Taking a different approach to biobanks - genetic databases that combine genetic information derived from blood samples with personal data about environment, medical history, lifestyle or genealogy, this book draws attention to their political and governance implications. It argues that for biobanks to be created, shaped, maintained, and to operate properly, a number of interrelated conditions need to exist, from legal environment to funding mechanisms and social acceptance.

The book takes a comparative focus, with chapters on biobanks in Iceland, Estonia, Scandinavia, France, US, Japan, UK, Germany, Australia and Israel, and is divided into three parts which:

• introduce the conceptual framework that underpins the volume
• focus on biobanks as a challenge for governance
• emphasize biobanks as a tool and site for governance.

This groundbreaking book makes clear that biobanks are a phenomenon that cannot be disconnected from considerations of power, politics, and the reshaping of current practices in governance. It will be a valuable read for scholars and students of genetics, bioethics, risk, public health and the sociology of health and illness.

Taking a different approach to biobanks - genetic databases that combine genetic information derived from blood samples with personal data about environment, medical history, lifestyle or genealogy, this book draws attention to their political and governance implications. It argues that for biobanks to be created, shaped, maintained, and to operate properly, a number of interrelated conditions need to exist, from legal environment to funding mechanisms and social acceptance.

The book takes a comparative focus, with chapters on biobanks in Iceland, Estonia, Scandinavia, France, US, Japan, UK, Germany, Australia and Israel, and is divided into three parts which:

• introduce the conceptual framework that underpins the volume
• focus on biobanks as a challenge for governance
• emphasize biobanks as a tool and site for governance.

This groundbreaking book makes clear that biobanks are a phenomenon that cannot be disconnected from considerations of power, politics, and the reshaping of current practices in governance. It will be a valuable read for scholars and students of genetics, bioethics, risk, public health and the sociology of health and illness.

Rejecting the notion that policy analysis and planning are value-free technical endeavors, an argumentative approach takes into account the ways that policy is affected by other factors, including culture, discourse, and emotion. The contributors to this new collection consider how far argumentative policy analysis has come during the past two decades and how its theories continue to be refined through engagement with current thinking in social theory and with the real-life challenges facing contemporary policy makers.

The approach speaks in particular to the limits of rationalistic, technoscientific policy making in the complex, unpredictable world of the early twenty-first century. These limits have been starkly illustrated by responses to events such as the environmental crisis, the near collapse of the world economy, and the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Addressing topics including deliberative democracy, collaborative planning, new media, rhetoric, policy frames, and transformative learning, the essays shed new light on the ways that policy is communicatively created, conveyed, understood, and implemented. Taken together, they show argumentative policy inquiry to be an urgently needed approach to policy analysis and planning.

Contributors. Giovanni Attili, Hubertus Buchstein, Stephen Coleman, John S. Dryzek, Frank Fischer, Herbert Gottweis, Steven Griggs, Mary Hawkesworth, Patsy Healey, Carolyn M. Hendriks, David Howarth, Dirk Jorke, Alan Mandell, Leonie Sandercock, Vivien A. Schmidt, Sanford F. Schram