Ms Tess Whitton1
1Melbourne Law School
Adaptive governance (AG) is a burgeoning approach to address the socio-technical innovation challenges of health research and technology governance. One challenge relates to developing socially-acceptable technology. Considering AG for COVID tracing apps, Blasimme and Vayena suggested that the approach could ‘help earn’ social licence (2020). In 2011, other researchers suggested that AG would deliver an integrated approach to governance capable of evolution in ‘fair and respectful ways’ (O’Doherty et al). There is research value in disentangling similarities and divergences in AG theory through a literature review.
This paper will present the findings of a rigorous narrative literature review, drawing on McDougall’s critical interpretive review method for bioethics (2015). A value of a critical interpretive review is to understand and assess the development of concepts broadly across the literature to theorize on the literature it represents and in doing so, the process creates new knowledge. A search of socio-legal databases was conducted to gather literature on adaptive governance and analysed to address the research question “how can AG in health innovation and research literature be understood?” Drawing on the historical development, the review considered:
- what are the differences in AG health literatures?
- what are key aims or promises of AG? and
- what research and/or governance processes underlie these promises?
The review provides a qualitative assessment with respect to the overall research question and the state of the theory. The findings will inform further research and application of the approach.
Biography:
Tess is a PhD student at HeLEX@Melbourne (Health Law and Emerging Technology) at Melbourne Law School. Her thesis considers an adaptive governance approach for human germline genome editing regulation as a complex case example of novel governance design for systems capable of learning for socio-technical innovation and change.