The Governance of Synthetic Biology Under the Convention on Biological Diversity: The Role of Expert Advice

International public policy at the environment-technology interface depends on the availability of expert advice. The credibility and legitimacy of such advice in turn depends on experts enjoying autonomy from national governments. We assess the linkage between expert advice and state interests for the case of synthetic biology under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Synthetic biology is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of recent, disruptive innovations in the life sciences. Techniques associated with synthetic biology are presently at different stages of the R&D pipeline, yet they carry enormous implications for biological diversity, presenting both novel opportunities for conservation and sustainable use, as well as potentially unprecedented biosafety risks. We estimate a Structural Topic Model for expert deliberations on synthetic biology under the CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA). Such models can uncover the latent semantic structure of large bodies of text while using document metadata as a predictor for the frequencies with which specific topics are being discussed. We use patenting activity as a proxy for state interests in international biotechnology regulation. We link SBSTTA records to experts and experts to nominating governments in order to assess the extent to which state interests predict experts’ priority issues. We find that experts nominated by governments with strong patenting activities within their jurisdictions are significantly more likely to raise issues related to conducive regulatory conditions than experts nominated by the governments of low-innovation countries. This suggests that the autonomy of expert advice on synthetic biology within SBSTTA is limited. Our results imply deficiencies with the science-policy interface due to the influence of governments over procedural aspects of institutionalized expert advice. Research for this paper is supported by the Research Council of Lithuania