Abstract
Keywords
I entered the taxi, anxious about the trip to the airport –
Introduction
The epigraph represents the actual cab ride I took from my home in Phoenix, Arizona, to SkyHarbor Airport and then to Washington, DC, where I led the reverse site visit portion of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) competition for the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS). As the conversation continued, I learned more about quantum computing, and about how my interlocutor came to know about it (he was not the proverbial, unemployed aerospace engineer; he had a girlfriend who had an ex-boyfriend who …). Far from being a distracting irritation, the conversation ended up providing a powerful illustration of an untutored citizen who wanted to talk about the ramifications of an emerging technology. The anecdote resonated well in my presentation to the NSF about my research center’s vision for ‘anticipatory governance’.
Anticipatory governance is defined as ‘a broad-based capacity extended through society that can act on a variety of inputs to manage emerging knowledge-based technologies while such management is still possible’ (Guston, 2008: vi). As pursued by the CNS at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU), which I direct, anticipatory governance motivates activities designed to build subsidiary capacities in
In a review of the
Fuller (2010) reinforces this view of anticipatory governance in a review of the English translation of Callon et al. (2009), where he declares that the ‘STS term now in vogue for the art of foreseeing the spread of an innovation’s effects is “anticipatory governance”’. He suggests that the
Omnipresence of anticipatory governance is felt in the proliferation of focus groups, consensus conferences, Internet surveys, and Wiki and other interactive media – all of which, again intentionally or not, serve to cast doubts on the representativeness of classic democratic institutions like legislatures and elections. (Fuller, 2010: 533)
From another perspective, anticipatory governance risks not playing into the hands of cynics or those who would delegitimize traditional institutions, but rather into those of wastrels, for it might represent an unwarranted exercise in ‘speculative ethics’ (Nordmann, 2007) or a new-fangled subdivision of bioethics known as ‘nanoethics’ (e.g. Allhoff et al., 2007). In this critique, ‘foreseeing the spread of an innovation’s effects’ can serve only to reify the illusory field of nanotechnology by taking its imaginaries as objects, thus squandering scarce ethical and intellectual resources by overlooking extant ethical challenges in the present for hypothetical ones in the future and engaging in the worst kind of academic parsimoniousness by insisting that this nonexistent technoscience also requires its own ethics and social studies (see also Robert et al., 2013).
Such critiques are part of a more general reception that anticipatory governance has received in some STS circles. While Barben et al. (2008: 994) presaged some of them by pondering the active role in governance that STS researchers have when they address technoscience in an anticipatory fashion, my purpose here is to continue the reflective development of anticipatory governance by engaging with critics in the hope of informing our own role in governance. In particular, I wish to explore one thing that yokes these critiques together: skepticism toward a set of proximities of anticipatory governance. These proximities are figured in relation to different aspects of the ensemble that comprises anticipatory governance: to its object, which all parties agree is a relatively indistinct one; to the public, which remains almost utterly naïve toward nanotechnology; and to the contemporary
As the director of a research center that receives considerable funding to conduct research into the anticipatory governance of nanotechnology, I am in an obviously biased position. Yet because I have an interest in developing the concept clearly and productively, I also have the motivation to trace its genealogy, development, and use, to elaborate its intellectual and practical underpinnings in more robust ways, and to avoid letting perceptions of the ‘vogue’ determine its role in public discourse. In doing so, I will articulate a broader notion of anticipatory governance than allowed by Fuller’s sense – which focuses on its participatory elements – and offer an understanding of the ‘art of foreseeing’ more nuanced than that allowed by the critiques of speculative ethics.
As a starting point, I provide a brief history of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in the United States and its strategic emphasis on responsible nanotechnology, which in part led to the creation of CNS-ASU and provided the resources for it to pursue this vision. 3 I then offer a genealogy of anticipatory governance and describe how its implementation both embraces and rejects elements of that lineage. In the third section, I discuss in more depth the three proximities mentioned above and how anticipatory governance addresses them. I hope this article will be neither simple primer nor unenforceable catechism, but rather the next stage of a robust consideration of how scholarship and practice can address emerging technoscience in a timely and influential way.
The US NNI and the creation of societal research on nanotechnology
While the historical foundations of nanoscale science and engineering (NSE) as a technical field are contested (Choi and Mody, 2009; Kehrt and Schüßler, 2010; Kim, 2008; McCray, 2007; Toumey, 2010), the NNI had an easily identified commencement in 2000 when President Bill Clinton proposed it in a speech delivered at the California Institute of Technology (McCray, 2005). Given the dialogue and planning regarding the potential role of social and human sciences in the responsible development of nanotechnology – especially considering the publication of Bill Joy’s (2000) provocation about ‘why the future doesn’t need us’ that same year – there was substantial optimism that both STS and governance itself would fare better with nanotechnology than they did with the Human Genome Initiative. When Congress held hearings to authorize NNI, Langdon Winner (2003) criticized the academic distance from which the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genomics research were conducted, urging the House Science Committee not to create a ‘Nanoethicist Full Employment Act’ and to forego the career-conscious social science and cozy relations with scientists and engineers that such efforts had produced. Instead, he encouraged the creation of new institutions and practices for the rigorous investigation of difficult questions of technological choice, the distribution of the risks and benefits of technoscientific innovation, and the early inclusion of public voices in deliberations about the direction of nanotechnology.
