Nanotechnology has been the subject of a large number of public engagement exercises over the past decade, but all this activity has had little impact on government policy formulation1, 2 because governments tend to favour their own forms of engagement. As Cohen has argued in a different context, the outcomes from such activities reflect the particular institutional constraints under which they are made3. Moreover, efforts to bring different stakeholders together to share different perspectives have tended to lead to competition rather than cooperation as these groups have competed with each other in their attempts to represent the best interests of the public, albeit generally from their own points of view.
“Research in Australia and the UK shows that as many as 35% of the public are not particularly interested in science or technology, and it is therefore difficult to engage with them about these topics.”
To give an example: in a workshop on public engagement with enabling technologies (predominantly nanotechnologies and biotechnologies) held in Canberra in October 2010, participants representing researchers, social scientists and engagement practitioners tended to frame engagement problems only according to their individual perspectives. For researchers, better education was the key issue; social scientists, on the other hand, wanted better processes, whereas having a better understanding of audiences was top of the agenda for engagement practitioners. This is not a problem if each group is then able to work together to adjust their views and priorities towards a common outcome, which is what happened at a follow-up workshop in Canberra in August 2011 (but some other workshops I have been involved in did not reach such a successful conclusion).
