Governance of technological change: How to define it without reducing it?The Governance of Socio-Technical Systems: Explaining Changeedited by Susana Borrás and Jakob Edler

Abstract

The governance of technology and innovation has become an increasingly important issue in recent decades. Issues such as environmental management, the availability of energy sources, arms control and food safety have appeared in the area of transnational politics, and are now governed by different conflict resolution instruments within the framework of international law, such as treaties, protocols and conventions. Nation states play a central role in negotiating, writing and operationalizing these legal devices. However, issues of scientific and technical governance often pass national borders to cross multiple spheres of sovereign action and different jurisdictions, communities of practice, and private sector strategies. Analysts from a variety of social science disciplines are interested in how arrangements of scientific and technical governance take effect in view of the internationalization of issues, the complexity of devices, the changing borders of governmentality, and the globalization of actors. A number of authors have explored how these arrangements are redrawing the boundaries of nation states, and more generally, how they reconfigure the meaning and the implementation of democracy thanks to the intervention of new players, whose perimeter is defined around their involvement in the governance of complex technical issues ( Irwin 2008 ).