Our global society faces a large number of challenges that are, for various reasons, rather unruly. What is the role of legislation to achieve a decisive and effective approach to these mostly cross-border challenges and problems, especially those in the fields of energy, security, innovation, environment, health and climate? Which instruments in the regulatory and legislative palette can contribute most effectively, given the global scale of the challenges and the complexity of the chains in which individuals, groups, companies and organisations operate?
Connecting character
This question consists of three related issues around the function of legislation in our current society. First, new issues and new solutions lead to new undesirable activities of people and organisations, which must be combated with new legislation. In addition, existing legislation is often an obstacle to a lot of innovative developments. Finally, modern developments, for example in ICT, are very useful for making legislation and enforcement more effective. Scientific issues in the context of this question are about function, construction and impact of legislation in society. This is partly a knowledge question, but actually also a design question: how to achieve better legislation? The societal challenges in this question fully cover the three components mentioned above: overcoming new problems, preventing legislation from hampering innovation, and making legislation more effective with new techniques and solutions. The application areas for these issues are diverse: environment, security, innovation, energy and climate, but also mobility, technology, entrepreneurship, organisational forms, development cooperation, and so on. Constructing effective legal frameworks for all these societal issues creates opportunities for entrepreneurs, consultants and NGOs to start applying those solutions to other societal challenges and in other countries.
