Getting to Green - Research Progress on Environmental Health and Safety Aspects of Engineered Nanomaterials - page 64

private sector, the academic community, and international organizations. Progress in implementation of
the strategy will be severely limited in the absence of such an entity” (NRC 2012, p. 169).
Short of addressing that fundamental need, the committee suggested other means by which the
NNI could enhance and extend interagency coordination. The NNI has identified a number of activities
aimed at improving interagency coordination and stakeholder engagement, both in its 2011 EHS research
strategy (NEHI 2011) and in its 2013 budget supplement (NSET 2012b), that are promising but do not
appear to have been implemented. The 2011 strategy (NEHI 2011, p. 96) indicates plans to use “webinars,
workshops, and other mechanisms for information exchange to assess the state of the science and current
research, and to reassess areas of weakness and gaps”; however, despite proposing to host two or three
webinars each year, it appears that the NNI has held but one such webinar, “Public Engagement through
Nano.gov” (NNI 2012a), and at the time of this writing none is planned.
The NNI's 2011 strategy also identified its signature initiatives (NNI 2012b) as offering NEHI “a
new mechanism through which to organize and leverage interagency efforts” (NEHI 2011, p. 96). Those
initiatives are all focused on nanotechnology development, however, not on EHS issues, and the
committee has not seen any indications of NEHI's use of the signature initiatives for the indicated
purpose. Similarly, the NNI's 2013 budget supplement (NSET 2012b, p. 61) notes plans for NEHI to host
“monthly meetings, public workshops and webinars and other social media”, but the committee is not
aware that such activities have taken place. The committee encourages NEHI and the NNCO to
implement those plans, which promise the dual benefit of enhancing interagency coordination and
stakeholder engagement.
Another option would be the formal assignment of responsibility for management of the
knowledge commons shown in Figure 4-1 to the NNCO. The NNCO would then be accountable for
ensuring both that EHS-relevant information generated by research in individual NNI agencies is
efficiently transferred to the knowledge commons and that it is widely shared. Such responsibility in itself
might support and spur a greater role for the NNCO in enhancing interagency coordination. The
committee puts this example forth to illustrate the role that enhanced interagency coordination could play
in increasing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the nanotechnology EHS research enterprise.
At the committee's November 2012 workshop, representatives of two federal agencies indicated
that they were undertaking a mapping of their own research activities onto the 2011 NNI strategy's
objectives. The NNCO could require all NNI agencies to conduct such mapping, compile the results, and
use them to indicate how they intend to address overlaps and gaps in their activities.
Finally, to address PCAST's criticism directly, the NNCO could reconstitute the NSET to require
that NNI agencies designate senior officials who have budgetary authority in their agencies as members
of the NSET.
Improving interagency coordination requires tracking of research that is being conducted by the
agencies and of how much is being spent on specific projects. Since publication of the committee's first
report, two reviews of the NNI have raised concerns about the need for the NNI to develop and
implement better performance metrics that can be used to track progress toward core objectives. That
need was a central theme of the 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which has as one
of its two “recommendations for executive action” that “the Director of OSTP [Office of Science and
Technlogy Policy] coordinate development by the NNI member agencies of performance measures,
targets, and time frames for nanotechnology EHS research that align with the research needs of the NNI,
consistent with the agencies' respective statutory authorities, and include this information in publicly
available reports” (p. 51). GAO (2012, p. 46) noted that earlier reviews had also flagged that need,
including a 2010 review by the National Nanotechnology Advisory Panel (PCAST 2010) and NRC
(2009).
Similarly, PCAST's 2012 review of the NNI (pp. vi, 17) notes that “the lack of clear metrics for
assessing the impacts of Federal investments in nanotechnology remains a concern” and that it had raised
a similar concern in its 2010 review of the NNI. PCAST calls on agencies to develop “mission-
appropriate” (p. 21) metrics and on the NNCO to track the development of appropriate metrics and