Parliament, Paradox and Policy

Abstract

The paper presented here is based almost entirely on perspectives derived from the experience of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), an integral part of the UK Parliament at Westminster. As a consequence, it has certain characteristics:

• 1. Obviously, it primarily draws on the UK situation. Indeed a major aim in making the initial conference presentation was to exchange ideas that have emerged from this context that may be of interest to other experiences. Conversely, of course, we seek to learn from those other experiences any approaches that could potentially be used for the work of POST in the future.

• 2. It is set in the context of Parliamentary Technology Assessment (PTA). This shares a central body of method and process with all forms of Technology Assessment (TA) but, certainly in the UK situation, has some additional specific features. The most important are:

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author alone.