Safety-by-design as a governance problem

Abstract Developments in nanotechnology oblige technology regulators and other stakeholders to manage unfamiliar and unpredictable human health and environmental risks. When technological achievement stretches the limits of understanding of risk and safety, the desire to ensure protection can produce unnecessarily prohibitive and costly regulatory policy. This lack of knowledge, referred within this paper as ‘governance gaps,’ requires safety-by-design to overcome lingering governance challenges. However, the fundamentals of safety-by-design are not developed. We propose translating the methodological framing of safety-by-design and related nanotechnology risk governance into a mathematical framing of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to illustrate how safety-by-design might be operationalized. This framing provides a more thorough understanding of technology governance gaps and can help focusing technology development on implementable and safe alternatives. Ultimately, addressing each governance gap can help technology development and technology risk governance keep pace with one another, thereby allowing innovation to flourish while protecting society from undue risks.