Already in 2000, the NSF issued its first solicitation for research that included the societal aspects of NSE research. NSF funded no large, societal proposals that first year, but the next year it funded Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams at the University of South Carolina (USC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to investigate the philosophical and commercial dimensions of NSE, respectively. In August 2004, NSF issued its program solicitation that included a call for a US$13 million, 5-year CNS. The center would join roughly one dozen other NSE Centers as a major part of NSF’s contribution to the NNI. The solicitation described the purpose of the proposed center as being to pursue research, training, and outreach on the ‘societal and educational implications of scientific and technological advances on the nanoscale’, in concert with the strategic emphasis on ‘responsible development’ as outlined in NNI’s strategic documents (e.g. Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology [NSET] Subcommittee, 2004) as well as in fulfillment of NNI’s authorizing legislation (Public Law (PL) 108-153) that emphasized the role of the social sciences in ‘ensuring that advances in nanotechnology bring about improvements in the quality of life for all Americans’ (PL 108-153, Sec 2(b)(10)(C); see Fisher and Mahajan, 2006).
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In particular, the solicitation held that ‘[e]xamining the ethical and other social implications of these societal interactions is necessary, in order to understand their scope and influence and
Despite meetings focused on or including discussion of the societal aspects of NSE (Roco and Bainbridge, 2001, 2005), the STS community had not yet taken to investigating it (Bennett and Sarewitz, 2006). Moreover, STS worked at a much smaller scale than the envisioned center, even after the funding to the USC and UCLA teams. To help prepare the community for submitting proposals, NSF held a meeting for interested parties on 20 September 2004 before receiving pre-proposals in November. From those submitting pre-proposals, NSF invited six groups to submit, in March 2005, full proposals. Sometime between then and July 2005, NSF decided to split the pot and, rather than make one US$13 million award, create two smaller centers at ASU and at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and to extend the teams at USC and UCLA with additional monies. CNS-ASU began its work in October 2005 with a 5-year cooperative agreement of US$6.2 million, and CNS-UCSB began its work in January 2006 with a similar agreement of US$5 million. 5
NSF administers these cooperative agreements through its Science, Technology, and Society program in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences directorate, but several directorates contribute funding toward them. These contributions mean that over each of the last three budget years for which information is available, a commitment from SBE of roughly US$1.7 million has leveraged a commitment to societal research of slightly more than US$4 million from the rest of NSF (NSF, 2011: 15–18), a match that brings nearly US$2.5 to STS for every US$1 it spends.
While huge by STS standards, the commitment to research in the societal aspects of nanotechnology is quite modest across the NNI. Data available from NSF (2011), which disaggregates the education spending from societal research spending for the first time in fiscal year 2010, show that the latter, smaller resources constitute less than 1.5 percent of NSF’s commitment to NNI, and thus as little as 0.3 percent of total NNI funding. At least some in the US Congress sought much higher levels of societal research spending, as a report from the US House of Representatives (2006) specified that 3 percent of expenditures should be so dedicated in explicit recognition of the precedent of the genome ELSI program.
At least some STS research on nanotechnology has followed the money. Shapira et al. (2010), using bibliometric techniques, demonstrate that publishing in the societal aspects of nanotechnology does not begin in earnest until 2005 and that the earlier publications are dominated by references to visionary science and scientists rather than to concrete NSE research on one hand or societal research itself on the other. 6 In other words, most empirical and potentially cumulative social science work on nanotechnology did not begin until after funding did. Moreover, the scale of activity on the part of the nanotechnology-in-society centers is significant. While Shapira et al. (2010) report 308 articles in the field for the period 1998–2007, CNS-ASU alone reports 79 journal articles published or under review for the period October 2005 to September 2010 (Guston et al., 2010). 7
In wondering whether STS ‘follow[s] the money’, however, Fuller is not asking for an empirical answer. Instead, he implies that STS that does follow the money has some particular kinds of explaining to do. Such explanations could address a range of issues: the quality or productivity of the research being conducted under lavish public sponsorship; the value added by large-scale and coordinated funding versus small-scale, investigator-initiated funding; the distribution of resources (and therefore power) within the field of STS resulting from the commitment of such sums; and the potential complicity, driven by resource-dependency, with the promotional, technoscientific agenda of sponsors.
