Stokes Elen
Cardiff University, UK.
Med Law Rev. 2013 Winter;21(1):11-38. doi: 10.1093/medlaw/fws042. Epub 2013 Jan 17.
This article seeks to add to current theories of new governance 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.
本文旨在通过强调监管者和被监管者在应对新技术时所面临的困境，为当前的新治理理论增添内容。以纳米技术作为研究对象，本文表明新的治理模式（与传统的强制性或命令与控制式监管相对）为高度复杂、不确定且存在争议的风险问题（如与新技术相关的问题）提供了有前景的解决方案。在这方面，纳米技术为更新、更好的治理模式的抱负提供了一个有用的试验场，因为对于适当的行动方针尚无任何固定的想法。然而，本文指出，新治理的例子并不像预期的那样突出。基于实证数据，本文认为，当面对相当多的认识论、政治、经济和伦理不确定性时，监管利益相关者通常表现出对更传统的命令式监管方法的偏好。这并不是说新治理在纳米技术监管政策中完全不存在，而是说新治理的出现方式可能比学术和政策文献所预测的更为微妙。
