Nanotechnology Governance: Accountability and Democracy in New Modes of Regulation and Deliberation

Current discourses in science, technology and innovation policy describe a shift from formal, governmental, or statutory regulation to non-hierarchical, informal, and co-operative self-regulatory approaches. They narrate a turn from government to gov-ernance, described as a “governance turn.” Governance as a new and popular mode of regulation, deliberation and shared responsibility is often linked to favored at-tributes of science and technology development, and policy making such as democ-racy and responsibility. This article analyzes the connection between governance and ideas of accountable and democratic science and technology development in the case of nanosciences and nanotechnologies. For this purpose, soft law mea-sures, self-regulatory initiatives, and public engagement projects in Europe and the U.S. were analyzed using the concept of social robustness (Nowotny et al. 2001).
The study showed that most of the analyzed governance approaches and engage-ment projects only partially met aspects of social robustness, and that the gover-nance and deliberative turn in science and technology policy has not led, so far, to greater democracy and responsibility in nanoscience and nanotechnology devel-opment. As a consequence, the delegation of techno-political decision making to less socially robust governance approaches might lead to a vacuum in science and technology policy and affect not only academic knowledge production but also the innovative force of a society.1