Regulating Nanotechnologies in the EU and US is a collaborative research
project involving researchers from LSE,
Chatham House|, Environmental Law Institute| and The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies|
at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Its goal is to investigate
the regulatory challenges posed by nanotechnologies and to assess the effectiveness
of existing approaches on both sides of the Atlantic. The project is innovative
in taking a comparative perspective and in contributing to the early identification
of regulatory methodologies and best practices that promote regulatory convergence
between the EU and US.
Nanotechnology, a multidisciplinary field of applied science and engineering,
allows the design and creation of objects at molecular scale (a nanometer is
one billionth of a meter). With a rapidly expanding range of scientific and
commercial applications, nanotechnologies have emerged as a new focus of EU
and US regulatory efforts that seek to promote innovation while ensuring safety
and enhancing public acceptability. Past developments in risk regulation, such
as the case of agricultural biotechnology, have shown the importance of identifying
technological risks and promoting international cooperation at an early stage
in the policy process.
This project, which will result in the publication of a major report and a
series of shorter papers (forthcoming in 2009), responds to the broader agenda
on transatlantic regulatory harmonization set by the EU-US Summit of 30 April
2007. It is funded by a grant from the EU's 2007 budget to support pilot projects
on "Transatlantic methods for handling global challenges", and its
results are expected to feed into the policy recommendations that are to be
presented to the EU-US Summit of 2010.