Forty Years On Authors David Cope Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England Abstract Motivated by the fact that 2013–2014 sees the 40th anniversary of the creation of the Office of Technology Assessment at the US Congress, this paper looks at what has come to be called Parliamentary Technology Assessment (PTA). It reviews some examples of proto-technology assessments with parliamentary links, going back 150 years, before examining some of the successes of contemporary PTA as well as some of the challenges that continue to face it. It concludes with several personal recommendations about how PTA might evolve in the coming years.Keywords: technology assessment ∙ European Parliamentary Technology Assessment (EPTA) ∙ Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) ∙ Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) ∙ Advisory Board of the Parliament of Catalonia for Science and Technology (CAPCIT Author Biography David Cope, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England Downloads PDF Issue Vol. 8 No. 2 (2012) Section Parliamentary Technology Assessment License This work is subject, unless the contrary is indicated in the text, the photographs or in other illustrations, to an Attribution —Non-Commercial— No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons License, the full text of which can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work provided that the author is credited and reuse of the material is restricted to non-commercial purposes only and that no derivative works are created from the original material.
