SUSTAINABILITY DECISION-MAKING BY USING TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT

The desire of the humanity to increase its quality of life was assured in the past by technological progress. It was the conviction that all developments in technological field will have only positive desired effects on the human beings. The developments did however emphasize that beside wanted effects of technological progress, undesired and even unthinkable negative effects can appear. Nowadays the humanity is confronting itself with a series of global problems, not only environmental ones. A lot of discussions on political, scientific and social levels did worldwide start some time ago in order to find solutions, which could be applicable to the developed as well as to the developing countries by taking into consideration regional differences. In the Brundtland Report 1987 for the first time the concept of sustainable development has been defined and then accepted as a possible solution for the global complex ecological, economical and social problems. In this regard Technology Assessment tries to give an answer to the question of which are the technologies that we need, and how do they integrate into environment and society. Technology Assessment brings together almost all scientific disciplines with the common goal of finding the best ways for sustainability operationalization, what actually means analysing the complex dynamic environmental, economic and social systems in order to discover developments which could lead to instabilities, putting in this way under question the world sustainability. Technology Assessment actually points out that there are new evaluation criteria for technological applications, that include not only technical and economic aspects, but also environmental and social ones. All these evaluation criteria should be considered in sustainability decision making processes, for which new pretty complex assessment methods would be necessary to be developed.