Abstract
This report is a case study of the travel of a ready-made design for public dialogue on geological disposal. We discuss how established participative procedures are made to travel from one national context to another under the auspices of the EU and what the limits and consequences of such transfers are.
The interesting thing for us is not only how the target setting is changed or not by the newly introduced practices, but also how the relatively well established participatory "technology" is itself being transformed during its transmission and implementation. Successes and failures of such a transfer have to be seen and assessed against the background of these mutual accommodations, translations and betrayals.
Thus, our general interest is the fragility and ambiguous results of intentional and systematic spread of technical democracy across national and political contexts. More precisely, we will follow and critically discuss the story of how a Swedish design for public dialogues called RISCOM was transferred to the Czech Republic.
We are going to show that, on the one hand, RISCOM made an important achievement in the Czech case, since it helped to bring all the main actors to a discussion table after previous negotiations had completely crashed. On the other hand, however, it seems that RISCOM substantially failed from a broader perspective.
It found its way in the Czech Republic only at the cost of losing its specific original characteristics. As such, it quickly became associated with only too general appeals to dialogue, the attractiveness of which lived but shortly.
It contributed to the increasing focus on dialogue per se, which ultimately led to frustration and impatience on both sides. This recently resulted in the shift toward more authoritative decision making in the Czech Republic and another crisis of mutual trust.