Co-produced legitimacies: Parliamentary technology assessment and nuclear waste management in France

Abstract

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 programme 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 (2007–17). 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 policymaking 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.

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