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Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2007) 20:1335DOI 10.1007/s10806-006-9018-5 Springer 2006
ANNIKA PORSBORG NIELSEN, JESPER LASSEN, and PETER SANDE
DEMOCRACY AT ITS BEST? THE CONSENSUS CONFERENCE IN A CROSS-NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
(Accepted in revised form September 3, 2006)
ABSTRACT. Over recent decades, public participation in technology assessment has spread internationally as an attempt to overcome or prevent societal conicts over controversial technologies. One outcome of this new surge in public consultation initiatives has been the increased use of participatory consensus conferences in a number of countries. Existing evaluations of consensus conferences tend to focus on the modes of organization, as well as the outcomes, both procedural and substantial, of the conferences they examine. Such evaluations seem to rest on the assumption that this type of procedure has universally agreed goals and meanings, and that therefore consensus conferences can readily be interpreted and applied across national boundaries. This article challenges this approach to consensus conferences. The core of the article is a study of national dierences in ideas about what constitutes legitimate goals for participatory arrangements. The study looks at three consensus conferences on GMOs, which took place in France, Norway, and Denmark. Drawing on this study, the article discusses the ways in which interpretations of the concept of participation; the value attributed to lay knowledge vs. technical expertise; as well as ideas about the role of the layperson, are all questions that prompt entirely dierent answers from country to country. Further, the article analyses these national dierences within a theoretical framework of notions of democratic legitimacy.
KEY WORDS: Public participation, consensus conference, GMO, cross-national evaluation, participatory technology assessment, TA, deliberative democracy, models of democracy, democratic legitimacy, lay and expert knowledge
1. INTRODUCTION
Over the past few decades, the deployment of the participatory consensus conference has spread from its place of origin in Denmark where it was developed by The Danish Board of Technology (DBT) in the mid-1980s1 to
1 The model of participatory consensus conferences, which is now widely referred to as the Danish model, was originally adapted from the expert-based consensus conferences of the US Oce of Technology Assessment (OTA). The rst participatory consensus conference was organized by the DBT in 1987 on the topic Gene technology in industry and agriculture (see the DBT web...