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Perspectives On Risk Governance and Regulation Of Nanotechnology Applied To Food and Biofuels
Considering the absence of regulation, we intend to evaluate the structure of plural forms of nanotechnology risk governance in these two sectors. Law will have to modify and realign its normative forms, expanding to other areas of knowledge, pursuing to develop the management of nanotechnology risks transdisciplinarily, permeated by the rereading of Natural Law constructed by John Finnis, as an ethical conductor to justify it.
In which measure the organization of legal norms in networks, with formatting dialogues between sources of Law, may be a regulatory alternative to nanotechnology?
It is adopted the theory-dialectical perspective of construction of the legal phenomenon in networks, developed by François Ost and Michel van de Kerchove (De la pyramide au réseau? 2000). In the dialectical theory of Law in networks it’s proposed the deliberation of structural changes in the legal system that undergo an incomplete paradigm transition, in which the linear verticality of the pyramidal hierarchy of legal system and the regulation by the State tend to make room for a complex network of regulation and governance, that involves a plurality of state and non-state actors.
Law goes through a time of transformation in which the influence of transnational regulation, technical regulation and private self-regulation to replace the state standards are widened, forming a complex network that involves both the traditional mandatory state standards, provided of sanction, and the new manifestations of Law, composed of non-mandatory rules, the soft law, disconnected from the legislative process. The state monopoly on the conduct of Law loses space to legal pluralism and to diversity of social actors (companies, institutions of standardization and certification, NGOs) and to the conduction of decision-making processes, with new forms of governance.