Kalendář

Technology transfer is intricate business with uncertain results. Our paper takes this well-known STS lesson as a starting point for a study in public deliberation. We will critically discuss the story of how a (social) technology for organizing public dialogues was transferred to the Czech Republic. This technology, called RISCOM, originally appeared during public debates about geological repository for high-level nuclear waste in Sweden. After some time it entered the international arena: under the auspices of European Commission and within several European projects it was proposed as something that would facilitate – and democratize – the processes of siting geological repositories. As such it is being implemented in several East European countries and in the Czech Republic in particular. On the one hand, RISCOM served well the Czech situation in that it helped to bring all the main actors to a discussion table after previous negotiations had completely crashed. On the other hand, it seems that RISCOM substantially failed from a broader perspective. Our study shows that it “succeeded” only at the cost of losing much of its specific original characteristics. As such, it became associated with only too general appeals to dialogue, the attractiveness of which lived but shortly. RISCOM also contributed to the increasing focus on dialogue per se, which ultimately lead to frustration and impatience on both sides. This recently resulted in the shift towards more authoritative decision making and another crisis of mutual trust. All in all, this import of democratic technology turned out to be somewhat counterproductive.