Brown Bag Seminar
28 Oct 2025 , 12:30 - 13:30 | Download Calendar Event (ICS)
Anna Nussbaum Auditorium and online, Hallerstrasse 6, Bern, Switzerland

Future Flight Governance: Socio-legal, Environmental and Economic Approaches to Emerging Air Technologies

For many years, hierarchical governance of aviation has, via incremental refinement of (trans)national rules and regulations, contributed to extraordinary safety and security performance. With the emergence of drone systems, embodying very different technologies, applications and accessibility, these governance arrangements have faced specific adaptation pressures. Indeed, in this chapter, we argue that drones have created the conditions for airspace to be considered as a form of common-pool resource, with correspondingly different governance challenges and possibilities. Making novel use of Ostrom’s design principles as a heuristic for reflecting on the UK experience, the chapter identifies critical themes for better understanding the current tentative state of drone governance. The chapter then addresses wider themes, including the importance of understanding the relational characteristics of drone systems, the emergence of more collective governance approaches and the challenge for hierarchical actors in overcoming potential epistemic ‘lock-in’ when reconciling their traditional approach to this new landscape. The chapter concludes with some important questions for future work.

Read the book here: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Air-and-Space-Law/book-series/SPACELAW?srsltid=AfmBOoqIV-9gsbNUZhXVoWY9HgA2OvzAdSvJbbzVxbQEc18yOIZjJJxm

About the speaker

Dr Mariela de Amstalden is an interdisciplinary legal scholar working on law, technology and innovation, global economic governance, and intellectual property rights. She is currently a UK Royal Society/Leverhulme Trust/British Academy APEX Award grantee (Academies Partnership in Supporting Excellence in Cross-disciplinary research; 2024-2026) at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (2024-2025) and at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (2026). Formerly, she was an associate professor in Law and Technology at the University of Exeter, Faculty of Law (2023-2024) and an assistant professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at the University of Birmingham, School of Law School (2021-2023; tenured). Being admitted to the bar, she has also practiced law, primarily in international dispute settlement and legal forensics, and acted as court clerk. She has also advised Swiss and British governments on law reform matters related to their respective national legal frameworks with a focus on food technology, public health and international trade. She regularly consults with the bar, the private sector, industry and the not-for-profit sector.

Credits to Prof Michael Lewis (University of Bath, School of Management), Dr Adam Packer (University of Birmingham, School of Engineering) and Prof Michael Lewis (Bath) as well as Routledge.