Translating knowledge of the genome into clinical applications will require the construction of large searchable repositories of phenotypic and genotypic information. These collections of DNA and biological information call for the sustained involvement of large numbers of research participants, and raise a host of difficult legal and ethical issues. Historically, the commercial value of medical records, bioinformation, and gene patents emerged after the regulatory structures of bioethics came into place. For some bioethicists and policy-makers, the norm of ‘benefit sharing’ has become a necessary corrective for a system seen to facilitate the appropriation of a valuable resource from research participants.

While benefit sharing should be applauded insofar as it attempts to submit relations of biocapital to new claims of distributive justice, the project is likely to fail both as a normative and practical matter without greater attention to issues of procedural justice: in particular, the constitution of distributive agency over resources for genomic research. Governance mechanisms in human subjects research are often justified as protections of research subjects from potential harms, but they also tacitly order the power to make distributive decisions over valuable collections of informational, genetic, and social capital. Benefit sharing as a discourse tends to settle political questions of distributive agency—the power to make distributive choices—in ways that exclude research participants from governing the resources they help to create.

The notion of ‘partnership governance’ presents a productive avenue for achieving a normative shift from ‘benefit sharing,’ a distributive value, to ‘power sharing,’ a procedural one. If implemented, partnership governance would empower participants to exert a share in distributive decision-making in return for contributing to the economic and social capital of the project. But it would also assign research participants with correlative obligations to other capital partners such as funders and researchers, and duties to uphold the charitable missions of biobanks. Legal principles and forms from within charitable trust law and corporate governance could help achieve ‘partnership governance,’ and address obvious challenges such as agency gaps and collective action problems.

Technological innovation is a double-edged and contested arena. On one hand, it has brought us global communications and unprecedented access to information for those connected to the Internet. The last 100 years have seen the widespread deployment of household electricity, potable tap water, and a host of transportation options in the Global North. Technologies allow us to manipulate matter at the subatomic level, and to observe the far reaches of the universe. Humans have been to the moon, discovered life in the deep oceans, and nearly eradicated polio. Clearly, technologies are a powerful force in the world, and innovation is seen as key to economic prosperity in the 21st century.

On the other hand, climate change threatens the survival of many species, and the livelihoods of much of the future human population. Further, it is far from alone in terms of problems to which large-scale technological deployment has contributed. Asbestos, DES, DDT, and endocrine disruptors are among the many technologies where some, perhaps many, of the negative human and environmental consequences that have ensued could conceivably have been mitigated. Technological governance is clearly an area for possible improvement, and emerging technologies present a particularly attractive leverage point, as they have yet to develop substantial sociotechnical and institutional momentum.

The dominant approach to technological governance in the U.S. is characterized by a combination of market forces, public support for basic science and targeted initiatives, and a "science-based" approach to risk assessment and regulation. In recent years, the EU has emphasized the Precautionary Principle as an alternative governance basis, and there has been much debate about the respective merits of precaution and science. This dissertation argues that much of that discourse misses a much larger point: The prevailing approaches to the governance of emerging technologies in both the EU and the U.S. are inadequate, in that they are excessively focused on relatively narrow conceptions of risk, do not provide a coherent framework for considering risks, benefits, and distributional tradeoffs simultaneously, and tend more towards reactivity than proactivity, particularly in terms of the production of public goods.

These failings systematically produce a series of governance gaps in the context of a market economy. Specifically, the rate of innovation tends to outstrip existing capacities for risk assessment, especially in the case of emerging fields such as nanotechnology. Second, the capacity lag in oversight tends to undermine public confidence and trust. Third, markets alone tend to underproduce public goods, a problem that is particularly acute in arenas with substantial environmental externalities. Finally, relevant existing institutions in the U.S. generally lack a systematic capability to incorporate foresight into current policy-making in a meaningful way.

This dissertation proposes a combination of the concepts of anticipatory governance and sustainability as a basis for addressing these governance gaps. A strong theme of transatlantic translation runs throughout; many of the recent developments in technology assessment have occurred in Europe, and require substantial adaptation to function effectively in the American sociopolitical environment. Anticipatory governance provides culturally appropriate philosophical underpinning and process; sustainability offers substantive direction. The goal is not to develop overarching theory, but to operationalize these ideas, to put the combination into practice with respect to the governance gaps articulated above. The empirical investigations of the first two gaps employ nanoscale technologies as cases to explore specific instances of the general question "what do we need to anticipate" with respect to risks and public perceptions, respectively. The inquiries regarding the third and fourth gaps are more exploratory. In terms of the production of public goods through innovation, how do the combination of historical patterns and market structures help demark the boundaries of a "constructive intervention space" for public investment? With respect to institutional capacities, how can the combination of anticipatory governance and sustainability assist in evaluating current programs, and designing solutions for the future?

Several conclusions with direct relevance to policy, strategy, and governance regarding emerging technologies result. First, existing decision-making paradigms need improvement in order to consider risk-benefit tradeoffs adequately, and to provide guidance to actors on the ground in the prolonged absence of scientific and regulatory certainty. Second, effective public engagement programs in the U.S. must complement and feed into existing structures of representative democracy, rather than attempting to circumvent or replace them. Third, the purported "Valley of Death" between invention and market penetration is particularly acute with respect to the production of environmental public goods, as the barriers to entry in these sectors are a poor match for private funding incentives, implying that this is a constructive area for increased levels of public intervention. Finally, the combination of anticipatory governance and sustainability provides a framework that highlights the fragmented nature of U.S. policy responses to the problem of technological governance, and does indeed provide a solid foundation for the design of future institutions, while recognizing that their implementation will be dynamic, contested, and theoretically impure.

International agreements on issues related to human health and the environment often enlist notions of scientific principles or "science-based" decision making in order to constrain the realm of permissible causal argument within the an area of international law. As a result, parties to these agreements often wage conflicts over what is or is not "scientific," and what kinds of decisions are or are not "based on" science - with important ramifications for the sovereign regulatory rights of the parties. This dissertation explores this process of contesting and constituting epistemic authority in international health and environmental law, and makes a modest attempt to suggest pathways to constructing more broadly legitimate international practices for validating knowledge claims for taking collective international action.

It does this through a detailed, mixed-method exploration of the practices employed by a number of critical international institutions to structure who is empowered to know, and to govern, in this relatively nascent international regulatory sphere. Through a mixture of negotiation observation, participant interviews, document review, and case law analysis, this dissertation tracks threads of cognitive and legal authority within and between science advisory bodies, domestic and international regulatory bodies, and domestic and international courts. By engaging with actual, as opposed to idealized sources of cognitive and legal authority in international affairs, it seeks to both illuminate the complexities of the relationship between science, sovereignty and the rule of law in global regulation, and to point the way to more broadly accepted practices of knowledge-making and law-making in global regulation.

I have approached this issue in three different ways: an in-depth analysis of the techniques used by two different international adjudicative bodies for evaluating scientific claims; a comparative examination of the expertise-related administrative law of the United States and European Community with an eye to the emergence of international norms; and a detailed examination of the birth of a global agency and the rise of its authoritative discourse of risk analysis. All three of these studies take interdisciplinary approaches to addressing these issues, supplementing legal analysis of key treaties and cases with important insights and analytical techniques from the field of science and technology studies (STS). Each chapter addresses distinct but interrelated issues, and makes a separate contribution to our understanding of the relationship between epistemic and regulatory authority in global governance.