The Governance of Emerging Disruptive Technologies by the convenors: Araz Taeihagh, Michael Howlett, M Ramesh, National University of Singapore and Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Recent emerging technologies -- such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous weapon systems, blockchain technology, ridesharing, the Internet of Things – have triggered changes that are threatening existing markets, social and political orders. The heightened pace of these emerging technological innovations poses serious challenges to governments, which must cope with the disruptive speed and scope of the transformations occurring in many areas of social life.

To enhance the benefits from these novel technologies while minimizing the adverse risks they pose, governments around the world need to better understand the scope and depth of the risks posed and design and establish regulatory and governance structures which effectively deal with these challenges.
The special issue addresses these and other relevant aspects of governing emerging disruptive technologies including policy design strategies for facilitating positive socio-technical transitions and policy capacity building to address the challenges these technologies bring.

Key issues to be covered in the issue include:

• Detailed studies of the risks, uncertainties and unintended consequences new technologies pose to economies and societies;
• Comparative and case study examination of the diverse types of governance responses taken to date to address the risks posed by these technologies;
• Theoretically informed empirical studies of the new regulatory strategies, institutions and discourses emerging as a response to new technologies around the globe and their fit with current orthodoxies of regulatory governance;
• Analysis of the (in)efficacy of traditional approaches to regulating and governing disruptive technologies and of the experiences of government with new approaches;
• Examinations and analysis of the relations between new technologies with incumbent industries in various domains and the role of actors such as technological and instrument constituencies in improving or exacerbating policy and regulatory designs and governance.

The Call for Papers is open to all disciplines, approaches and perspectives and we welcome theoretical and empirical papers using diverse qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches to the topics listed
above as well as upon other relevant issues related to the subject.

Please send proposals (500 words) along with authors’ names, institutional affiliations, and list of relevant publications to Araz Taeihagh at govemergingtech@gmail.com no later than September 30, 2018.