While they are more salient under public sponsorship, concerns of quality and productivity exist for all research, as do questions of what kinds of research are possible given certain levels of sponsorship. If STS is intended, at least in part, to extend a critical or normative
Yet the simple point remains: STS was asked to participate within large-scale nanotechnology initiatives, not only in the United States but also in many European nations. 8 The money followed by societal research in nanotechnology was not disbursed blindly but deliberately, through significant consultation with many members of the STS community, with attention to the experiences of previous attempts to conduct such research, and in a highly leveraged fashion. Many in the STS community have come to recognize that following publicly authorized missions and communally defined problems, rather than retreating into disciplinary shells or rationalizations about autonomously organized research, is part of the responsibility of natural scientists and engineers. It would be hypocritical at best, and counter-productive at worst, not to embrace it as part of our responsibility as well.
Defining and tracing anticipatory governance 9
While CNS-ASU has been using anticipatory governance from its inception, it took a short time for the concept to emerge as the center’s central, strategic vision. The prior rise of the term is ‘still somewhat mysterious’ (Karinen and Guston, 2010: 224). Indeed, it was not until the concept became more centrally articulated as the center’s strategic vision that it was deemed fully necessary to engage in more genealogical research on it. In their initial search, Karinen and Guston (2010) found no references to ‘anticipatory governance’ prior to 2001, save for one thesis by a master’s student in Canada (Feltmate, 1993). A contemporary repeat of that search on Google Scholar yields similar results. Starting in 2001, however, two strands of literatures on anticipatory governance begin to emerge: one associated with authors in public administration and management (e.g. Bächler, 2001), and a second associated with authors in environmental studies and policy (e.g. Gupta, 2001). Distinct understandings of anticipatory governance play out in each of these two initial strands. In the public administration and management literature, influenced by Lindblom (1959) and others, anticipatory governance has a negative connotation because incrementalists equate anticipation with prediction, which they view as both impossible and undesirable. While the environmental studies and policy literature also views prediction unfavorably (e.g. Sarewitz et al., 2000), it distinguishes anticipation from prediction and therefore holds anticipatory governance more favorably. Shortly after the term ‘anticipatory governance’ was used in policy and environmental studies, Guston and Sarewitz (2002) introduced it into STS and social studies of nanotechnology. While Guston and Sarewitz (2002) initially adopt the usage more often found in the policy literature, a few years later CNS-ASU rapidly moved toward the perspective found more in environmental studies.
Feltmate (1993) borrows his anticipatory perspective from the new public management literature. Osborne and Gaebler (1993), who use the term ‘anticipatory government’ rather than ‘anticipatory governance’, want to reform government rather than describe the broader forces and strategies at work in governance, even as they are part of the new public management associated with the neoliberal concept that government should be run more like the private sector. For Feltmate (1993) and Osborne and Gaebler (1993, see particularly Chapter 8), anticipatory government is mostly about ‘prevention rather than cure’. In a chapter dedicated entirely to the topic, they focus on how government can use foresight and long-term strategic planning to reduce or eliminate bad outcomes
The ancestral form of Osborne and Gaebler’s reinvented government is Alvin Toffler’s (1970) ‘anticipatory democracy’, which is the antidote prescribed for his diagnosis of
A deeper policy lineage for anticipatory practices exists alongside this scholarly lineage. Historian of science Charles Weiner (1994) surveys many of these, focusing on ‘several major obstacles impeding efforts to anticipate and prevent negative consequences’ of the Human Genome Project (p. 34). Among the earlier examples he identifies are discussions among biologists in the early 1960s that focused on the prospect of human genetic engineering. The same topic led the US Senate to ‘consider the need for a national commission’ to ‘
Delving deeper still for precedents turns up Detlev Bronk, 11 who recounts how he testified to the US Congress in support of the original bill to create what became NSF. He broke with his elite science colleagues to endorse a role for the social sciences in the proposed independent agency. ‘Competent social scientists should work hand-in-hand with natural scientists, so that problems may be solved as they arise, and so that many of them may not arise in the first instance’ (Bronk, 1975: 413). It took nearly 20 years from its mid-century founding for NSF to create a substantial social science presence (Gieryn, 1999), and the social sciences subsequently developed on a disciplinary rather than an integrated model. While NSF introduced an evaluation criterion of the ‘broader impact’ of research projects that created some implicit incentives for integration of the natural and social sciences, and while there were some minor opportunities across programs, integration did not become NSF policy for a major program until the creation of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers (NSECs) and the 2003 Act. Subsequently, NSF has also insisted on a social science component integrated with large-scale support of emerging technology research when it funded the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006 (Rabinow and Bennett, 2012).
