Page - 145 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Somewhat similar to our approach is backcasting, another method developed to deal with incorporating technological change in economic models. Backcasting starts with defining a desirable future and then tries to identify policies and actions taken in order to achieve the specified future backwards. It answers what actions must be taken to attain a certain (predefined) goal (Robinson 1982). Nevertheless, while backcasting might work perfectly for political, economic and legal (institutional) actions and arrangements and can probably work also for estimating continuous technological change, there are several problematic points with applying backcasting to predict technological change and specifically technological breakthroughs. One step forward could be to use backcasting together with e.g. a participatory workshop identifying possible future technological breakthroughs influencing the post-carbon transformation. Our proposal is a two-step research design. The first step consists of exploratory in-depth interviews with experts on wind and solar energy. The associated scenario building can be based on each interview separately – outcomes of one interview are translated into one scenario in case of widely differing results, or clustered according to responses with similar estimations. Then, a participatory workshop takes place. This is to assure that uneven events and changes are also taken into account in the following scenario building (such as technological breakthrough and their implications). Assuming that the group work can create a more stimulating environment for the experts, participatory modelling should provide answers to questions such as the likelihood of technological developments that can take place, and can give more rigorous ideas about the range of institutional and policy developments. The method of experts’ selection must be dealt with caution. How do we define who is an expert, and who is not? The selection has to be done in an explicit and self-reflective way. We recommend to ask a question on the experts’ self-evaluation, regarding their level of understanding of the technological details of the RES production, operation and maintenance, respectively the policy framework of RES deployment. A snowball method can be used to identify the appropriate “available” experts. However, this method has been also criticised in the field of science and technology studies. According to (Klein and Kleinman 2002), some relevant social groups may be excluded from participation and their absence may go unnoticed. Both the exclusion and the reasons for it would thus remain hidden, with the risk that some major factors influencing technological change are undetected. The authors conclude that the snowball method is inadequate for identifying unrecognized and missing participants, while its emphasis on groups overlooks social structures that might account for such absences. While this criticism is certainly relevant for several fields of research, with highly specific a technology-oriented questions about renewable energy developments this should not be a serious problem. The group of technology experts is well defined, based on their knowledge of technical details concerning RES production, operation and maintenance. On the other hand, this might not be true about the second group of policy experts. The group’s definition is broader and more dependent on interpretation of what it means to be a “policy expert” (on renewable energy transformation). Bijker (1997), following Latour (1987), suggests that researchers must “follow the actors.” The idea is that the only categories and lines of social demarcation of importance are those consciously recognized by the actors. In our case, this would mean asking the (first contacted according to the researchers’ judgement) policy experts about whom they would classify as other experts in the field (and why). The burden of identifying 145