The Rob Walton College of Global Futures to advance Principled Innovation at 2026 Governance of Emerging Technologies and Science Conference
Timiebi Aganaba, Assistant Professor in the School for the Future Innovation in Society within the Rob Walton College of Global Futures, is principal investigator on Engineering Trust Under Scale: A Space Governance Lab Workshop for GETS 2026, a new $4,200 grant awarded by the Rob Walton College of Global Futures Principled Innovation Research and Teaching Grant.
Says Aganaba: The Engineering Trust Under Scale workshop positions Principled Innovation as a practical framework for understanding space governance under technological scale by leading participants in identifying value conflicts, incorporating diverse stakeholder perspectives, and redesigning governance approaches in response to real-world constraints. It also encourages participants to move beyond compliance-based thinking toward deeper questions of accountability, legitimacy, and institutional design, equipping them to engage responsibly with emerging technological systems.
A brief summary follows:
As space activities expand into commercial, environmental, and data infrastructures, governance challenges increasingly center on legitimacy, inclusion, and institutional reliability under conditions of scale, rather than technical regulation alone. Governance systems often fail not because rules are absent, but because they do not function effectively in practice across distributed and rapidly evolving environments. Emerging research within the Space Governance Lab suggests that this failure is structural. Governance systems are shaped by how they define who can participate, what counts as harm, and what forms of knowledge are recognized. As space activities scale, many harms—cumulative, intergenerational, or relational—fall outside these definitions, limiting what governance systems can perceive and address. These challenges intersect with longstanding debates in property and commons theory, particularly regarding how shared resources are defined and governed. As space activities expand, questions of who defines what counts as a resource—and whose interests are recognized—become increasingly central. The GETS conference provides an important interdisciplinary venue for introducing early-career researchers to Principled Innovation as a framework for developing coordinated, high-quality contributions that address these complexities and critically explore our collective space futures.
Aganaba offers the following acknowledgments:
The Rob Walton College of Global Futures, ASU Office of University Affairs, the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, the Parsons School of Design at The New School.