselves, they allow action to be taken and these products to enter the market.

In order for anticipatory governance to have a chance of successfully integrating these new sciences into society, it must have to power to act. The governance model suggests that distributed models of management will be the paradigm. But will these new boundary organizations, self-regulations and distributed learning organizations be enough? In the Bell reading he suggests options for experts, watchdogs, or the public to be decision agents and encourages public participation in the debates. The public need for informed decision making will face many challenges including the need for open engagement with regulatory agencies. In order to keep the debate from dissolving into dogmatic stand offs over social impacts, further public engagement tools will require continual government interventions to give legitimacy and discipline to decisions.