Abstract
This article addresses a key question emerging from this project based at the University of Minnesota: the fundamental capacity of government to engage in “dynamic oversight” of emergent technologies. This conception of oversight requires additional or new types of capacity for government agencies that must arbitrate conflicts and endow any outcomes with necessary democratic legitimacy. Rethinking oversight thus also requires consideration of the fundamental design and organizational capacity of the regulatory regime in the democratic state.
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Notes
Not everyone is willing to wholly disregard the unknown unknown. One could make a fairly persuasive argument that by creating organizational practices designed to mitigate unexpected events, the literature on HROs directly deals with unknown unknowns (see Weick and Sutcliffe 2007). Moreover, in the more than forty years since Alvin Toffler’s (1970) Future Shock, the futurist movement continues to present works that imagine a society hundred of years in the future.
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Acknowledgments
Preparation of this article was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #0608791, “NIRT: Evaluating Oversight Models for Active Nanostructures and Nanosystems: Learning from Past Technologies in a Societal Context” (Principal Investi-gator: S. M. Wolf; Co-PIs: E. Kokkoli, J. Kuzma, J. Paradise, and G. Ramachandran). Preparation of this article was also supported in part by National Science Foundation Award No. SES-0609078, “NIRT: Nanotechnology in the Public Interest: Regulatory Challenges, Capacity, and Policy Recommendations” (PI: Christopher Bosso; Co-Investigators: Jacqueline Isaacs, W. D. Kay, Ronald Sandler & Ahmed Busnaina). The views expressed in this article belong to the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.
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Bosso, C., DeLeo, R.A. & Kay, W.D. Reinventing oversight in the twenty-first century: the question of capacity. J Nanopart Res 13, 1435–1448 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-011-0232-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-011-0232-3