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Short abstract:

Emerging concerns about the chemical universe fall between risk governance institutions, feeding into a creeping crisis. We propose hormonal infrastructures as an analytical framework to build adaptive capacities for more responsible chemical practices across multiple levels.

Long abstract:

Chemicals of emerging concern contribute to major diseases and biodiversity loss, while chemical pollution overall surpasses safe planetary boundaries. Traditional risk management practices, regulations and even academic research struggle to keep pace with novel chemical entities and the diverse scales of toxic endpoints, fueling a creeping crisis where toxic effects on life-sustaining systems remain insufficiently addressed until it is too late.

To navigate this complex, scientifically uncertain and socio-politically ambiguous chemical landscape, previous research has emphasized the need for institutional reforms, while noting on "molecular bureaucracy" as the deeply entrenched gameboard that conditions regulatory moves and chemical imagination. We propose hormonal infrastructures as a missing metaphor, epistemically bridging the scales of evidence-focused chemical risk governance with those of toxic unknown-unknowns represented by endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Our empirical work turns to recent policy documents, interviews and case studies to examine the institutional dynamics and underlying rationale of chemical governance in Finland, a national case implementing EU regulations while undergoing reforms.

We critically analyze how scientific accounts and political strategies co-produce certain kinds of chemical realities, innovation traps and institutional lock-ins, thus restricting or enabling certain kinds of policy interventions. In other words, our integrative approach aims to pinpoint controversies that reveal opportunities for more responsible chemical practices within and between formal and informal institutions of risk governance to address this creeping crisis of multi-chemical exposures.