Striving for technical consensus by agreeing to disagree: the case of monitoring underground nuclear waste disposal facilities

Abstract

Socio-technical arrangements seeking to produce consensus are understood differently by theories in science and technology studies. Some scholars argue that consensus ambitions are coercive in that they oppress the (inevitable) alternatives to the dominant values and interests that are enforced under a guise of consensual unity. Others argue that consensus is inherently characterized by value and interest heterogeneity, i.e. downplaying processes of coercion and exclusion, and instead emphasizing ‘multiplicity’. In this article, we combine both these seemingly contradictory insights to understand how a European Union Research and Development Project sought to produce consensus among a range of international actors about introducing new technology into existing nuclear waste management programmes. By presenting the political and technical contexts of two national programmes – the Swedish and the French – we show that political and legislative preconditions for monitoring differed between the countries. The project thereby faced the European Union’s expectations of honouring certain (political) values by producing consensus and the simultaneous turmoil of divergent national trajectories. This turmoil, however, was reconciled by ‘agreeing to disagree’. By producing consensus on the level of technical protocols that allowed a degree of flexibility, both the political values of European harmonization imposed on the project and the integrity of the somewhat divergent national programmes were honoured. Fundamentally, we argue that the coercive aspects of this process are constituted by the naturalization of European Union policy, but that such coercive efforts still leave some room for diversity, i.e. flexibility.