Prospects and challenges: Introduction to the special issue on "Global governance of emerging technologies"

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Global Public Policy and Governance (2022) 2:261–265
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EDITORIAL
Prospects andchallenges: Introduction tothespecial issue
on“Global governance ofemerging technologies”
LiTang1 · CongCao2
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University 2022
“The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
—William Faulkner (1951, p.73)
Appealing for the global governance of emerging technologies contains two
assumptions: one is that emerging technologies possess potential far-reaching
effects, both of a desired positive nature and an unwanted negative sort. The sec-
ond is that a pervasive and persistent discourse of uncertainty against risk (Beck,
1992) poses risk as “calculable” and “controllable” and therefore makes it seems
less threatening than uncertainty, which in turn is defined as “incalculability and
hence uncontrollability,” and thus equates it with “danger” (Nowotny etal., 2001,
pp. 33–34). Indeed, the development trajectories of emerging technologies are
unknown, and so are their wide-ranging consequences, intended or unintended(Xue
& Wang, 2021). These, combined with the bounded rationality of human beings,
pose profound challenges for policymaking and demand cooperation at the global
scale. For nations with deep-rooted traditions of long-term science and technology
(S&T) planning, this challenge is even more daunting as the situation can change
dramatically, and predictions can go significantly astray. In this sense, self-govern-
ance of the scientific community is far from sufficient for securing the outcomes and
uses of emerging technologies in the public interest (Chubb etal., 2019; Kaiser &
Moreno, 2012).
Meanwhile, amid the escalating global competition of S&T and innovation-
driven economic development, the pursuit in emerging technologies has been arous-
ing growing interests from scientists and capturing the attention of policymakers
(Cao, 2021; Gao et al., 2019; Yu etal., 2021). Take synthetic biology as an exam-
ple. Anticipating the tremendous benefits as well as potential safety and security
* Cong Cao
cong.cao@nottingham.edu.cn
Li Tang
litang@fudan.edu.cn
1 School ofInternational Relations andPublic Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai200433, China
2 Nottingham University Business School China, University ofNottingham Ningbo China,
Ningbo315100, China

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concerns associated with it, many countries have invested lavishly (Gómez-Tatay
& Hernández-Andreu, 2019; Kuzma etal., 2018). Similarly, over 60 international
reports on human heritable germline editing were published during the period of
2015–2018 (Brokowski, 2018). In the artificial intelligence domain, the war for tal-
ent and investment has been raging among world leaders (Jobin et al., 2019; Liu
et al., 2022; Savage, 2020).Yet the academic discussion on emerging technology
governance is still in its early stages. Our knowledge about the global coordination
of governing emerging state-of-the-art technologies remains very limited. This is
interesting given that emerging technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for
scientific discovery as well as bringing enormous challenges to human beings (Tang,
2021).
To fill some of the gaps in the literature, Global Public Policy and Governance
launched this Special Issue, “Global governance of emerging technologies: pros-
pects and challenges.” It includes four articles plus a book review. The contribu-
tors consist of both promising young researchers and established scholars working
on different specialties: law; public policy; science, technology, and society; and
S&T policy. Each article focuses on one specific domain of emerging technologies
to investigate the issue of governance on both national and international agendas.
Combined, their findings shed some light on the challenges, tangible solutions, and
prospects for governing emerging technologies globally.
The central statement of the first article, “Governing emerging technologies—
looking forward with horizon scanning and looking back with technology audits,”
is that for better and adaptive policy making and implementation, governing emerg-
ing technologies needs both looking forward (i.e., anticipatory governance) and
looking backward (i.e., technology audit). In this paper, Henry T. Greely starts with
four stages of policy responses to new technologies: initial recognition of possi-
ble new tech, preliminary assessment, policy making on adoption and regulation,
and monitoring the actual effects of new technologies. Among them, he identifies
a research gap in the extant scholarly discussion: less attention paid to stages one
(prediction) and four (monitoring). Greely then purposefully selects the illustrat-
ing case of human germline genome editing and proposes establishing and motivat-
ing a Horizon Scanning Group and Technology Audit Group for better governance.
Greely argues that as human beings rather than Tralfamadorians (Vonnegut, 1969),
our inability to make accurate predictions suggests that governing new technologies
requires both a precautionary forward-looking approach and a backward-auditing
mechanism. This echoes Collingridge’s dilemma justifying the idea of having pro-
fessional groups of both horizon scanning and tech auditing (Collingridge, 1980).
Greely does not stop with bold suggestions; he also notes that making the proposal
operational across various technological domains and regulatory agencies and mak-
ing practice nimble with different scales and levels of governance are the keys to
achieving effective global governance (Chubb etal., 2019).
The second article, “Global digital governance: Paradigm shift and an analytical
framework,” by Shaowei Chen and Kai Jia, represents an effort to (re)conceptual-
ize a framework of global digital governance. The ubiquitous use of the Internet,
and especially the rising significance of mega digital platforms, has been intensify-
ing the tensions between different stakeholders, especially between platforms and

