Geoengineering is 'the deliberate large-scale intervention in the earth's climate system, in order to moderate global warming' (Royal Society 2009) and is currently unregulated. Owing to foreseeable political, ethical and legal difficulties associated with this deliberate intervention, the Royal Society has called for geoengineering, and its research, to be governed. By adopting a critical socio-legal approach, this thesis claims that regulatory frameworks must be legitimate in order to be justified. It suggests a model of institutional design called situation-centred communicative proceduralism (SCCP) that maximises the possibility of securing legitimacy in nonstate, or transnational, settings. It explores the regulation of risky scientific research using a case-study of agri-biotech research in the EU/UK and US. It concretises SCCP, suggesting that in scientifically risky research fields, regulatory frameworks should comprise institutions that are able to respond flexibly to different types of risk assessment and procedures that facilitate direct participation. The thesis applies the concretised seep to the field of politically sensitive, subscale geoengineering research, suggesting that in order to maximise the possibility of securing legitimacy, regulatory frameworks should be 'deliberative' in the way that rules are created and implemented and 'technocratic' in the way they feedback through accountability mechanisms. Being deliberative means that institutions such as university ethics review bodies, should be inclusive; be able to treat scientific information alongside other types of information (such as ethical or political information); and be fully transparent. Procedures should be built into regulatory frameworks that allow for direct participation (in addition to representative forms of participation, if need be) prior to decision-making. Being technocratic means that regulatory frameworks should have centralised repositories of information that are directly accessible by the public; reporting, auditing and review requirements should be established that enable the public to comment directly upon and which inform the development of procedures and rules.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:684642 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Sargoni, Janine Nathalie Melanie |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0024 seconds