Decidiamo assieme! Conflitti tecnologici e deliberazione pubblica

The article deals with the application of deliberative democracy to technological conflicts. Deliberative processes, as forms of participatory governance, are expected to effectively address controversies, enhancing civic values and the legitimacy and quality of decisions. Public deliberation, however, raises problems of inclusion, manipulation, and externality. Moreover, when applied to technological conflicts, it is confronted with some specific issues: the distributive or integrative character of the controversy; the role of technical-scientific expertise in the legitimation of arguments and decisions; the involved parties’ focus on different types of errors in the evaluation of costs and benefits of a technology. The future of deliberative democracy in this field is not simply a matter of procedural design but of a broader reassessment of the division of labour between science and politics.