Science and politics in innovation policy: The making and remaking of nanotechnology

Abstract

This thesis explores the tensions inherent in late-modern, capitalist states’ development of technology policy, using political and policy responses to nanotechnology in Australia and the United States (US) as case studies. Contemporary accounts have alternated between those that treat the emergence of novel technologies as the outcome of political construction and coordination, and those that emphasise the role of market infrastructures. This thesis offers a distinct view by illuminating the active work undertaken by government officials, entrepreneurial scientists and research funding bodies to build state support for nanotechnology, and the specificity and limits of their success. I argue that in both countries, the adoption of national nanotechnology policies might be best understood as a situated achievement, and that assumptions regarding the state’s ‘natural’ interest in sponsoring emerging technologies merit closer inspection.

Drawing on interviews with nanotechnology stakeholders, archival documents and material obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests, I investigate the US political response to nanotechnology in the years preceding and following the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s establishment (mid-90s to 2003), and that of Australia in the years the field grew and receded from political attention (2000 to 2013). By tracing the shifting enactments of nanotechnology in innovation policy in both countries, and in Australian regulatory policy, I reveal the ongoing (re)negotiation of science-state-market relations, and their divergent construction in ‘innovation’ compared to ‘regulatory science’.

The imbrication of science, the state and the market revealed in this thesis is inconsistent with technologically determinist, market essentialist, or state-directed accounts of nanotechnology’s elevation as a policy object. Instead, I show that the creation of national nanotechnology policy, in both the US and Australia, reflected the responsiveness of proponents’ constitutive and promissory work to wider conflicts and accommodations within science policy, the confluence of favourable political and fiscal circumstances, and chance. Further, I find that Australian nanotechnology policy was constrained by market failure justifications for the state's role in innovation and by the limited credibility achieved for promissory claims. Highlighting the contingency of existing technology policy settlements, this study concludes by reflecting on how processes of state-backed innovation may be ‘opened up’ for reimagining.