Presentation of the Programme

Industrial societies, trapped in the paradigm of past ‘industrial revolutions’, tend to respond to most social, environmental and health problems through technical innovation. There is a tendency to favour ‘high-tech’, ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘disruptive’ techniques, which prevents a realistic and contextualised assessment of social, scientific and technical development needs. The ability of high-tech innovation to respond to the scale of today’s problems seems doubtful, or even counter-productive, either because it rules out other, more effective solutions or because the indiscriminate mass distribution and use of technical objects is the source of the problems. The widespread use of private cars in the second half of the twentieth century is a case in point, and we can now measure their deleterious effects on the climate and on the land. The emergence of an ecological society requires a technical regime that combines technical democracy, responsible research and ‘appropriate’ techniques: slow science & low-tech.

Sub-Programmes and Beneficiaries

TEC1. Technical Democracy and Social Control of Technical Innovations

TEC2. Researchers, Technicians and Engineers’s Responsibility

TEC3. Low-tech Approaches/Ecological Techniques