Sustainability in regulating biotechnology: A new form of knowledge in regulatory co-production?

We analyse the extent to which sustainable development influences the co-production of regulations that target new technologies in the European Union (EU). We start by identifying the conventional forms of knowledge that serve as inputs into that co-productive process, namely scientific, societal and legal knowledge. We show that sustainability-related propositions have gained considerable traction in the regulation of genetic modification (GM) in the EU. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that sustainability cannot be reduced to scientific or societal knowledge. As far as the overlap between sustainability knowledge and legal knowledge is concerned, it is undeniable that sustainable development is deeply embedded into EU regulation; however, treating sustainable development solely as an element of the law does not capture the material influence that it exerts on society and technology, not to speak of its evolutionary flexibility. It follows that it would be best to treat sustainability as a separate input into the co-creation process.