Justin Greaves

The development, regulation and use of biopesticides for integrated pest management.

Over the past 50 years, crop protection has relied heavily on synthetic chemical pesticides, but their availability is now declining as a result of new legislation and the evolution of resistance in pest populations. Therefore, alternative pest management tactics are needed. Biopesticides are pest management agents based on living micro-organisms or natural products. They have proven potential for pest management and they are being used across the world. However, they are regulated by systems designed originally for chemical pesticides that have created market entry barriers by imposing burdensome costs on the biopesticide industry. There are also significant technical barriers to making biopesticides more effective. In the European Union, a greater emphasis on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) as part of agricultural policy may lead to innovations in the way that biopesticides are regulated. There are also new opportunities for developing biopesticides in IPM by combining ecological science with post-genomics technologies. The new biopesticide products that will result from this research will bring with them new regulatory and economic challenges that must be addressed through joint working between social and natural scientists, policy makers and industry.

Biopesticides: pest management and regulation.

Biological controls that utilize natural predation, parasitism or other natural mechanisms, is an environmentally friendly alternative to chemical pesticides. Chemical pesticide methods are becoming less readily available due to increasing resistance problems and the prohibition of some substances. This book addresses the challenges of insufficient information and imperfectly understood regulatory processes in using biopesticides. It takes an interdisciplinary approach providing internationally comparative analyses on the registration of biopesticides and debates future biopesticide practices.

Endemic cattle diseases: comparative epidemiology and governance

Cattle are infected by a community of endemic pathogens with different epidemiological properties that invoke different managerial and governmental responses. We present characteristics of pathogens that influence their ability to persist in the UK, and describe a qualitative framework of factors that influence the political response to a livestock disease. We develop simple transmission models for three pathogens (bovine viral diarrhoea virus, bovine herpesvirus and Mycobacterium avium spp. paratuberculosis) using observed cattle movements, and compare the outcomes to an extensive dataset. The results demonstrate that the epidemiology of the three pathogens is determined by different aspects of within- and between-farm processes, which has economic, legal and political implications for control. We consider how these pathogens, and Mycobacterium bovis (the agent of bovine tuberculosis), may be classified by the process by which they persist and by their political profile. We further consider the dynamic interaction of these classifications with pathogen prevalence and with the action taken by the government.

Crossing the Interdisciplinary Divide: Political Science and Biological Science

This article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration can offer significant intellectual gains to political science in terms of methodological insights, questioning received assumptions and providing new perspectives on subject fields. Collaboration with natural scientists has been less common than collaboration with social scientists, but can be intellectually more rewarding. Interdisciplinary work with biological scientists can be especially valuable given the history of links between the two subjects and the similarity of some of the methodological challenges faced. The authors have been involved in two projects with biological scientists and this has led them critically to explore issues relating to the philosophy of science, in particular the similarities and differences between social and natural science, focusing on three issues: the problem of agency, the experimental research design and the individualistic fallacy. It is argued that interdisciplinary research can be fostered through shared understandings of what constitutes ‘justified beliefs’. Political science can help natural scientists to understand a more sophisticated understanding of the policy process. Such research brings a number of practical challenges and the authors explain how they have sought to overcome them.

Biopesticides, Regulatory Innovation and the Regulatory State

This article analyses regulatory innovation. It considers, in particular, how a regulatory environmental agency has been encouraged to innovate in the area of biopesticides. The literature on regulatory innovation is reviewed, the discussion situated within Morans theory of the regulatory state. It considers to what extent innovation has occurred within the agency, looking at its proactive stance, and how unusually for a regulatory body it has negotiated new policy spaces in which to operate. The article looks at the contextual drivers and also the exogenous and endogenous pressures behind the innovation. It shows how the executive has intervened in order to promote more use of biopesticides and how pressure is also being exerted within the regulatory authority. By using the existing literature and empirical evidence a framework is outlined for explaining the likelihood of regulatory innovation occurring in regulatory agencies.

Continuity or Change in Business Representation in Britain? An Assessment of the Heseltine Initiatives of the 1990s

Britain has a fragmented, overlapping, and underresourced system of business representation. Attempts at reform, however, have proved difficult and largely unsuccessful. A coherent and logical system is relevant, in terms of both an effective dialogue between government and business, and the promotion of competitiveness and productivity. Through interviews and archival evidence, I look at how government has attempted to reform business associations. The main focus is the Heseltine initiatives of the 1990s: I outline the various initiatives taken, reveal the extent to which policy represented continuity or change, and consider whether the initiatives were effective. I show that they had a degree of success but that they would have made greater impact if they had been sustained over a longer period of time. A consideration of the historical context, moreover, suggests there may be limits to the role of government intervention in business association reform.

Pressure Politics: Business as Usual but an Expanding Private Sector

Part of the conventional wisdom about pressure groups is that the principal targets of their activity are public bodies, broadly defined to include central government, local government and quasi-governmental agencies of various kinds. Of course, there are ambiguous cases such as the Church of England, which has within it groupings reflecting different views, but as the established Church it is in one sense part of the state. However, as the state has shed some of its functions, with public tasks being carried out by private providers, the target of group activity has shifted to include private entities such as firms. This has almost certainly contributed to an expansion in pressure group activity over the last few years, arguably longer. It is particularly apparent in the food chain, where power has shifted down from producers and manufacturers to retailers. Not only does the oligopolistic and the oligopsonistic position of the major food retailers, such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s, give them considerable economic power, but also they are seen as close to the consumer.