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The Director's Blog
May 12, 2006
One of the key concepts for CNS-ASU and its core program of real-time technology assessment (RTTA) is anticipatory governance, which we describe as a broad-based coping capacity extended throughout society. RTTA is intended to increase the capacity for such activity, and it was uplifting to see that Mike Roco, the still-reigning policy impresario of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, has himself adopted anticipatory governance of nanotechnology as a goal as well. Indeed, it was a minor theme of Roco’s talk at the recent NanoPolicy event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
The range of activities implicated by the concept of anticipatory governance is broad. On one side they are bounded by the kind of technological determinism of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “Science Finds, Genius Invents, Industry Applies, Man Adapts” – an attitude often apparent in nano advocacy that Langdon Winner effectively cited in his testimony before the House Science Committee in the run-up to the 2003 Nanotechnology R&D Act, which mandated research programs in the societal implications of nanotechnology as well as authorizing one billion dollars of nano-scale science and engineering research annually.
At the NanoPolicy meeting, John Sargent of the US Department of Commerce’s Office of Technology Policy, came close to performing this perspective. Although his determinist rhetoric was slightly diminished from that unleashed by his former boss, Undersecretary of Commerce Phillip Bond in his contribution to the 2003 NNI workshop on societal implications, Sargent still insisted that nanotechnology was coming and we as a society had better get used to it. Against the twin autonomies of science and market, humanity has no choice but adapt.
Although technological determinism as such is generally out of favor among intellectuals, the support for the autonomy of science and the autonomy of the market rarely wavers, and the two do provide nearly insurmountable barriers to technological choice on the pursuit of individuals. Adaptation is therefore a reasonable governing strategy for many innovations – humans are nothing if not adaptable, and many innovations are worth a little or even a lot of change.
On the other end of the governance spectrum is the full expression of technological choice, the ban. In this stem cell era, the ban has gotten a lot of play, and earlier technological eras had their bans – “ban the bomb,” banning racial research. We do effectively ban all sorts of research for broadly consensual reasons, e.g., the safety of human research subjects, even if such experiments could provide useful information and might plausibly be consented to (e.g., effects of pesticides on humans). We even have a reasonably good track record on bans of military technologies – despite revelations about breaches in Cold War treaties against biological weapons research. The spread of NBAC weapons must be less than what forecasters would have predicted because of determined international efforts. (One could easily imagine an international treaty prohibiting the NBIC modification of soldiers, akin to the treaty on underage soldiers.)
In nanotechnology, we have heard calls not for a ban as such but for the ban’s temporary cousin, the moratorium. The ETC Group made an early splash by recommending a halt in nanotechnology research until environmental issues could be settled. At the NanoPolicy conference, Brend Blackwelder of Friends of the Earth called for a similar moratorium until the safety of nanoproduction for workers and consumers could be assured.
Between adapting and banning are a wide range of governing options, including – in no particular order – licensing, civil liability, insurance, indemnification, testing, regulation, restrictions on age or other criteria (rather than on ability to pay), labeling, and on and on. Some tools, like labeling and life cycle analysis, complement market governance by providing more complete information necessary for market efficiency. Some, like civil liability and indemnification, may distort markets for important reasons of justice or critical technology development. Exploring nano policy – with nanotechnology as wide open as it is currently – means keeping an open mind about any and all of these governing options.
But anticipatory governance requires more than just a catalogue of responses or interventions. That’s “mere” governance – the kind that is always found running behind knowledge-based innovations. The anticipation comes with the capacity to 1) understand beforehand the political and operational strengths and weaknesses of such tools; and 2) imagine socio-technical futures that might inspire their use. With nanotechnology, we like to think that we have a good shot at anticipatory governance because those of us concerned with its societal implications have gotten into the game both a little bit earlier than with other knowledge-based innovations and in a manner in which both we and our technical target audience have learned from recent histories of GMOs and genome ELSI. Yet when we recognize that the NNI was planned as a technical endeavor prior to any major consideration of its societal implications other than the speculations on the part of its advocates, and that more than one dozen NSECs were created before the nanotechnology-in-society network, one begins to get a sense of how much anticipation is still behind the eight ball.
Roco, among others at the NanoPolicy meeting, offered rough timelines or roadmaps for nanotechnology development. Not only does the language of roadmap or generation of nanotechnology lend an air of inevitability to the present propagation of the work, but it also creates a plan of action that helps mobilize and prioritize the resources for making what might not be inevitable, inevitable.
What might a timetable, or generational list of milestones, for anticipatory governance look like? When would particular skills and capacities need to be on line? What do successive “generations” of anticipatory governance look like?
Stay tuned.
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