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Paper short abstract:

A hermeneutic discourse analysis of TA documents on synthetic biology revealed a tendency to close down future spaces under hermeneutic imperialism of science against opening up sociotechnical futures and the outputs of TA.

Paper long abstract:

The development of newly emerging science and technology is related to the ability of actors to anticipate and reflect, to confront ideas about technology-driven futures with shared values, and assess them accordingly. The societal assessment of techno-futures can provide a semantic and hermeneutic structuring of a basically open future to allow a better informed and reflected debate for preparing decision-making (Grunwald 2013, 2014a, 2014b). However, there is always a danger that the present discourse of the future is affected by subtle closing down pressures called as 'hermeneutic imperialism' of science (Wynne 2014, 2016; cf. Stirling 2008) while going against opening up the outputs of TA with plural and conditional advice (Ely, van Zwanenberg & Stirling 2014). Inspired by hermeneutic approaches to policy analysis (Dryzek 1982; Fischer 2003) and sociological hermeneutics (Reichertz 2004; Hitzler 2005; Keller 2011), this case study takes a discourse analysis of 35 TA documents on synthetic biology. The analysis revealed a tendency to close down future spaces that appears even in studies conducted by dedicated TA organisations in Europe, where rarely touch upon security and sustainability of global natural and innovation ecosystems underlined in the context of bioeconomy and biodiversity. With a strong focus for concern on safety reflecting the GM debate, European policy discourses tend to adopt a more manageable approach under the name of the proportionality principle, being in line with the 'act now, before it's too late' slogan for European futures (Felt 2015) and the idea of the hype cycle as a stagist model.