The non-predictive approach to anticipatory governance is apparent in ASU’s full proposal to NSF for the center (Guston et al., 2004). CNS-ASU’s annual reports refer to the concept, beginning with a single reference in the first annual report (Guston et al., 2006) completed in July 2006. At this early stage, anticipatory governance is cast in support of ‘real-time technology assessment’ (Guston and Sarewitz, 2002), which both denotes the programmatic structure of the center and connotes its initial attempt to articulate the ‘long-term vision’ required by NSF for a center to pursue. For these purposes, real-time technology assessment was something of a domestication of ‘constructive technology assessment’ (Schot and Rip, 1997) 12 in an environment soured by the unfulfilling ELSI agenda of the Human Genome Initiative (e.g. Cook-Deegan, 1994) and the ongoing neglect of technology assessment at the national level. The center’s writing in 2006, published the following year, shows that an affirmative vision akin to Gupta’s had been developing (Guston, 2007; Guston et al., 2007) and moving toward more comprehensive and reflexive statements (Barben et al., 2008). As an ensemble of activities to build research and societal capacities for foresight, public engagement, and integration of social and natural sciences, it became CNS-ASU’s core strategic vision as articulated in its third annual report (Guston et al., 2008). Anticipatory governance also became the focus of reflexive activities at CNS-ASU, including a scenario development and visioning workshop, held in October 2008 (Selin, 2008a).
The desire for such a vision was of course born with frustration over the Collingridge (1980) dilemma: how can technologies be self-consciously governed when, in the laboratory, they are too inchoate but, once in the market, too interwoven with economic and social interests? The response of anticipatory governance is nothing so dramatic as the slicing of the Gordian knot. Rather, it is more like the punch line in the old gag in which the lost tourist queries a querulous New Yorker, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?’ ‘Practice!’
Practice, understood as exercise, is central to anticipatory governance. Indeed, a brief analogy to physical exercise is useful here. Lifting weights in a gym, for example, is not intended to enable individuals to overcome a specific or predicted event. Rather, it is a form of building capacity to confront physical and mental challenges that are unknown. This practical aspect is the force of the word ‘anticipation’, which is not synonymous with expectation, prediction, or foresight, but is instead related to ‘capable’ and ‘capacity’, from the Latin
As described in Barben et al. (2008),
This vision of governance is sympathetic to broader STS concerns that have emphasized the contextual nature of knowledge, democracy, the interactive nature of policy making, and, perhaps most importantly, the centrality of ‘uncertainty, doubt and indeterminacy’ to such processes (e.g. Irwin, 2008: 586). That is, this approach recognizes that governance does not consist simply of government or the activities of public sector organizations, but rather also includes governing activities that are more broadly distributed across numerous actors. To engage with this mode of analysis is not to acquiesce to neoliberal ideology that would focus on governance to the diminishment of government. Rather, it is self-consciously meant to recognize the complicated political economy of technoscience that cannot be captured in the crude dichotomies in which public debates are often cast, between, for example, the deterministic position that the die is cast and hence that our only decision is about how to adapt, and the quixotic precautionary position that we should forego learning about that of which we know little because of how little we know. In nanotechnology, these poles have been represented, on the determinist hand, by public officials like US Under Secretary of Commerce Philip Bond (2005), who refers to the ‘next industrial revolution’ and whose rhetoric invokes that of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair motto, ‘Science finds, genius invents, industry applies, man adapts’, and on the precautionary hand by such civil society groups as Friends of the Earth and the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration (ETC), who have advocated moratoriums on research and industrial production of nanotechnology. Governance thus points to the ‘many policy rooms’ (Nowotny, 2007) in which STS encounters policy. Here we find a multitude of mechanisms mediating the extremes – treaties, regulation, funding and subsidies, licensing and restrictions, liability and indemnification, intellectual property and licensing, testing, standards, public understanding and engagement, public action and protest, codes of conduct, routinization, laboratory practice, and so on – through which we do in fact govern, however poorly, much of the technoscience with which we live.
These definitional points also help explain why it is necessary to intentionally bring together ‘anticipation’ and ‘governance’ rather than rely on the correct but incomplete supposition that all governing activities must have some disposition toward the future, whether it be predictive, precautionary, deterministic, or some other normative orientation. Literature in anticipatory governance suggests that the nature of this disposition, which often goes unarticulated, plays a crucial role in deciding upon matters of concern, which is why it is necessary to bring it into public debate. Precaution, for example, prescribes a particular governing decision – take no risky action – under given circumstances of uncertainty and qualities of risk. Not opposed to precaution as such, anticipatory governance leaves that relationship between governing decision and quality of knowledge in productive tension. 13
Anticipatory governance in vogue?
