A Socio-Legal Analysis of the Emergence of Global Neurotechnology Governance and Its Epistemic Community

Abstract

This thesis argues that epistemic communities can act as global governors that drive and shape the emergence of new spaces of governance. Using the transnational governance of neurotechnologies as a case study, this analysis examines how epistemic communities can govern, arguing they do so through methods more diffused than more coercive or formal institutional forms of influence. In this case, actors use productive power to regulate other global governors, acting as meta-regulators.

Although transnational lawmaking for neurotechnologies has accelerated in recent years, few state, private, or civil society actors have become meaningfully involved in these processes. Instead, as this research illustrates, an epistemic community has become the predominant entity driving lawmaking transnationally; albeit in ways that reflect its own internal tensions. This study uses a processual approach to capture these sociological phenomena, applying socio-legal analytic tools that draw on ecological theory. The findings of the analysis are the results of a two-and-a-half-year exploratory case study. Data were collected from interviews with elites and participant observation across multiple transnational sites, supplemented by an analysis of documents and archival records from these sites and actors involved.

The thematic analysis here highlights how an epistemic community can become a key governor in a space where there is a relative absence of better-known global governance actors. It also illuminates significant types of interactions occurring over time and across space. Interactions among actors seeking to influence the governance of neurotechnologies not only produce lawmaking narratives and norms, but also contests between those narratives and norms. Accordingly, the emergent governance space has come to reflect these contestations, becoming institutionalised through various competitive and cooperative dynamics.

Scrutiny of these dynamics reveals the epistemic community's connections to and positions within international organisations and other transnational regulators. Through these interactions, the community has produced two competing lawmaking agendas, responsible innovation and 'neurorights,' which have animated influential governance actors and coalitions, including the OECD, UNESCO, and the UN Human Rights Council. Across the thesis chapters, the ecological analysis attends to how power operates in shaping boundaries, topology, stability, and participation in neurotechnology governance agendas. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the politics of productive power in the case and in emergent global governance, as well as highlighting limitations of the study and opportunities for future research.