Governing Future Technologies

Zusatztext

<P>Nanotechnology has been the subject of extensive assessment hype, unlike any previous field of research and development. A multiplicity of stakeholders have started to analyze the implications of nanotechnology: Technology assessment institutions around the world, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, re-insurance companies, and academics from science and technology studies and applied ethics have turned their attention to this growing fields implications. In the course of these assessment efforts, a social phenomenon has emerged a phenomenon the editors define as assessment regime.</P><P>Despite the variety of organizations, methods, and actors involved in the evaluation and regulation of emerging nanotechnologies, the assessment activities comply with an overarching scientific and political imperative: Innovations are only welcome if they are assessed against the criteria of safety, sustainability, desirability, and acceptability. So far, such deliberations and reflections have played only a subordinate role. This book argues that with the rise of the nanotechnology assessment regime, however, things have changed dramatically: Situated at the crossroads of democratizing science and technology, good governance, and the quest for sustainable innovations, the assessment regime has become constitutive for technological development.</P><P>The contributions in this book explore and critically analyse nanotechnologys assessment regime: To what extent is it constitutive for technology in general, for nanotechnology in particular? What social conditions render the regime a phenomenon sui generis? And what are its implications for science and society?</P>

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