508669

research-article2013
SSS44210.1177/0306312713508669Social Studies of ScienceGuston

Article

Social Studies of Science

Understanding ‘anticipatory
2014, Vol. 44(2) 218­–242
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0306312713508669
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David H Guston
School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; Consortium for Science,
Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; Center for Nanotechnology in Society,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Abstract
Anticipatory governance is ‘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’. It motivates activities designed to build capacities in foresight, engagement, and
integration – as well as through their production ensemble. These capacities encourage and
support the reflection of scientists, engineers, policy makers, and other publics on their roles in
new technologies. This article reviews the early history of the National Nanotechnology Initiative
in the United States, and it further explicates anticipatory governance through exploring the
genealogy of the term and addressing a set of critiques found in the literature. These critiques
involve skepticism of three proximities of anticipatory governance: to its object, nanotechnology,
which is a relatively indistinct one; to the public, which remains almost utterly naïve toward
nanotechnology; and to technoscience itself, which allegedly renders anticipatory governance
complicit in its hubris. The article concludes that the changing venues and the amplification within
them of the still, small voices of folks previously excluded from offering constructive visions
of futures afforded by anticipatory governance may not be complete solutions to our woes in
governing technology, but they certainly can contribute to bending the long arc of technoscience
more toward humane ends.

Keywords
anticipatory governance, emerging technologies, foresight, nanotechnology, public engagement,
responsible innovation

I entered the taxi, anxious about the trip to the airport – how bad would traffic be? – the
meeting in Washington, DC – how well would the presentation go? – and the months-long

Corresponding author:
David H Guston, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State University, Interdisciplinary B
366, 1120 S. Cady Mall, PO Box 875603, Tempe, AZ 85287-5603, USA.
Email: david.guston@asu.edu
Guston 219

wait for the committee’s decision – would we win? After the obligatory exchange of airline
terminal information, the cabbie asked, ‘Where ya headed?’ ‘DC’. Anxiety elided my reply.
‘Business or pleasure?’ ‘Business’. Will this inquisition never end? ‘Oh, whaddaya do?’
‘Teach at the university’. No, it will not end. ‘Whaddaya teach?’ ‘Political science’. Never
end. ‘Really! What in particular?’ Never, ever, end. I tried the conversation stopper: ‘I study
the politics of science and technology’. Ha! ‘Cool. So what’s in DC?’ You’ve got to be
kidding. Here comes the big gun. ‘I’m trying to get a grant from the government to study the
social, ethical, and political aspects of nanotechnology’. Ha, ha! ‘So, like, whaddaya think
of the situation with quantum computing and security?’1

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 soci-
ety 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 foresight, engagement, and integra-
tion, as well as through their production ensemble (Barben et al., 2008). These capacities
encourage and support scientists, engineers, policy makers, and other publics to reflect
on their roles in nanotechnology. Reflection here quite simply means awareness of one’s
own position as participant, with a specific set of roles and responsibilities, in a field of
other actors.
In a review of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Hackett et al.,
2008), Fuller (2009) hangs the fate of Science and Technology Studies (STS) on antici-
patory governance, which he describes as a ‘strategy to facilitate the acceptance of new
technosciences by inviting people to voice their hopes and concerns in focus groups,
science cafes, and computer-based interactive spaces before the innovations are actu-
ally implemented’ (p. 209). ‘To the cynic’, Fuller writes, ‘anticipatory governance
looks like public relations. The challenge facing the next edition of the handbook will
be to prove the cynic wrong – that STS is not reducible to the formula “Follow the
money”’.
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
220 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

vogue for the art of foreseeing the spread of an innovation’s effects is “anticipatory gov-
ernance”’. 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 inform-
ing 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 com-
prises anticipatory governance: to its object, which all parties agree is a relatively indis-
tinct one; to the public, which remains almost utterly naïve toward nanotechnology; and
to the contemporary modus operandi of technoscience itself, which allegedly renders
anticipatory governance complicit in the hubris of the era. While the fate of the field may
not hang in the balance, I hope this discussion will contribute to an ongoing, if some-
times agonistic, dialogue about the relationship among STS, technoscience and govern-
ance (see, for example, Nowotny, 2007; Webster, 2007; Wynne, 2007).2
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 produc-
tively, I also have the motivation to trace its genealogy, development, and use, to elabo-
rate 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 nano-
technology, which in part led to the creation of CNS-ASU and provided the resources
Guston 221

