Alison Mohr

Seeking citizens' views on GM crops: experiences from the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand

discussions about whether to permit the commercial planting of genetically modified (GM) crops in a number of developed, and to a lesser extent, developing countries.1 In the European Union (EU), this debate led to a five-year moratorium (voluntarily agreed to by industry and government) on the introduction of commercial GM crops from 1999 to 2004. Even at the end of this period, regulations are extraordinarily tight, and GM companies have yet to fully enter the EU market. In the United States, the largest producer of GM crops, there has been virtually no organized public opposition. This long-running dispute also raises the issue of how the scientific community evaluates the safety of GM crops and foods and how various countries decide the extent to which they will invoke the precautionary principle.2 The procedures through which such decisions are being made invoke a variety of citizen-based deliberative approaches. Beginning with Australia in the late 1990s, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand each conducted such processes with the ostensive goal of incorporating a wider public appraisal of the scientific evidence. Examining the experiences of these three nations are particularly useful for comparing varying approaches to public deliberation, as they all took a different format. In addition, although the political and cultural circumstances of the three case studies differed, the manner of handling these opportunities were surprisingly similar. The three approaches manifested as a series of public debates and focus group studies in the United Kingdom, known as “GM Nation?”; a consensus conference that was undertaken in Australia; SEEKING CITIZENS’ VIEWS ON

Of being seen to do the right thing: Provisional findings from the first Australian consensus conference on Gene Technology in the Food Chain

This is an initial evaluation of the first Australian consensus conference held in Canberra in March 1999. It illustrates lessons learnt from staging this method of participatory technology assessment (pTA) by applying an analytical framework consisting of three basic dimensions: social context; institutional context; and pTA arrangement. While Australia stands to benefit from implementing this new style of decision-making, there are obvious hurdles that must be overcome. When transplanting the consensus conference model into a new social context, it is apparent that a period of anticipatory socialisation is needed so that organisers and participants are clear about what can and cannot be achieved. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Challenge clusters facing LCA in environmental decision-making—what we can learn from biofuels

PurposeBioenergy is increasingly used to help meet greenhouse gas (GHG) and renewable energy targets. However, bioenergy’s sustainability has been questioned, resulting in increasing use of life cycle assessment (LCA). Bioenergy systems are global and complex, and market forces can result in significant changes, relevant to LCA and policy. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the complexities associated with LCA, with particular focus on bioenergy and associated policy development, so that its use can more effectively inform policymakers.MethodsThe review is based on the results from a series of workshops focused on bioenergy life cycle assessment. Expert submissions were compiled and categorized within the first two workshops. Over 100 issues emerged. Accounting for redundancies and close similarities in the list, this reduced to around 60 challenges, many of which are deeply interrelated. Some of these issues were then explored further at a policy-facing workshop in London, UK. The authors applied a rigorous approach to categorize the challenges identified to be at the intersection of biofuels/bioenergy LCA and policy.Results and discussionThe credibility of LCA is core to its use in policy. Even LCAs that comply with ISO standards and policy and regulatory instruments leave a great deal of scope for interpretation and flexibility. Within the bioenergy sector, this has led to frustration and at times a lack of obvious direction. This paper identifies the main challenge clusters: overarching issues, application and practice and value and ethical judgments. Many of these are reflective of the transition from application of LCA to assess individual products or systems to the wider approach that is becoming more common. Uncertainty in impact assessment strongly influences planning and compliance due to challenges in assigning accountability, and communicating the inherent complexity and uncertainty within bioenergy is becoming of greater importance.ConclusionsThe emergence of LCA in bioenergy governance is particularly significant because other sectors are likely to transition to similar governance models. LCA is being stretched to accommodate complex and broad policy-relevant questions, seeking to incorporate externalities that have major implications for long-term sustainability. As policy increasingly relies on LCA, the strains placed on the methodology are becoming both clearer and impedimentary. The implications for energy policy, and in particular bioenergy, are large.

Against the Stream: Moving Public Engagement on Nanotechnologies Upstream

Nanotechnologies are materials and devices conceived, developed and applied on a scale of one thousand millionth of a metre. Nanoscale materials differ not only in size but also in behaviour to their larger-scale counterparts. Nanomaterials have a greater surface area relative to material produced on a larger scale that potentially renders them more chemically reactive, thereby altering certain molecular properties. Matter at the nanoscale is also susceptible to behavioural changes dominated by quantum effects, which may affect the optical, electrical and magnetic behaviour of nanomaterials. Nanotechnologies are intrinsically multidisciplinary; amalgamations of materials science, chemistry, physics, engineering, life and medical sciences.

A social licence for science: capturing the public or co-constructing research?

