Governing Nanotechnologies in Europe: Human Rights, Soft Law, and Corporate Social Responsibility

Scholars and decision-makers share the need of renewed regulatory frameworks for emerging technologies. Broadly speaking, a consensus has become obvious about the complexity of such frameworks, which are formed by a plurality of regulatory sources and instruments ranging, e.g., from hard national legislation to soft voluntary codes of conducts and guidelines. Indeed, soft law is often considered the most salient feature of this regulatory landscape and is sometimes enthusiastically acknowledged as an adaptive, flexible and democratic regulatory instrument or, on the contrary, regarded as an ‘injury to the rule of law’. By referring to the legal trends in the European Union and by drawing on examples from the fields of nanotechnology and synthetic biology, the paper discusses the insufficiency of the command-and-control regulation and introduces the notion of epistemic and scientific uncertainty as a proper perspective to frame the interplay of hard and soft law as well the role of the latter in the broader governance framework.