VI. Public Participation
The potential of nanotechnologies to transform the global social, economic, and political landscape makes it essential that the public fully participate in the deliberative and decisionmaking processes.[45] These processes must be open, facilitating equal input from all interested and affected parties. Government-corporate alliances (i.e., “public-private partnerships”) undermine democratic ideals and oversight principles when they fail to be transparent and accountable to the public. The general public of every nation as well as future generations must be seen as stakeholders.
Participation must also be meaningful: it must proceed and inform policy development and decision-making, rather than be limited to after-the-fact, one-way public ‘engagement’ in which the government and/or industry ‘educates’ the public with the goal of quelling debate and smoothing public acceptance. Meaningful public participation requires a governmental commitment and sufficient funding.
Finally, full public participation requires democratic involvement for the entire range of processes by which nanotechnologies are developed and used and is necessary at each stage of development on a continuing basis to ensure that public concerns, values and preferences inform and guide nanotechnology oversight. Rather than beginning from the false presumption that technological change is inevitable and/or always beneficial, the processes of designing nanotechnology devices and systems should be driven by social needs that are identified through informed deliberation and open decision-making among the affected people. Special efforts must be made to include persons living in poor communities, who have suffered disproportionately from the development of new technologies in the past.
45 See, e.g., National Science and Technology Council, National Nanotechnology Initiative, Nanotechnology: Shaping the World Atom by Atom 4 (1999) (proclaiming nanotechnology as “a likely launch pad to a new technological era because it focuses on perhaps the final engineering scales people have yet to master.”); id. at 8 (“If present trends in nanoscience and nanotechnology continue, most aspects of everyday life are subject to change.”); id. (“The total societal impact of nanotechnology is expected to be much greater than that of the silicon integrated circuit because it is applicable in many more fields than just electronics.”); id. at 1 (stating the nanotechnology revolution will result in “unprecedented control over the material world.”); see also Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Industrial Science and Technology Working Group, Nanotechnology: The technology for the 21st Century. Vol II: The Full Report 24 (2002), (“If nanotechnology is going to revolutionize manufacturing, health care, energy supply, communications and probably defense, then it will transform labor and the workplace, the medical system, the transportation and power infrastructures and the military. None of these latter will be changed without significant social disruption.”).