SWF and Open Lunar Foundation Host Workshop on Norms of Behavior in Space

Friday, December 13, 2019

The Secure World Foundation and the Open Lunar Foundation held a workshop on Tuesday, December 10th in Washington DC to explore the meaning, purpose, and life cycle of norms and their use in preserving the global commons and in fostering and maintaining global public goods, especially in the context of norms for activities in the space environment. The purpose of the workshop was to identify shared perspectives, trends, and open questions, and to inform research priorities for SWF’s emerging governance challenges program in 2020. 

Norms are generally understood to be a standard of behavior that actors are held to, and have an ‘oughtness’ in their conception. Norm serve as a “principle of right action binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior.” However, in the near Earth environment norms are not well understood and even less well utilized. Likewise, In the lunar environment, norms will play an even more important role given the limited legal framework available to early actors. 

Twenty four participants from private industry, government, and academia participated in the workshop. Slides from the workshop are available here. A short report from the workshop will be posted online in the near future.