A while back, DuPont and Environmental Defense released a proposed framework for best practices in handling nanotechnologies– part product development strategy, part risk analysis and unusual for being a cooperation between a corporation and an NGO (though not that unusual, Elise pointed out this collaboration on sustainable forestry as another example). Two weeks ago a coalition of various “civil society actors” as we like to say these days (ETC, AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, United Steelworkers, etc) sent out an open letter decrying this voluntary “framework” as back-door, corporate-driven regulation. The protesting groups claim it is an attempt to usurp “broad public participation in government oversight of nanotech policy” and that (if successful) such a framework would be “a precedent of abdicating policy decisions to industry by those entrusted with protecting our people, communities, and land.”
There hasn’t been much discussion around this online, but here are two starting points (1,2).
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Friends,
Mea Culpa. April is the toughest month. I had five qualifying exams. And we all look forward to May- now!
I will attempt to come back to this issue raised by Chris in more detail soon. Gaymon Bennett and I have submitted a grant proposal to DOE precisely based on the idea that the thing to study now was the way that the political rationality was being co-defined by the professional civil society activists and the corporations. Of course we did not use the language of political rationality.
ETC contacted Drew Endy and politely but forcefully suggested that we all contact the Meridian (??) group in Washington who runs on-going debates and fora. Clearly ETC equates this with participation and democracy of some sort.
More soon. And if we can iron out a wrinkle or two we will put the grant proposal up on the working papers site of ARC.
The Meridian Institute: http://www.merid.org/projects.php?
Seems like something similar to GBN, actually. They worked with ICON at their first meeting and have done all kinds of stuff in and around nanotech. Interesting to think what kind of beast these institues are though– mediation, negotiation, conflict resolution, strategy planning– is this para-ethnography