Emerging risks key to nanotech

Nanosciences and nanotechnologies are set to transform the global industrial landscape, but the debate on how to regulate environmental, health and safety risks is lagging behind technological innovation. Current regulatory efforts are primarily focused on the national and regional level, while the international dimensions of nanotechnology governance are still poorly understood and rarely feature on the international agenda. With the ongoing globalization of nanosciences and the rapid expansion of international trade in nanomaterials, however, demand for international coordination and harmonization of regulatory approaches is set to increase. However, uncertainty about nanotechnology risk poses a profound dilemma for regulators and policy-makers. Uncertainty both creates demand for and stands in the way of greater international cooperation and harmonization of regulatory approaches. This paper reviews the emerging debate on nanotechnology risk and regulatory approaches, investigates the current state of international cooperation and outlines the critical contribution that a global governance approach can make to the safe development of nanotechnologies.

Introduction

Emerging technologies create a peculiar, often complex, and fundamentally political, problem for global governance. This problem exists not so much because technologies may produce environmental and health risks; systems of risk assessment and management are in place to deal with such risks. Rather, emerging technologies are problematic because of the persistent uncertainty that surrounds potential risks. This uncertainty—about whether, in what form and to what extent risks exist—makes it difficult, and often impossible, to apply routine decisionmaking procedures for risk assessment and management. It impedes the application of standard scientific approaches and pushes regulatory decision-making into a more political direction. As a result, differences in national priorities, societal values, domestic interest group dynamics and institutional contexts often stand in the way of deeper international cooperation and regulatory harmonization. Indeed, in cases such as agricultural biotechnology and others, national differences in risk regulation have not only prevented common international approaches but have also set off political and trade conflicts between industrialized countries.

Nanotechnology, which enables the manipulation of matter at the molecular level, is the latest technological innovation to surface in global debates on risk regulation and international cooperation.1 Over the last decade, nanosciences and nanotechnologies have emerged as a new transformative force in industrial society, with a rapidly increasing range of applications in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electronics, energy, food and cosmetics, among others. Yet, as nanotechnology is beginning to reshape global markets, evidence has mounted that some applications create new and poorly understood risks. Regulatory systems face profound uncertainties about the adequacy of existing risk assessment and management frameworks, and about rapidly progressing scientific and commercial developments. These uncertainties are so fundamental that they go beyond the regulatory capacity of individual states and require extensive international cooperation as we go on to argue. At the same time, however, these uncertainties also increase the likelihood that national differences in risk regulation limit the scope for global governance approaches.

Nanotechnology risk is a relatively new, and hitherto largely neglected, concern in the study of global environmental politics. Most of the debate on its environmental and health risks has been confined to scientific and regulatory expert circles. Academic research on nanotechnology regulation has so far concentrated on the domestic legal, political and social dimensions, within the subfields of science and technology studies, applied ethics, regulation studies and law.2 By contrast, the international dimensions of nanotechnology regulation have received relatively little attention and are only slowly coming into focus.3 This article seeks to help fill this gap and introduce existing debates on nanotechnology risk to the study of global environmental politics.