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 techni-
cal 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 mil-
lion, 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
222 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

Americans’ (PL 108-153, Sec 2(b)(10)(C); see Fisher and Mahajan, 2006).4 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 to
anticipate and respond effectively to them’ (emphasis added); it also sought a ‘long-term
vision for addressing societal, ethical, environmental and educational concerns’ (NSF,
2004: 8).
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 investigat-
ing 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 pre-
pare the community for submitting proposals, NSF held a meeting for interested parties
on 20 September 2004 before receiving pre-proposals in November. From those submit-
ting 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 expendi-
tures 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 nanotech-
nology-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
Guston 223

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 sponsor-
ship; the value added by large-scale and coordinated funding versus small-scale, investi-
gator-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 pro-
ductivity 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 perspective on technoscience (X ought to be done) to a critical capacity
(helping to do X), then some scale of activity is required to engage with people and build
capacity with numerous institutions. In the absence of large-scale public funding, an
inequitable distribution of resources within the field would still exist, but one driven
instead by forces other than public authorizations and appropriations, such as path
dependencies, institutional commitments, the whims of private philanthropy, and the
like. The challenge of avoiding complicity in taking the king’s gold would be displaced
– but not replaced, as even small-scale STS requires gold – by the challenge of finding
leverage over the governance of emerging technologies through scientists and engineers
as well as mass and elite lay audiences.
Yet the simple point remains: STS was asked to participate within large-scale nano-
technology 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 com-
munity, 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 governance9

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 ini-
tial 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
224 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

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 predic-
tion unfavorably (e.g. Sarewitz et al., 2000), it distinguishes anticipation from prediction
and therefore holds anticipatory governance more favorably. Shortly after the term ‘antic-
ipatory 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 manage-
ment literature. Osborne and Gaebler (1993), who use the term ‘anticipatory govern-
ment’ 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 govern-
ment can use foresight and long-term strategic planning to reduce or eliminate bad out-
comes ex ante, rather than maintain a large bureaucracy to respond to situations that have
already turned bad. They offer examples from fire prevention, health care, and environ-
mental protection to bolster their argument for strategic planning and long-term budget-
ing, which are more predictive than anticipatory because they envision sets of plans,
forecasts, budgetary ranges, and the like. But they also endorse the somewhat more
anticipatory ‘Futures Commissions’ in which ‘citizens analyze trends, develop alterna-
tive scenarios of the future, and establish recommendations and goals for the community’
(Osborne and Gaebler, 1993: 230).
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
Future Shock. Consisting of two basic elements, Toffler’s anticipatory democracy is
about reinvigorating local, participatory institutions (e.g. New England town meetings)
with the capacity to think in a long-term fashion (e.g. through long-term budget forecast-
ing). While not entirely different from Osborne and Gaebler’s more technocratic use,
Toffler (1975) more explicitly endorses participatory elements, extending beyond budg-
ets and demographics to cultural change, and including an emphasis on the normative
aspects of deciding ‘the quintessential question’ of what kind of future we want to have
(Toffler, 1970: 118–119). Indeed, pace Fuller, Toffler (1970) heralds ‘social future
assemblies’ as ‘the salvation of the entire system of representative politics’ (p. 127)
rather than its delegitimator.10
A deeper policy lineage for anticipatory practices exists alongside this scholarly line-
age. Historian of science Charles Weiner (1994) surveys many of these, focusing on
Guston 225

