Nanotechnology and Its Governance

Arie Rip

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429879517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book charts the development of nanotechnology in relation to society from the early years of the twenty-first century. It offers a sustained analysis of the life of nanotechnology, from the laboratory to society, from scientific promises to societal governance, and attempts to modulate developments.

1
Introduction

The life and times of nanotechnology and its governance

Arie Rip

When selecting papers for this collection, I was conscious of a deep sense of our late-modern society and the challenge of its attempt to handle technology, in particular a newly emerging technology like nanotechnology, with its combination of promises and concerns. This sense has coloured my work since my turn from chemistry (and philosophy) to science, technology, and society studies. I have tried to articulate elements of a diagnosis in my work on the danger culture of our industrial society, taking the handling of chemicals as my main example (Rip 1991): like the danger culture of miners and mountaineers, where rules are created and maintained which are functional to reduce danger, but are also taboos (cf. Mary Douglas 1966). This allows them (and us) to accept to continue living a dangerous life, up to life in industrial society.

For the case of nanotechnology, I had followed what was happening over time, at first occasionally because of my interest in how expectations are voiced about new technologies (see also Van Lente 1993), and more systematically since the early 2000s. I had seen the discussion about risks, e.g. of free nanoparticles, emerge. The issue of governance was (and is) much broader than regulation of risks of nanotechnology, however. It is about agenda building and implications for action (cf. Chapter 5). And it is about perceptions and actions, not in the least of nanotechnologists themselves (cf. Chapter 4). In other words, the governance of nanotechnology is to a large extent de facto governance, while occasionally punctuated by debates about government regulation (see Chapter 7; see also Kearnes and Rip 2009).

As Scharpf (1997: 204) phrases it (quoting Elinor Ostrom),

Much effective policy is produced not in the standard constitutional mode of hierarchical state power, legitimated by majoritarian accountability, but rather in associations and through collective negotiations with or among organizations that are formally part of the self-organization of civil society rather than of the policy-making system of the state.

In the broadest sense of the concept of governance, all structuring of action and interaction that has some authority and/or legitimacy counts as governance. Authors on governance such as Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden (2004) and Kooiman (2003) recognize this, even if they do not thematize it. Governance arrangements may be designed to serve a purpose, but can also just emerge and become forceful when institutionalized. The same move is visible in Voß et al. (2006: 8) where they argue that governance refers to ‘the characteristic processes by which society defines and handles its problems. In this general sense, governance is about the self-steering of society’.¹

In the sense outlined here, de facto governance is studied by, or should be studied by, sociology, and what I like to call ‘macro-anthropology’. A macro-anthropology of nanotechnology allows us to address the richness of nanotechnology and its de facto governance.² This book shows possibilities, but does not give a comprehensive analysis or an overview. Up to its neglecting to thematize features like cultural aspects, that might be missed in a too exclusive focus on the technicalities of governance.

One interesting symptom of de facto governance, and thus a topic for macro-anthropology, is the way the announcement of support for nanotechnology by the US Clinton Administration early in 2000 created a socio-political entity ‘nano-technology’, clinching a variety of developments into a concerted effort (for a history of the specific dynamics, see McCray 2005), and with repercussions in the US and worldwide (see Chapter 2, see also Van der Most 2009). The life and times of nanotechnology started in 2000, a macro-anthropologist would argue. As our analysis shows, it coincided with the need of policy makers and administrators to show they could be strategic (cf. Rip 2002)

Although generally recognized as important for the field of nanotechnology, this is not the common ‘origin myth’ of nanotechnology, however.³ By now, the regular story picks up on Richard P. Feynman’s Christmas dinner speech for the American Physical Society in 1959, in which he unfolded his vision of interactions at the nano-scale, i.e. orders of magnitude of 1 to 100 nanometre (10–⁹ m), using the engaging title ‘There’s lots of room at the bottom’ (Feynman 1960). The regular story has all the trappings of a myth, a key feature being its retrospective construction.⁴ As Christopher Toumey (2008) has shown, there was little or no reference to Feynman’s dinner speech until the early 2000s, when a community of nanotechnologists had started to form, incited by the new opportunities to get funding, linked to a general interest in the field fuelled by Eric Drexler’s strong claims about so-called molecular manufacturing (see Chapter 5).

This may be seen as only of anecdotal interest, but it reinforces my general point about the importance of an anthropological approach, also for newly emerging technologies like nanotechnology.

In a sense, I have been fortunate to have access to nanotechnologists and nanotechnology policy makers and administrators from a relatively early stage. In 2003, given my record of work in chemistry and society, and in science, technology, and society more generally, I was invited to participate in the new Dutch national R&D programme on nanotechnology, eventually called NanoNed (see Rip and Van Lente 2013). We were recognizable as ‘visiting strangers’, but also legitimated in our actions because we were invited by the board of the national programme consortium, and thought to be part of the attempt to show politicians and wider publics that nanotechnology was being developed responsibly.

Because of NanoNed, I had legitimation to participate in meetings and informal discussions at the European Commission, and participated (together with PhD students and post-docs) in two European Networks of Excellence, Nano2Life and Nanobioraise, and also globally, in particular in the meetings of the International Dialogue on Responsible Development of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (see Chapter 7). I was able to move about, as an anthropologist would do, up to interacting with the ‘natives’ and having them confide in me (see for a background argument about the role of ‘moving about’, Rip 2000).

