Demand for command: responding to technological risks and scientific uncertainties

Stokes, Elen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0206-5241 2013. Demand for command: responding to technological risks and scientific uncertainties. Medical Law Review 21 (1) , pp. 11-38. 10.1093/medlaw/fws042

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Abstract

This article seeks to add to current theories of newgovernance by highlighting the predicament facing regulators and regulatees when dealing with new technologies. Using nanotechnologies as a study, it shows that new modes of governance (as opposed to traditional coercive, or command and control regulation) offer promising solutions to highly complex, uncertain, and contested problems of risk, such as those associated with new technologies. In this regard, nanotechnologies provide a useful test bed for the ambitions of newer, better modes of governance because there are not yet any fixed ideas about the appropriate course of action. The article suggests, however, that examples of new governance are less prominent than perhaps expected. Drawing on empirical data, it argues that, when faced with considerable epistemological, political, economic, and ethical uncertainties, regulatory stakeholders often exhibit a preference for more conventional command methods of regulation. That is not to say that new governance is entirely absent from regulatory policies on nanotechnologies, but that new governance is emerging in perhaps more subtle ways than the scholarly and policy literature predicted.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) T Technology > T Technology (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	nanotechnology; new governance; new technologies; regulation; risk; uncertainty
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0967-0742
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2022 11:49
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/49460

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