Over the past several years, the vision, if not the complete framework, of anticipatory governance has been taken up by practitioners and scholars for a wide range of audiences, from a white paper written for the Rockefeller Foundation by Leon Fuerth (2009), vice president Al Gore’s national security advisor, to a presentation titled ‘Anticipatory Governance, Queer Difference, and the Emirati Post-Oil Generation’, by Noor Al-Qasimi (2011), visiting scholar at King’s College, London. Much uptake has occurred directly around nanotechnology, while some has occurred around other emerging technologies. Natural scientists as well as social scientists and STS scholars have adopted the terminology of anticipatory governance and some of its core tenets. Kuzma and Tanji (2010) take an anticipatory look at synthetic biology, not to predict its future but to help prepare more broadly for a future that includes it. Arguing that anticipatory governance should be part of the foundational development of synthetic biology, they outline a set of preventive, precautionary, permissive, and promotional policies that could be taken as part of a regime of anticipatory governance. Others recognize in anticipatory governance precisely those characteristics associated with its STS-related governance emphasis: a nonlinear, co-constructive approach and flexibility in the face of scientific serendipity (Ozdemir et al., 2009), an avoidance of top-down policy prescriptions (Groves et al., 2010), foresight and flexibility under uncertainty (Quay, 2010), encouragement of public engagement (Bell, 2009), participatory technology assessment (Sclove, 2010), and responsible innovation (Owen et al., 2012). While some understand anticipation as ‘one defining quality of our current moment … as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast’ (Adams et al., 2009), others have suggested making a ‘discipline of anticipation’ (Miller et al., 2013). 14
There are three styles of critique of anticipatory governance that I explore in more detail below. Each critique tends to focus on one or another of the various proximities that anticipatory governance adopts: first, that anticipatory governance is too close to nanotechnology, which is after all an indistinct and perhaps even a fictitious entity; second, that anticipatory governance is too close to the public, which is utterly naïve toward nanotechnology; and third, that anticipatory governance is too close to the technosciences such that by necessarily adopting their modus operandi, it becomes complicit in the hubris of the technoscientific era.
Proximity to nanotechnology
Central to Fuller’s (2009, 2010) argument, as well as others’ about the proximity of anticipatory governance to an emerging technology, is the possibility of ‘priming’. That is, the issue is whether discussion of an as yet nonexistent phenomenon will ‘prime’ society for that phenomenon, real or not. Thus, by rearticulating the hyperbolic visions of NSE researchers too closely, anticipatory governance risks either fanning the coals of this ‘next industrial revolution’ or arching the hyperbole so high as to set nanotechnology, or society, up for a Icaran fall (also see McGrail, 2010). Fuller sees mostly the former possibility, suggesting at times that to imagine is to invite, to name is to conjure. 15
To be sure, there is wisdom in recognizing the subtle if nonlogical connections between positive acts and normative ones, and thus to bring caution and even skepticism to one’s own declarations. Yet this particular brand of wisdom does not distinguish causes. Neither Fuller nor we can tell if the alleged priming will favor the acceptance of nanotechnology or its rejection. That is precisely how it should be. Given the impossibility of eliminating surprises, anticipatory governance suggests that an approach aimed at ambiguous priming is preferable to one aimed at unambiguous surprise. 16
The question of priming, however, raises the question of ‘priming for what?’ While it is not my purpose (nor is it within the ambit of STS scholarship) to determine what nanotechnology
Beyond priming, it is hard to see how social studies of emerging technologies could be a malign contributor to the reification of their object of study beyond the research and development (R&D) already being performed. The United States government now spends nearly US$2 billion per year for nanotechnology R&D, of which a mere US$6 million goes to societal research. Given the generative power of unfettered and unreflective R&D, it seems absurd to argue for less societal research. And while I cannot have it both ways – anticipatory governance cannot be both sufficiently weak so as to avoid reifying nanotechnology and sufficiently robust to alter its trajectory – the anticipatory activities are not so much directed at channeling scientific prophesy as they are at amplifying the still, small voices less often heard in the innovation process (see also Guston, 2013). For example, an early scenario development activity at CNS-ASU, NanoFutures, took advantage of the well-established STS observation that ‘people immediately outside of technological development make sense of technology in surprising ways that may not be known by analysts conducting technology assessments’ to design an open source scenario planning platform through which online users could comment on, discuss, and help further develop currently ‘naïve’ technical futures (Selin and Hudson, 2010: 173). The naïve technical futures derive from a variety of published literatures – including science fiction 17 but also technical articles, popular science articles, and other fact-based accounts – and were previously reviewed for plausibility (Bennett, 2008). Even though the NanoFutures activity did not go viral, it demonstrated how Web 2.0 techniques could facilitate relatively transparent and participatory scenario planning and provide a kind of extended peer review appropriate to the postnormal character (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993) of emerging technologies. While expanding the population of those able to contribute to nanotechnological futures, anticipatory activities also aim to render scientists more reflexive about the research they are performing. In exploring the future of medical diagnostics, a scenario development workshop showed how opening up the coproduction of scientific and technological artifacts to social scientists and prospective designers and adopters can cause scientists and engineers to, upon reflection, alter the agendas and strategic vision of science-in-the-making (Selin, 2008a). One cannot tell at this stage whether such scenario development work is ‘preparing the path’ for the march of nanotechnology, reconfiguring nanotechnology with a view toward broader societal values, or both. The point, however, is to value the ability of the scientists and engineers to improve their capacity for reflective practice. 18 Of course, in addition to encouraging reflexivity among its participants, such scenario-making places significant demands of reflexivity on practitioners as well (Selin, 2008b; Williams, 2006).
