Public Value Mapping

Nanotechnology Policy Challenges

One of many challenges for PVM and analyzing public values in nanotechnology policy is the sheer volume of participants in the discourse. NSE discourse participants are motivated by a wide divergence of agendas drawn from a range of industrial, government, academic, and civil society actors. Further, NSE discourse participants are more diverse than what might be seen in other realms of science and innovation policy, as evidenced by the U.S. nanotechnology legislative policy emphasis on interdisciplinarity. Other social scientists have described how citizens of different countries make sense of nanotechnology in an attempt to describe value structures, such as D.A. Scheufele et al., mostly based on results from public opinion surveys and consistent with most research on elicitation of public values. While their methods have led to theory development in the understanding of basic values for science policy, evidence shows that additional, important insight comes from locating and analyzing value statements found in key public and governmental documents, according to T.B. Jorgensen and B. Bozeman.

New methods to analyze public value statements (in the documents published by key participants in a bounded nanotechnology policy circle of interdependent governance stages) are yielding important results for PVM. Analyzing documents of a range of policy actors who operate within and across multiple policy process stages is presenting a robust picture of the public values in play within formally authorized nanotechnology policy discourses. At the same time, such a multipartite focus is registering convergences and divergences of public value statements across several policy stages and agency domains with a better understanding of related decision processes and outcomes.

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