BioGovernance Commons and China's Role in Global Risk Governance

This volume addresses the critical question of how scientific collaboration can remain possible in an era of deepening geopolitical tension, without denying difference or enforcing false consensus. It is the outcome of an ongoing, real transnational forum on biogovernance commons, and offers a rare, inside account of the experimental effort to rebuild trust in the governance of the life sciences across the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and beyond.

Drawing on sustained dialogue among scientists, ethicists, lawyers, and policy scholars, the volume introduces the idea of the ‘commons’ as a practice of commoning: the ongoing work of making differences intelligible, negotiating conflict, and sustaining cooperation under constraint. Through richly grounded case studies—from genetic data governance and biobanking to biosecurity, CRISPR, and global health—it shows how regulatory impasse is often produced not by incompatible values, but by fractured relations, politicised language, and unequal epistemic authority.

Neither a blueprint for harmonisation nor a polemic about China, the volume demonstrates how meaningful collaboration can be rebuilt when formal channels narrow. At once empirically revealing and conceptually innovative, it speaks to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking new ways to govern science responsibly in a divided world.

Joy Y. Zhang is Professor of Sociology with a first degree in medicine. She is also the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice (GSEJ) at the University of Kent. An internationally recognised expert in the transnational governance of scientific risk, her research focuses on four major scientific powers—China, India, the UK, and the US. Zhang has initiated several landmark programmes, including the BioGovernance Commons (2021), the founding of GSEJ (2022)—whose research has informed G20 and G7 policy discussions—and, most recently, O.D.E.SS.I., a global “odyssey” for public engagement with the life sciences.)

Kathleen M. Vogel is Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She is Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She has served in the U.S. Department of State as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and as William C. Foster Fellow in the Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. She received her PhD in development economics from the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Ben Ouagrham-Gormley has conducted research and written on such topics as nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons proliferation, organization and management of weapons programmes, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) trafficking in states of the former Soviet Union, biosecurity and bioterrorism, bio-dissuasion, export controls, defence industry conversion, transfer mechanisms of WMD expertise, and redirection of WMD experts.

Lei Ruipeng, trained in philosophy, is Professor at the Advanced Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Electric Science and Technology, Chengdu, China and Director of the Research Center for Science and Technology Ethics Governance. Her research focuses on philosophy of life sciences, bioethics, and technology ethics governance.