Proximity to the public
There has certainly been, to repeat Fuller’s statement, a ‘proliferation of focus groups, consensus conferences, Internet surveys, and Wiki and other interactive media’. Or, as Delgado et al. (2011) declare, public engagement has come of age, especially around emerging technologies like nanotechnology. 19 Nevertheless, it is a matter of inquiry precisely how tightly these interactions conform to the vision of anticipatory governance, and thus serve as evidence of its ‘omnipresence’. Many such activities have been rationalized, if not necessarily inspired, by calls for ‘upstream engagement’ of the sort articulated in the United Kingdom (e.g. Wilsdon and Willis, 2004). While there are significant overlapping concerns between this upstream engagement and anticipatory governance, it is not the case that all, or even many, of such exercises demonstrate fealty to building the crucial capacities of foresight and integration in concert with engagement. Moreover, lumping engagement activities this way mixes too many apples with too many oranges: small-n activities with large-n ones, activities with extreme demands on participants with activities with minimal or no demands, and activities with relatively formal methods or testing behind them with those having little method or testing. This is not to dispute the value of such activities. Indeed, it may only be through the aggregate of this diversity that a substantial societal capacity – or population of ‘dialogic spaces’ (Joly and Kaufmann, 2008) – can be constituted. But it is to say that by virtue of their diversity of design, they must have a diversity of purpose. As Delgado et al. (2011) recognize, there are challenging trade-offs among these dimensions of diversity and both scholars and practitioners would do well to recognize them. 20
This proliferation of public engagement – faithful to anticipatory governance or not – is an effect more than a cause of the delegitimation of traditional democratic institutions. The real surge in upstream engagement in the United Kingdom occurred in the wake of a succession of science policy crises, including mad cow disease as well as genetically modified foods. In the United States, Guston and Sarewitz (2002) situated real-time technology assessment and, later, anticipatory governance in a national political context that had eliminated a congressional OTA (Bimber, 1996; Bimber and Guston, 1997) and consistently rejected attempts to reestablish it (see Morgan and Peha, 2003; Sclove, 2010). The United States, at least, has always embraced a pluralism of institutionalized modes of representation (Brown, 2009a), in part leading to competition not just among public sector but also among private sector institutions, for example, science museums and science centers, which have taken up anticipatory governance precisely to build their political and commercial constituencies (see Bell, 2009). The surge, particularly in authorized upstream engagement, may be seen, as Toffler saw it, as an attempt to relegitimate ‘classic democratic institutions’.
Delgado et al. (2011), however, raise a pair of concerns about the kind of upstream engagement to which anticipatory governance not only is but must be committed. The first is that the ‘upstream’ metaphor is fatally contaminated with linear thinking that contradicts ‘a widely accepted idea within the STS community that science–society relations are co-producing, changeable and context dependent’ (Delgado et al., 2011: 10; Joly and Kaufmann, 2008). The second is a concern that upstream engagement ‘exercises are serving the theoretical ideal of guiding the direction of technoscientific development, or rather focused on preventing controversies by familiarising the public with technologies before they become commercialised’ (Delgado et al., 2011: 10).
I take the first concern as a challenge more to our metaphoric imagination than to consistency between theory and practice. Without a robust concern for coproduction and context-dependency, a large portion of the rationale for any public engagement activity, let alone an upstream one, disappears. As with scenario development, the upstream position manifests the desire to enable certain, albeit limited, publics to engage in substantive dialogue with more technically oriented and elite actors about the coproduction of new technoscience. To be sure, we cannot rely on a linear model, but the ‘upstream’ metaphor need not be considered devoid of its eddies, cross-currents, backflows, undertows, upwellings, and oxbows. Neither does abandoning linearity with respect to either the innovation or policy process require abandoning at least limited conceptions of temporal, logical or procedural priority. This is all that upstream engagement really requires, and its conflict with theory is exaggerated. 21
The response to the second concern is parallel to the response to scenarios and anticipation. As argued above, the tension generated by the false dichotomy that anticipatory governance must either guide development or suppress controversy operates as a soft determinism of its own if it prevents upstream engagement. It is better to use the upstream position to explore and assemble current values, knowledge, and plausible scenarios in order to travel into the future with more rather than less reflexive capacity. Thus, while there exist for public engagement ‘theoretical disagreements [that] are in play in the case of nanotechnology’ and also that choices among stances ‘may ultimately be uncomfortable or unsatisfactory according to other theoretical ideals’ (Delgado et al., 2011: 11), and while there are clear differences based on national and local histories and contexts of engagement, the tensions with respect to upstream engagement are not terribly acute in truth or practice.
