ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the movement from national to international to global governance, in order to identify the elements necessary for global bioethics governance. It argues that global bioethics is increasingly incorporated in the emerging mechanisms and procedures of global governance. Bioethics governance at the international level faces a different type of problem. The need for bioethics governance emerged because policy-makers were confronted with a new type of problem. Policy-makers regard bioethics as a mechanism to transcend diverging cultural and moral perspectives and to debate issues in a common language so that tensions can be mediated and opposing ethical positions overcome. The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (UDHGHR) is credited as the first impetus to global bioethics governance. In 2006, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) proposed core competencies for healthcare ethics consultation.