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Prospects andchallenges: Introduction tothespecial issue…
regulators, non-government organizations, and users who have shown declining trust
toward digital technology, within a state, and between sovereign states and global
governance bodies. Therefore, according to the authors, there is not only an urgent
and acute demand but also a necessity for the governing regime to move away from
a laissez-faire accommodation to the institution toward more regulations and con-
trol. As a result, the focus of global digital governance is no longer merely innova-
tion and free speech but privacy, competition, taxation, and democracy, all of which
largely had been ignored. Characterized by laws and regulations, this new paradigm
of governance also has rendered the European Union, formerly a secondary player
in the game of innovation, powerful and influential. The authors further develop an
“issue-actor-mechanism” framework for global digital governance, in which govern-
ance goes beyond the issue of national sovereignty, includes multiple stakeholders,
and entails both formal and informal mechanisms.
In the third article, “Implementing responsible research and innovation: A case
study of U.S. biotechnology oversight,” Jennifer Kuzma aims to address two crucial
issues of governing emerging technologies through the lens of U.S. biotechnology
oversight. The first one comprises factors inhibiting the implementation of responsi-
ble research and innovation (RRI), while the second involves tangible solutions for
getting RRI to function well. Drawing insights from three policy process theories—
a multiple streams approach, punctuated equilibrium theory, and advocacy coalition
framework—Kuzma explores RRI implementation barriers from macro-, meso-,
and microlevels. She argues that institutionalizing RRI for emerging technologies
demands the support of funding from the public sector. But this alone is insufficient.
Taking the macro-level socioeconomic and political forces into consideration, she
proposes six strategies to place and prioritize, if possible, RRI on the policy agenda
setting for the U.S. biotechnology innovation system, which also has implications
for the U.S. and other countries in dealing with the governance of emerging tech-
nologies in general.
Probably the hottest among emerging technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) has
drawn enormous attention from the scientific and policy communities, which have
taken a variety of approaches to assessing the technology’s advantages and benefits
and to debating its possible challenges. In the fourth article, “Emerging technology
for economic competitiveness or societal challenges? Framing purpose in artificial
intelligence policy,” Inga Ulnicane studies AI from the two frames of technology
policy: economic competitiveness and societal challenges. Through a careful exami-
nation of AI strategies, reports, and policy papers produced by national govern-
ments, international organizations, consultancies, and think tanks in the European
Union and the United States from 2016 and 2018, she finds evidence of both conver-
gence and divergence between the two frames of technology policy pertaining to AI
and points out that the policy documents should be more explicit.
Not only must technology governance coevolve with new contexts (i.e., new
technologies and globalization), so must public administration theories. Zooming
in on public value theory, Hong Mei and Yueping Zheng write a review of Public
Value and the Digital Economy, by Usman W. Chohan, whom they say is the first to
apply the public value theory to the study of the digital economy. The digital econ-
omy must engage various stakeholders—politicians, civil society, and the private

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sector—to co-create value, while the introduction of (virtual) public managers into
the process seems to be critical. While the reviewers agree with Chohan that in the
pandemic-catalyzed “digital present” public managers must deploy the “value-seek-
ing imagination,” they also tackle the limitations of the book, especially ambiguous
definitions of “public value,” a lack of empirical evidence to deliberate the digital
economy’s ability to co-create value, and the generalization of the findings from
developed countries to those of emerging economies that have been on a rapidly
rising trajectory in developing the digital economy despite their different political,
cultural, and social institutions. The review fits nicely into the Special Issue as a
complement to its theme.
Indeed, the global governance of emerging technologies faces great challenges
on numerous fronts. In addition to their impacts and uncertainty, technologies them-
selves have raised legal, ethical, political, and economic questions, which also mat-
ter a great deal for effective international cooperation in their governance. Falkner
and Jaspers (2012) argue that decisions about whether to rely on existing laws,
regulations, and codes or promulgate new regulations versus whether toopt for a
technology-focused regulatory system or reckon on sector-based or product-specific
regulatory regimes must be made at the national level. Beyond national boundaries,
other important elements shaping the discourse of global technology governance
include political conflicts, national R&D preferences, various risk perceptions, dif-
ferent extents of market maturity, and competing societal values. Engaging techno-
logically less-developed countries, strengthening governance capacity building in
anticipatory governance (Guston, 2014; Nelson etal., 2021) and technology audit-
ing, and promoting trust among diverse stakeholders globally are key factors to
achieving effective and sustainable global governance of emerging technologies for
socially desirable outcomes.
In summary, determining how to ensure that agreed-upon terms and codes are
deployed in an unbiased manner and how to translate these principles into opera-
tional practices in and across different contexts yields additional directions for future
research. Yet emerging technologies are moving targets (Rotole etal., 2015), and so
is the global governance of these technologies.
Acknowledgements The editing of this Special Issue was partially supported by the Synthetic Biology
Biosafety Research project under the National Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry
of Science and Technology of China (2020YFA0908600) and the China National Office for Philosophy
and Social Sciences project, The Modernization of the System Governing China’s Scientific and Techno-
logical Innovation (20&ZD074). The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the
positions of the funders.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report.

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