Participatory technology assessment

Participatory technology assessment (pTA) is an approach to technology assessment that incorporates lay citizens, affected communities, and civil society organizations as co-equal participants in the evaluation of technological change. Unlike expert-driven assessment, which treats publics as passive recipients of risk, pTA treats them as epistemic agents whose lived experience constitutes knowledge that experts cannot access. The method has been institutionalized in Denmark (consensus conferences), the United States (citizen juries), and increasingly in global governance frameworks.

The central claim of pTA is not merely democratic but cognitive: the consequences of a technology are distributed across populations, and therefore the knowledge of those consequences is also distributed. An expert panel studying algorithmic hiring cannot know what it is like to have one's livelihood determined by an opaque scoring system. pTA is the recognition that epistemic injustice in technology policy is not an accident but a structural feature of expert-centric institutions.