Similar Regulatory Challenges but Contrasting Modes of Governance? The Puzzle of Governing Human Biotechnology across Western Europe

Abstract

Human biotechnology is a fairly recent policy issue that emerged onto the political agenda in the 1980s and 1990s in most Western European countries. As an emerging policy area, human biotechnology was largely unstructured and the governance was mostly left to the medical and scientific communities. In the meantime, with the exception of Ireland, all Western European states have designed regulation, yet governance modes still vary considerably. Various governance modes have been developed. Some of these modes rely on traditional “command and control” governing arrangements, others operate with delegated or partial self-governance. While the government has taken a more pre-eminent role over time in the governance of the field, some striking variation remains. The challenge is to understand when, how and under what conditions modes of governance emerge and evolve over time. In this chapter, we shed light on the impact of the dynamics between stakeholders in building up modes of governance over time. We argue that the variation in the configuration of and the interactions between stakeholders, in particular medical and scientific stakeholders, impacts on the trajectory of governance modes over time. The continuous process of structuring a new policy problem is tightly linked to establishing modes of governance (Capano et al. 2012).