Technology Impact Assessment for Peace and Stability in Practice: Australia and India

Since 2020, Australia and India have committed to coordinating policy on critical technologies to promote peace and stability. This is part of a deepening political, economic and strategic relationship across many sectors. One of the policy tools for managing technology policy in both countries has been that of technology impact assessment (TIA), a process that has been in existence for more than five decades. Both Australia and India would benefit from a clearer commitment to regularized TIA of critical technologies for peace and stability. This would involve organizational reform and commitment of more resources, which could be justified by reinstating peace and stability to the policy status it enjoyed in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. A drift to more confrontational relationships in international affairs in the past decade should point to the need for more investment in TIA related to maintaining stability, alongside the increasing investment in TIA for hard military capability or domestic security. This paper presents TIA mechanisms for peace and stability in Australia and India demonstrating that while there are existing approaches to TIA by government and non-government stakeholders, a lot more could be done to bring the two countries together to conduct joint impact assessment of critical emerging technologies in support of peace and stability.