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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.

Consensus conferences, also known as citizens' panels—a collection of lay citizens akin to a jury but charged with deliberating on policy issues with a high technical content—are a potentially important way to conduct technology assessments, inform policy makers about public views of new technologies, and improve public understanding of and participation in technological decision making. The first citizens' panel in the United States occurred in April 1997 on the issue of "Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy." This article evaluates the impact of this citizens' panel. The standard criteria to evaluate the impact of analyses focus on the "actual impact" and on the "impact on general thinking." To these standard criteria, this article introduces the evaluation of two impacts related to learning: impact on the training of knowledgeable personnel and the interaction with lay knowledge. The impact evaluation is based on a nearly comprehensive set of semistructured telephone interviews with the participants in the panel.

The sociological study of boundary-work and the political-economic approach of principal-agent theory can be complementary ways of examining the relationship between society and science: boundary-work provides the empirical nuance to the principal-agent scheme, and principal-agent theory provides structure to the thick boundary description. This paper motivates this complementarity to examine domestic technology transfer in the USA from the intramural laboratories of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). It casts US policy for technology transfer in the principal-agent framework, in which politicians attempt to manage the moral hazard of the productivity of research by providing specific incentives to the agents for engaging in measurable research-based innovation. Such incentives alter the previously negotiated boundary between politics and science. The paper identifies the crucial rôle of the NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) as a boundary organization, which mediates the new boundary negotiations in its routine work, and stabilizes the boundary by performing successfully as an agent for both politicians and scientists. The paper hypothesizes that boundary organizations like OTT are general phenomena at the boundary between politics and science.

Examines how state legislatures acquire and use technical information and analysis; suggests ways to improve legislatures' relationships with a broader variety of sources, and finds a need to educate legislators as consumers of technical information; US.

Expands on the argument that science and technology policy analysis (SPTA) cannot achieve great utility for practitioners or cumulative progress for scholars, because the field lacks a critical tradition; focuses on Science, the endless frontier (STEF), a new framework for appraising the quality and impact of any work of STPA; since 1960, chiefly; US.