Agile Approaches for Governing Emerging Technologies

Conference jointly organized with the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation and the OECD Directorate for Public Governance

This workshop will take stock of experience and build on the recent advances in the understanding of agile and anticipatory governance and frameworks for its implementation. It will explore how governments and industry can design and implement responsible innovation and develop relevant practices to deal with emerging technologies, whether linked to digital technologies, life sciences, or nanotechnologies.

The conference aims to yield the synergies between communities working on agile governance from different angles to share and develop anticipatory policies and practices. Therefore, the meeting will assemble participants from business, government and academic sectors, explicitly connecting up science and innovation policy approaches to ethics and governance. 

Among other things, the workshop aims to build novel approaches to the implementation of key pieces of OECD guidance in the field, including the new OECD Framework for Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies welcomed by Science and Technology Ministers in April 2024, and also the OECD Recommendation for Agile Regulation to Harness Innovation.

Overall, the goal of the conference will be to review and assess existing practices, in particular in terms of policy delivery, and to explore potential developments in order to balance the promises of innovation by a collective management of its consequences.

Programm:

9am-10.30am - Session 1: Forward-looking approaches for emerging technology governance
To remain prepared for future technological developments and uncertainties it is critical for both government and industry to develop a forward-looking evidence base – through techniques such as foresight, technology assessment and other strategic intelligence methods – to ground the governance of emerging technologies. This session will focus on:

• The relevance and application of different forward-looking tools and approaches.
• How the application and efficacy of these approaches can be enhanced.
• Processes for building constructive governance mechanisms in acknowledgement of future uncertainty.

10.30am-11am Coffee Break

11am-12.30pm - Session 2: Informing more effective governance along the innovation journey and policy cycle
The risks posed by, and our approaches to govern, emerging technologies differ based on the maturity and type of technology, amongst others. Broad frameworks and strategies can help provide policymakers useful practical guidance on the most effective mechanisms to govern these technologies. This session will focus on:

• Building synergies between the innovation journey and policy cycle to assist governance discussions between government and industry.
• Presenting an initial mapping of agile governance mechanisms against the innovation journey and policy cycle.
• Discussing and critiquing further strategies for bridging the gap between technological and policy development. 

12.30pm-1.30pm : Lunch

1.30pm-3pm - Session 3: Tackling the challenges of technological convergence for governance and regulation
Technology convergence poses significant unaddressed challenges for anticipatory governance and policy. The increasing convergence of technologies -- especially across the realms of digital, material and biological -- is resulting in exciting new synergies that promise strides in economy and society, but also entail new challenges centering on biosecurity and safety, global competition and equity, and public acceptance. STI policy and policies across Ministries will need to address the challenges of technology convergence both from the viewpoint of specific technology applications and as a general matter. As a result, this session will focus on:

• The particular challenges that emerge from the convergence of technologies. 
• The implications of these challenges for responsible technological development and the actions of policymakers.
• Evolving approaches to managing responsible innovation with technological convergence.

3pm-4.30pm - Session 4: The role of ethics in guiding the development of emerging technologies
Ethics as a mode of governance has a central role to play in the development of emerging technologies. These approaches tend to be non-binding, consisting of shared and recognised practices within communities of practice. The thrust is rather to shape individual behaviours rather than guide organizations. Innovations on ethics-based approaches to technology governance consist in the carry-over of ethics into the marketplace, and also the adoption of technology-driven approaches like “ethics by design”. Also, the mechanisms (e.g. randomly selected citizens committees, appointed and specialized groups experts) and the stakeholders involved in the design of ethical codes matter a lot in contexts in which no-well established pre-existing community of practitioners do exist.  This session will focus on:

• How ethics, or lack thereof, currently influences emerging technology design, development and deployment.
• The role of ethics in informing policies and helping achieve governance objectives.
• Approaches to develop ethics as a more effective mechanisms for governance and therefore the necessary organizational arrangements that are requested both in the industry and in the government to design and implement ethical principles.

4.30pm-5pm: Coffee Break

5pm-6.30pm - Session 5: Using soft law to bridge business and government objectives on emerging technologies
Soft Law is increasingly being used as a flexible approach to governance for emerging technologies. This notion encompasses a number of practices — e.g. eliciting recommendations, naming and shaming, proposing non-bidding standards, publishing information and assessment, etc — allowing public authorities to influence industrial practices. It is expected to incentivize self-regulatory efforts by the industry, or to be a vector of experimentation for regulatory solution. However, both the effectiveness of these approaches and the associated dependence on industry to execute are often brought into questions. This session will focus on:

• How effective soft laws have been effective in achieving their objectives thus far.
• The extend to which soft laws can and should be further used, and the best ways to establish soft laws to align government and industry incentives.
• How should non-binding (soft laws) and binding regulations complement each other to build a more effective governance system.

6.30pm-7.30pm Cocktail

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