‘several major obstacles impeding efforts to anticipate and prevent negative conse-
quences’ 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 ‘anticipate, to examine in advance, and to report on the legal,
ethical, and social implications of biomedical research’ (Weiner, 1994: 37; emphasis
original). While this proposal never advanced, a parallel effort to create a more general
capacity for foresight in science and technology policy, an Office of Technology
Assessment (OTA), gained momentum. Authorized in 1972 and operational in 1974,
OTA began with a mandate from the US National Academy of Sciences (1969) that
included an emphasis on foresight, but which rapidly turned to responding to more
immediate congressional interests (Bimber, 1996). In addition, Weiner (1994) discusses
ELSI research, about which he is deeply ambivalent because, although the ELSI program
has an apparently novel potential ‘to identify the ethical, legal, and social issues in
advance’, the ‘effort is compartmentalized and insulated from the main mission of the
project, rather than influencing its policies and priorities’ (p. 48).
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 sup-
port of ‘real-time technology assessment’ (Guston and Sarewitz, 2002), which both
denotes the programmatic structure of the center and connotes its initial attempt to articu-
late 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 unful-
filling 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
226 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

been developing (Guston, 2007; Guston et al., 2007) and moving toward more compre-
hensive 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 vision-
ing 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 labo-
ratory, 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 ‘capac-
ity’, from the Latin capere, meaning to take into possession. With the prefix ‘ante-’,
meaning ‘before’ ‘with regard to position, order, or time’ (Merriam-Webster, 1930),
anticipation is thus more about practicing, rehearsing, or exercising a capacity in a logi-
cally, spatially, or temporally prior way than it is about divining a future. But neither is
anticipatory governance merely rehearsal.
As described in Barben et al. (2008), foresight is a methodologically pluralist approach
to plausible futures with an emphasis on such methods as scenario development that
provide a more diverse and normative vision compared with other methods that seek to
identify a single, most likely future. Engagement refers simply to encouraging the sub-
stantive exchange of ideas among lay publics and between them and those who tradition-
ally frame and set the agenda for, as well as conduct, scientific research. Integration is
the creation of opportunities, in both research and training, for substantive interchange
across the ‘two cultures’ divide that is aimed at long-term reflective capacity building.
Importantly, anticipatory governance also sees these capacities as being developed in
concert – what Barben et al. (2008) call an ensemble – in order to inform and reflect on
one another.
This vision of governance is sympathetic to broader STS concerns that have empha-
sized the contextual nature of knowledge, democracy, the interactive nature of policy
making, and, perhaps most importantly, the centrality of ‘uncertainty, doubt and indeter-
minacy’ 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 distrib-
uted 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
Guston 227

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 posi-
tion 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 indem-
nification, 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 orienta-
tion. 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, pre-
scribes a particular governing decision – take no risky action – under given circum-
stances of uncertainty and qualities of risk. Not opposed to precaution as such, anticipatory
governance leaves that relationship between governing decision and quality of knowl-
edge 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 audi-
ences, 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 terminol-
ogy 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
228 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

regime of anticipatory governance. Others recognize in anticipatory governance pre-

cisely those characteristics associated with its STS-related governance emphasis: a non-
linear, 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; sec-
ond, 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 nanotechnol-
ogy, or society, up for a Icaran fall (also see McGrail, 2010). Fuller sees mostly the for-
mer 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 impossibil-
ity 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 nano-
technology is, scholars have all too casually dismissed nanotechnology as a fictitious
science and thus unworthy of serious and sustained attention. Some chemists, for exam-
ple, have expressed doubts that nanotechnology as codified in major national initiatives
is really anything more than the research they were already doing. Problematically, for
this perspective, however, claimants from materials science, biology, crystallography,
instrumentation and metrology, and other fields argue that nanotechnology is nothing
more than what they have been doing for decades. The diverse complaints about it, just
Guston 229

as much as the bibliometric analyses (Arora et al., 2013; Porter and Youtie, 2009), cap-
ture a sense in which an authentically cross-disciplinary nanotechnology may be emerg-
ing, as does the more ethnographic style of work that Berne (2006) produced from
immersing herself in discussions with self-described NSE researchers. The term ‘nano-
technology’ predates the NNI by a quarter-century, and the journal Nanotechnology pre-
dates the initiative by a decade. NNI, however hyped (Berube, 2006), did not arise ex
nihilo. To point this out is not to establish nanotechnology as any particular thing, but
rather to argue that claims about its nature must be well grounded. Based on the geogra-
phy of publishing and patenting, both globally and domestically in the United States, as
well as the interests behind its funding, which includes huge defense investments in the
US and Russia, for example, we can anticipate nanotechnology to be different from, say,
biotechnology or, for that matter, from chemistry.
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 unreflec-
tive 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 ampli-
fying 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 out-
side 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 sci-
ence fiction17 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 con-
tribute 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 nano-
technology, 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
230 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