The “social licence to operate” has been invoked in science policy discussions including the 2007 Universal Ethical Code for scientists issued by the UK Government Office for Science. Drawing from sociological research on social licence and STS interventions in science policy, the authors explore the relevance of expectations of a social licence for scientific research and scientific contributions to public decision-making, and what might be involved in seeking to create one. The process of seeking a social licence is not the same as trying to create public or community acceptance for a project whose boundaries and aims have already been fully defined prior to engagement. Such attempts to “capture” the public might be successful from time to time but their legitimacy is open to question especially where their engagement with alternative research futures is “thin”. Contrasting a national dialogue on stem cells with the early history of research into bioenergy, we argue that social licence activities need to be open to a “thicker” engagement with the social. Co-constructing a licence suggests a reciprocal relationship between the social and the scientific with obligations for public and private institutions that shape and are shaped by science, rather than just science alone.

Representing the Public in Public Engagement: The Case of the 2008 UK Stem Cell Dialogue

Engaging the public as architects, rather than simply as subjects or objects, of the substantive content of interactive dialogue may help fulfill the democratic potential of public engagement.

Publics in the making: mediating different methods of engagement and the publics these construct : commentary on: "Technologies of democracy: experiments and demonstrations".

The potential for public engagement to democratise science has come under increasing scrutiny amid concerns that conflicting motivations have led to confusion about what engagement means to those who mediate science and publics. This raises important yet relatively unexplored questions regarding how publics are constituted by different forms of engagement used by intermediary scholars and other actors. It is possible to identify at least two possible ‘rationalities of mediation’ that mobilise different versions of the public and the roles they are assumed to play, as ‘citizens’ or ‘users’, in discussions around technology. However, combinations of rationalities are found in practice and these have significant implications for the ‘new’ scientific democracy.

Working with bacteria and putting bacteria to work: The biopolitics of synthetic biology for energy in the United Kingdom

The UK government has made significant investment into so called ‘fourth-generation’ biofuel technologies. These biofuels are based on engineering the metabolic pathways of bacteria in order to create products compatible with existing infrastructure. Bacteria play an important role in what is promoted as a potentially new biological industrial revolution, which could address some of the negative environmental legacies of the last. This article presents results from ethnographic research with synthetic biologists who are challenged with balancing the curiosity-driven and intrinsically fulfilling scientific task of working with bacteria, alongside the policy-driven task of putting bacteria to work for extrinsic economic gains. In addition, the scientists also have to balance these demands with a new research governance framework, Responsible Research and Innovation, which envisions technoscientific innovation will be responsive to societal concerns and work in collaboration with stakeholders and members of the public. Major themes emerging from the ethnographic research revolve around stewardship, care, responsibility and agency. An overall conflict surfaces between individual agents assuming responsibility for ‘stewarding’ bacteria, against funding systems and structures imposing responsibility for economic growth. We discuss these findings against the theoretical backdrop of a new concept of ‘energopolitics’ and an anthropology of ethics and responsibility.

Book Review: The Social Shaping of Technology(Second Edition):

meaningful status as Australian citizens had by then already been removed both at State and Federal levels. Finally, the jurisprudential importance of the 1992 landmark Mabo decision is reassessed and its legal limits underlined. Stressing that native title had continued to exist only because there had been no valid parliamentary or governmental action to extinguish it and noting that State and Commonwealth governments could still override the existence of native title, subject to other Acts of Parliament, the authors indicate how limited a departure this decision had represented in point of law. Again, it was a matter of acknowledging the importance of the event as a political and symbolic watershed rather than a jurisprudential one, because the Mabo decision had prompted the Federal parliament into action and because it had recognized native title as a legal interest that had de facto transformed the position of Aboriginal people as Australian citizens. The history of the progressive expansion of Aboriginal land rights in the legal and judiciary practices (and its implications on the notion of the special status of indigenous citizens) is then contextualized in the gradual evolution of an administrative and political framework organized in order to deal with the special position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples. What emerges is a tantalizingly slow history of continuous adjustments and renegotiations of the controversial relationship between the citizenship of Aboriginal people and the emerging concept of special Aboriginal citizenship. This work deals with a feature of Australian political history that diminishes its democratic tradition, yet is no black armband history. The Commonwealth Constitution, the founding document of the Australian nation and state, is not to be reproached for the treatment of Aborigines. Since the constitutional base was sound, such a situation could be positively rectified. Moreover, the book speaks from a point of view that recognizes the irreversibility of many of the achievements of the past two decades. The citizenship of Aboriginal people has been progressively given a more meaningful significance. The attainment of civil rights has only been a step in what the authors perceive as a continuous progression towards self-determination and, ultimately, a negotiated form of indigenous sovereignty within the Australian polity. The central argument is based on a reading of the Constitution that departs strongly from traditional interpretations. However, the focus on the ‘letter’ of the Constitution tends to downplay the historical fact that the document had received dramatically racist ‘readings’ during the first six decades of the twentieth century. The slightly celebratory tone adopted by the book, published on the eve of the centenary of Federation, will not convince those who believe that racism is a constituent feature of the Australian experience.