Democratizing Delphi: towards more inclusive methodologies for assessing technologies for development

Emerging technologies can have a tremendous impact on the Global South. There are several methods to assess the societal implications of these technologies. These methods can be used to promote those technological developments that benefits the Global South and mitigate developments that harm the Global South. Most of these methods exclusively rely on natural scientists and engineers to identify societal implications, however. This has been shown to introduce several biases and exclude other relevant voices. In this project we therefore aim to develop more democratic and inclusive methods for assessing emerging technologies for the Global South. In particular we focus on the Delphi method, an influential expert-based method for ranking the most important societal implications of emerging technologies. We aim to develop a new type of Delphi method that incorporates diverse forms of expertise. We will test and apply this method to the case of genome editing.