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 pre-
cisely how tightly these interactions conform to the vision of anticipatory governance,
and thus serve as evidence of its ‘omnipresence’. Many such activities have been ration-
alized, if not necessarily inspired, by calls for ‘upstream engagement’ of the sort articu-
lated 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 institu-
tions. 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 politi-
cal 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 institu-
tionalized 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, particu-
larly 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
Guston 231

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 ‘exer-
cises are serving the theoretical ideal of guiding the direction of technoscientific devel-
opment, 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 posi-
tion 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 antici-
pation. 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 uncomfort-
able 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 techno-
science 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
232 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

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 con-
fronted with an ‘embedded’ social scientist or humanist who enters the laboratory say-
ing 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 devel-
opment 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 today that are consequential for the future not only of the
laboratory but of the larger world in which it is situated, and thus also taking a role in
governance just as do the authorizers and sponsors of the research being performed, or the
regulators or adopters of innovations derived from the research results. Those conse-
quences cannot be laid out in a full causal chain, and thus with Rabinow and Bennett
(2009) we might use the term ‘ramification’ rather than ‘consequence’ or ‘implication’.
Yet CNS-ASU researchers tend to observe scientists and engineers who do not initially
conceive of themselves in this role at all, but who nevertheless through repeated interac-
tions begin to and then capably reflect on their performance in it.
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 nanotech-
nology. Reconceiving the laboratory in this way also allows for the dismissal of the
Guston 233

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 pub-
lic, 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 power-
ful 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 ‘experi-
ment’ 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 sci-
ence research with natural science and engineering may thus be better grounded in more
powerful, free-standing institutions.
234 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

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 dif-
ferent. By laying open some of these social conditions – particularly alternate visions
for the futures of nanotechnology – and instigating more and broader critical reflec-
tion 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 nanotech-
nology 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 geoen-
gineering, 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 perspec-
tives within the laboratory – together with foresight and participatory practices – cre-
ates 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 oppor-
tunity to focus on the normative dimensions of their enterprise. There are important
limits, however, without which we as social scientists or humanists would risk arro-
gating 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.
Guston 235

Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges assistance from Sarah Davies, Cynthia Selin, Kelly Rawlings,
and Erik Fisher, as well as the constructive comments by three anonymous reviewers and the
editor.

Funding
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation cooperative agreement 0531194 and
0937591. Any findings, conclusions, or opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily
represent the National Science Foundation.

Notes
  1. This passage is derived from Guston (2007: 377–378).
  2. The categories of proximity are similar to Webster’s (2007) areas in which STS can engage in
(re)constructive boundary-crossing into policy, particularly in his concern for characterizing
emerging technologies, understanding the nuances of foresight, and creating opportunities for
understanding contexts of innovation.
  3. While Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) con-
centrates on nanotechnology, it touches on other emerging technologies (e.g. synthetic biol-
ogy, geoengineering, do-it-yourself [DIY] manufacturing), and it has attempted to design
both its programs and its strategic vision to be transferable across them.
  4. Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET) Subcommittee (2004), the National
Nanotechnology Initiative’s (NNI) first strategic plan, includes ‘responsible development’
as one strategic goal. The original implementation plan (NSET, 2000: 78–81) and the earlier
vision report (IWGN, 1999: 179–180) included modest attention to the societal implications
of nanotechnology, but mostly in conjunction with training and infrastructure needs. Reports
on societal implications (e.g. Roco and Bainbridge, 2001, 2005), which are derived from
workshops in 2000 and 2003, respectively, explored greater breadth and detail and presum-
ably informed the 2004 strategic plan.
  5. See NSF Press Release 05-179 for details.
  6. The data set used by Shapira et al. (2010) ends in 2007 and thus includes only the earliest
publications, if any at all, from the two centers.
  7. From data provided by the authors of the Shapira et al. (2010) study, the total number of social
science articles through 2010 is estimated to be 970, with roughly 70 percent published in
2007 or more recently.
  8. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and several other countries have implemented sizable
nanotechnology-in-society programs.
  9. Karinen and Guston (2010) offer a preliminary genealogy of anticipatory governance that is
expanded here.
10. Toffler’s later career as a consulting guru perhaps provides a cautionary lesson against
unhinging foresight from engagement and integration.
11. Bronk, a founder of the field of biophysics, testified as a member of the Committee Supporting
the Bush Report, and would soon thereafter be elected chairman of the National Research
Council.
12. See Guston and Sarewitz (2002) for distinctions between constructive and real-time technol-
ogy assessment, and Fisher and Rip (2013) for distinctions between the former and anticipa-
tory governance.
13. Also see Dupuy (2007), who argues for a ‘prudential’ approach to nanotechnology, dis-
tinguished from precaution by a different conception of uncertainty that links prudence to
236 Social Studies of Science 44(2)