A specific entrance point was our work on Constructive Technology Assessment, a version of TA which involves itself in the actual construction of new technology, attempting to broaden the aspects and actors taken into account. This includes a methodology of ‘insertion’ (cf. Chapter 8), essentially an ethnographic approach but includes a diagnosis of what was happening in and around nanotechnology. However, the present collection of articles is not about our work on Constructive Technology Assessment (see for Constructive TA, in addition to Chapter 8, Rip 1994; Schot and Rip 1997; Te Kulve and Rip 2008; Robinson 2009; Parandian 2012; Parandian and Rip 2013).

In this collection of published articles, I tell the story of nanotechnology as a socio-political entity and its de facto governance. As for many newly emerging technologies, the storyline starts with big promises – which then evoke big concerns. There is hype from both sides, but then life as usual reasserts itself, increasingly so from 2006 onwards. But there will be residues, i.e. insights and arrangements that continue and shape what will happen.

I start with an analysis of the nature of the promise. Not in the sense of the expectations per se, but about how they function to create a protected space for the new field to work on its own challenges, while being legitimated to do so by the promises (Chapter 2). This is actually a feature of present day technosciences, and of the move towards ‘strategic science’ in general (Rip 2002). The article adds another example of a promising new field, sustainability research, with different dynamics, but its main interest for this collection is the compact history of nanotechnology.

I then move towards a more detailed look at how this works out in practice, up to ‘waiting games’ of nanotechnology enactors, knowing about the promise but reluctant to invest in an indeterminate future (Chapter 3). I continue a micro- and meso-anthropological focus when looking at nanotechnologists working with folk theories about what is happening (Chapter 4). Particularly important was their concern that nanotechnology should not fall victim to the fate of genetically modified approaches in biotechnology,⁵ which led them to take initiatives at interaction with publics at an early stage. One effect was a gradual shift in the view of roles and responsibilities of nano-enactors, with the attendant popularity of the notion of a ‘responsible development’ of nanotechnology, visible, among other things, in various proposals to have an ethical code for nanoscience and nanotechnologies. We offered a diagnosis of what was happening at the time (Chapter 6), and I have expanded it in more general terms as a changing division of moral labour (Rip 2017).⁶

There is a distinct shift from the focus on more or less speculative promises and concerns in the first five years or so, to more concrete, and often more subdued claims. For the debates about risk and regulation, we have located the transition around 2006 (see Chapter 5). This is not to imply that problems were then solved, but the dimensions along which to address them appeared to be clearer. See also the case of the Danish construction industry which in their marketing strategies moved from being ‘loud’ (outspoken) in the early 2000s about their nano-activities to being ‘silent’ towards the end of the decade (Andersen 2011).

Not much later, the public interest moved to other issues, for example synthetic biology now drawing a lot of attention, also from social scientists and humanities scholars (compare Downs 1972 on the issue-attention cycle).

This is where I could conclude my story about nanotechnology, but the story is not just about the vagaries of issue-attention cycles and newly emerging technologies.⁷ Nor was it a matter of ‘we’ having got nanotechnology ‘right’ this time. There are deeper issues, not necessarily specific to nanotechnology, and which a macro-anthropology should include. In particular there is the cultural image of a new technology coming in from the outside, and to be contained or tamed – or domesticated, to use an anthropological turn-of-phrase introduced by Roger Silverstone (1994). ‘The metaphor of “domestication” came from the taming of wild animals, but was then applied to describing the processes involved in “domesticating ICTs” when bringing them in the home’ (Haddon 2007: 26). I note in passing that these processes of domestication occur on location and cannot simply be shaped by nanotechnologists wanting ‘to do it right’.⁸

New and emerging science and technology are positioned as being introduced into society, coming in from the outside as it were (Swierstra and Rip 2007). Thus, the technology is seen as having agency by itself, while society (societal actors) must come to terms with it. Enactors (the developers and promotors of nano-technology) can then speak in the name of the exogenous technology, and feel justified in imposing their view of progress on society – up to blaming obstacles to such progress on phobias: nano-phobia (cf. Chapter 4 on enactor perspective).⁹

Outsiders to technology, especially when they are critical, can easily fall into the trap of attributing agency to exogenous technology. Sarah Franklin (2006, p. 87) illustrates this when she says,

This view [of Fukuyama and Habermaß] of genetic manipulation as a force unto itself, hostile to social order and integration…. Here …‘biotechnology’ is attributed a sinister agency.

Thus, outsiders picturing new technology as an independent force become part of an unholy alliance with insiders, perpetuating the myth of exogenous technology.¹⁰

In other words, the notion of domestication is not an innocent descriptive concept. It is, intentionally or unintentionally, part of the overall diagnosis, with implications for how we look at social order. One way to bring this out is to reflect on the irony of my story’s ‘happy’ end: ‘Don’t worry, nanotechnology will be domesticated in the end’. I’m not just being flippant here. It raises the question if it is just a matter of decline of public interest, as the common interpretation of Downs (1972) would have it (cf. note 7). There might also be learning, about how to handle a new technology, and not just by deciding to ‘do better this time’.

One can also worry about the possible costs involved, including opportunity costs.¹¹ I have considered learning (and costs) in general terms in my ‘philosophy’ of TA, intended to broaden the policy analysis approach to TA and a simple focus on cost-benefit views. The goal of TA as a societal function should be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: the life and times of nanotechnology and its governance
• 2 Umbrella terms as mediators in the governance of emerging science and technology
• 3 Dual dynamics of promises and waiting games around emerging nanotechnologies
• 4 Folk theories of nanotechnologists
• 5 Emerging de facto agendas surrounding nanotechnology: two cases full of contingencies, lock-outs, and lock-ins
• 6 Positions and responsibilities in the ‘real’ world of nanotechnology
• 7 De facto governance of nanotechnologies
• 8 Constructive technology assessment and the methodology of insertion
• Index