Proximity to technoscience
Finally, a third critique holds that anticipatory governance is itself technoscientific, a recognizable heir to traditional technology assessment and captive of an age of technoscience that cannot help but reproduce itself in all its microcosms. ‘It is the very idea of taking hold of the future’, writes Nordmann (2010: 10), focusing on a different aspect of anticipatory governance than does Fuller, ‘that characterizes the transgressive hubris of the technosciences’. Yet, as Sarewitz (2011: 97) replies rhetorically, ‘What lies between an implausible commitment to control and a fatalistic embracing of passivity?’
While I (hope that I) do not have the hubris to claim that anticipatory governance can transcend its own age or, in a slightly less grandiose metaphor, escape the hegemony of the current ‘assessment regime’ (Kaiser, 2010), I do believe with Liebert and Schmidt (2010b) that a more sympathetic category of ‘prospective technology assessment’ exists, akin to anticipatory governance, that does not fully partake in technoscientific hubris because it emphasizes the shaping of technoscience rather than its control. As Liebert and Schmidt (2010a) elaborate, the ‘control dilemma’ originally articulated by Collingridge in a technoscientific mode was later deconstructed by Collingridge’s own approach in a direction supportive of prospective technology assessment. Or as Schuurbiers and Fisher (2009) put it, ‘Shaping technological trajectories … include[s] shaping the very research processes that help to characterize them’ (p. 424).
One way of observing this less technoscientific mode for anticipatory governance is to compare it to Toffler or Osborne and Gaebler. While the perspective of ‘prevention’ is often smarter and cheaper than ‘cure’, it is nevertheless a technoscientific approach to problem-solving. This mode can also be seen presaged in Bronk’s preemptive defense of the role of ‘competent social scientists’. And while anticipatory governance likewise postulates the role of ‘competent social scientist’ – albeit with a different connotation – in ‘working hand-in-hand’ with natural scientists and engineers, its building of an integrated capacity is sensitive to the problematic framing of ‘problem’. CNS-ASU’s Socio-Technical Integration Project postulates a laboratory-based decision-maker confronted with an ‘embedded’ social scientist or humanist who enters the laboratory saying not, ‘I’m here to help you solve your problems’, but rather querying in a Socratic way: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Why are you doing it that way?’ and ‘What do you hope to get out of it?’ While social scientists in the project have served as ‘collaborators’ (e.g. Calvert and Martin, 2009) with scientists and engineers, their ongoing role in defining and refining their laboratory’s research has been an independent product of their development of contributory expertise and their role as Socratic interlocutor (Calleja-López and Fisher, 2009). 22
The goal of such dialogues is exploring and perhaps even generating a greater capacity for responsible development (following a strategic goal of the NNI).
23
As McCarthy and Kelty (2010) argue, responsibility is being reconfigured in nanotechnology (as well as in synthetic biology and geoengineering) in an attempt to render it ‘do-able’ in the absence of a workable risk paradigm. In reconfiguring responsibility, for them as for Fisher, it is as important to conceive of the role of the scientist or engineer in the host laboratory as to conceive of the role of the embedded or integrated social scientist or humanist. Postulating this person as a ‘decision-maker’ is part of the temporal move of anticipation and the jurisdictional move of governance. That is, anticipatory governance views the scientist or engineer as making decisions
In this way, responsible development becomes, at least in part, understanding the role of one’s own decisions and one’s own position in the innovation process, relieving at least a modicum of Ulrich Beck’s ‘organized irresponsibility’ that Rip and Shelley-Egan (2010) point to as perhaps the more important revolutionary opportunity for nanotechnology. Reconceiving the laboratory in this way also allows for the dismissal of the critique of speculative ethics, because anticipatory governance in its integrative mode considers the meaning and ramifications of decisions that are being made in the here-and-now, even if the choice of research sites themselves may be subject to some of the seductive powers of nanotechnology (Nordmann and Schwarz, 2010). And while even the embedded social scientist can gain some critical distance from the laboratory and still not entirely exempt himself or herself from the assessment regime, it is nevertheless the case that integration at least helps make scientists and engineers self-conscious of and reflective on the decisions that the regime damns them to make.