anticipatory governance. Etymologically, however, prudence is related to providence and thus

literally is about foresight.
14. While not entirely consonant in its perspective on anticipation, Miller et al. (2013) agree that
the concept emphasizes ‘the use of the future in the present’ (n.p.).
15. See Milburn (2008) and McCray (2013) for the importance of speculative visions in the
development and promotion of nanotechnology.
16. In addition, see Adams et al. (2009) who raise the question of ‘What would it mean to not-
anticipate?’ (p. 260).
17. For the importance of science fiction in technology assessment, see Miller and Bennett (2008).
18. The NNI endorsed scenario development in its 2007 strategic plan (NSET Subcommittee,
2007) and its 2010 strategic planning stakeholders’ workshop (NSET Subcommittee, 2011)
because of the radical uncertainties faced in understanding social and environmental implica-
tions. Scientists such as Brown (2009b) have also endorsed it because it combats the ‘New
Deficit Model’, which maintains that an accumulation of scientific facts is sufficient for
developing regulatory approaches to nanotechnology and which ‘is at odds with the well-
documented need for genuine public engagement and for anticipatory knowledge’ (p. 610).
19. Joly and Kaufmann (2008) similarly argue that upstream public engagement has become part
of the master narrative of nanotechnology, in knee-jerk response to the genetically modified
(GM) food controversy. Kurath and Gisler (2009) argue, somewhat contrarily, that while sub-
sequent technoscientific controversies in Europe have demonstrated learning from previous
ones with regard to public engagement, the shift toward engagement for nanotechnology has
not been as profound and complete as thought because of the continued adoption of a simplis-
tic opposition between science and the public.
20. One dimension Delgado et al. (2011) miss is using public engagement as experiment or dem-
onstration project to probe deliberative theory in an empirical fashion or to exemplify or per-
form a certain combination of their dimensions for evaluation and/or public uptake. CNS-ASU
conceptualized its large-scale National Citizens’ Technology Forum (Cobb, 2011; Guston,
2014; Hamlett et al., 2008) and its Futurescape City Tours (Davies et al., 2012) in this way.
21. Similarly, Joly and Kaufmann (2008: 232) criticize the use of the upstream metaphor and
prefer to identify the position as one in which the socio-technical ‘trajectory’ has a low degree
of irreversibility – yet trajectory seems more deterministically (curvi-)linear than stream.
22. Importantly, such dialogue is done in a common tongue, with the only (intentional) jargon
being that of decisions, decision-making, and decision-makers, in contrast to Rabinow and
Bennett (2012), who insist on ‘the investment of time or thought to learn new terms and ana-
lytical approaches’ (p. 90).
23. NSF (2011) identified CNS-ASU’s Socio-Technical Integration Project as ‘a model for future
integration of ethicists and social scientists into nanotechnology R&D laboratories’ (p. 7).
24. Policy studies similarly conceives of public or private individuals who implement something
that the state has authorized, that is, the sales clerk at a private business who collects sales tax,
as a ‘street-level bureaucrat’ (Lipsky, 1980). See also Fisher (2010).

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Author biography
David H Guston is Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State
University (ASU), as well as Co-Director of the Consortium of Science, Policy & Outcomes and
Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored Center for Nanotechnology in
Society at ASU. Among other books, he is the author of Between Politics and Science (Cambridge,
2000) and editor of the Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Society (SAGE, 2010). He is also the
founding editor of the new Journal of Responsible Innovation and principal investigator of the
NSF-funded Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation.