ABSTRACT
The study of the relationship between risk management and public-engagement experiments in the nanotechnology debate rested on a comprehensive analysis of existing archival sources. Two reports—one emanating from French sources and one from British sources—attempted to establish a panorama of initiatives concerning public engagement undertaken between 2003 and 2007 in the nanotechnology field. The data presented concerned essentially European and American experiments, as there did not seem to have been many other instances of consequence elsewhere in the period concerned. I synthesized the various features of each type of experiment, checking my findings with focused interviews with key stakeholders of the public-engagement experiments. Finally, I drew conclusions about new dynamics in risk management. These conclusions were twofold: they bore on the concerns of end users with the development of nanotechnologies, and they applied to the impact of new risk-management dynamics on institutional emergence.
