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Biotechnology and governance in Australia and Sweden: Path dependency or institutional convergence?

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Author

Summary, in English

The development of new generic technologies occurs within traditional structures of industry - government interaction, but also unleashes a process of 'creative destruction' generating new institutional patterns. This article, focusing on biotechnology, describes and compares policy processes and institutional arrangements in Australia and Sweden. The Swedish biotechnology sector displays a pattern of fragmentation and relatively weak state steering. Australia, by contrast, has implemented a set of comparatively coordinated regulatory and other measures to foster the growth of biotechnology. This observation contradicts the characterisation of Sweden as a 'strong state' economy, and challenges the depiction of Australia as lacking in state steering capacity. The relative open-endedness of the search in these countries for a mode of regulation of biotechnology suggests that the role of the state in economic restructuring today is fundamentally distinct from that of earlier periods.

Department/s

  • Research Policy Institute (RPI)

Publishing year

2003

Language

English

Pages

25-43

Publication/Series

Australian Journal of Political Science

Volume

38

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1036-1146