This special issue examines strategies for public engagement in science and technology issues in Australia, Japan and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It traverses issues relating to new energy technologies, food nanotechnology, the environmental impacts of dioxins, toxic waste disposal, genetic modification and the way scientists engage with the social dimensions of new biotechnologies. The papers look critically at engagement across scientist/non-scientist boundaries and explore how these boundaries are confounded and reworked in particular contexts. This is an increasingly popular theme in Science, Technology and Society studies.