Conclusion
While sustaining and generative for the center, this vision of anticipatory governance drives one of my primary aspirations for CNS-ASU: to edify the agora with at least one example of the ‘new kinds of institutions that are capable of responding to the dynamics of innovation and the societal impacts that the latest scientific and technical advances bring with them’ (Nowotny, 2007: 489). In responding to the call for the responsible development of nanotechnology, CNS-ASU has offered anticipatory governance as a responsible innovation from the social sciences.
The taxicab incident related in the epigraph recalls the multitude of ‘dialogic spaces’ (Joly and Kaufmann, 2008) that must exist in order for socially robust approaches to emerging technologies to flourish. Academic journals are another of these spaces, and so I have tried here to deepen the discussion around aspects of the connections among STS, technoscience, and governance. These are, of course, not all of the issues that we have faced in performing ‘big STS’ in close proximity to emerging nanotechnology, the public, and the technoscientific ‘assessment regime’, but they are at least several of the most resonant ones.
Indeed, one of the ambiguities of big STS in the context of CNS-ASU is that, with the diversity of projects allowed by the scale of resources with which it operates, there is almost always at least one project that is exemplary of any favored approach – ‘Yes, we have one of those!’ – as well as another project that demonstrates challenge or even failure – ‘Well, um … we tried that’. Failures must be allowed to happen, as big STS operates in an experimental mode. Creating such institutions even at the behest of powerful actors does not guarantee the material and collegial resources necessary for success, as the experience of what Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett (2012) call their ‘experiment’ of the Human Practices research agenda of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center in part demonstrates. Yet, compared to Human Practices experiment – which was added to SynBERC at the insistence of NSF – CNS-ASU was structured in a vastly more favorable way, not just with larger resources but with the ability to set its own strategic vision, in direct connection with supportive program officers, and with extensive cultural and institutional resources afforded by its host institution. Human Practices at SynBERC lacked each of these elements, and it was thus more like the social and ethical implications components of the NSE Centers, found by Rogers et al. (2012) to be ‘not well-integrated’ (p. 12) with the Centers. The agenda of integrating social science research with natural science and engineering may thus be better grounded in more powerful, free-standing institutions.
With regard to the proximity to nanotechnology, it is beside the point whether nanotechnology is unique or distinguishable vis-à-vis existing disciplines or fields. What matters is that its position as an emerging technoscience is different from that of biotechnology, genetic modification, information technology, cognitive science, and neuro-technology, because the social conditions of its production and use are different. By laying open some of these social conditions – particularly alternate visions for the futures of nanotechnology – and instigating more and broader critical reflection around them, anticipatory governance commits not to any one or specific set of outcomes from nanotechnology, but to the idea that ambiguous priming is better than unambiguous surprise.
With regard to proximity to the public, part of this contextual distinction of nanotechnology is the prior and concurrent construction of many dialogic spaces and the attendant possibility, still playing out through mandates for responsible development and social science and ethics research, that the ‘scale and audacity of science’s presumptive demands on public trust’ (Wynne, 2007: 492) may be met with ‘reciprocal’ demands on the emerging technoscience. Cultivating this demand by improving the societal capacity to articulate and apply public values in the context of emerging technologies is the goal. Neither such abstractions as the overwrought likeness between the ‘upstream’ metaphor and the linear model nor the soft determinism of lack of anticipation should divert us from it.
With regard to proximity to technoscience generally, as Rabinow and Bennett (2009) write about the development of synthetic biology, in ‘following the mandate of funders and other thoughtful observers, we insist that technical virtuosity per se cannot be the only measure of success’ (p. 100). As anticipatory governance unfolds with respect to synthetic biology, cognitive science and neuro-technology, and geoengineering, it also becomes clear that the question of nanotechnology’s distinction from them hinges, in part, on the comparative extent to which they also meet Wynne’s reciprocal demands. While the assessment regime may ultimately hold all of these technosciences in its thrall, the integration of social science and humanist perspectives within the laboratory – together with foresight and participatory practices – creates opportunities not for control as such, but for dialogue and more reflexive decision-making.
Can such ‘proceduralism … answer the ethical and political questions of whether or not a given course of action is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust’ (Rabinow and Bennett, 2009: 58)? Yes, because it provides a different context – changes in framing and in venue – in which the researchers, as decision-makers, have the opportunity to focus on the normative dimensions of their enterprise. There are important limits, however, without which we as social scientists or humanists would risk arrogating to ourselves the judgment of what is good, or right, or just, for other people, becoming technocrats in our own right. Such is also the importance of engagement together with foresight and integration. While changing venues and amplifying within them the still, small voices of folks previously excluded from offering constructive visions of futures may not be complete solutions to our woes in governing technology, they can certainly contribute to bending the long arc of technoscience more toward humane ends.