ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes some of the main tasks that must be confronts by those doing—and using—technology policy analysis. The most significant of these is the high level of factual uncertainty that usually characterizes development and diffusion of new technologies and plagues efforts to assess their social and environmental problems. The starting point for any realistic understanding of politics is to face up to the inevitability of uncertainty. Analysts sometimes seem to behave as if this fundamental difficulty of political life could be circumvented by sufficient information or logic. Policy analysis texts do not supply much in the way of an explicit methodology for choosing topics for research, there are nearly an infinite number of possible topics and very limited budgets, misallocation of scarce analytic resources is virtually inevitable. Political actors from presidents to community organizers face high uncertainty, rampant disagreement with others in and out of their working group, and sharp tradeoffs among competing values.
