Les Levidow

Assumptions in the European Union biofuels policy: frictions with experiences in Germany, Brazil and Mozambique

The biofuel project is an agro-industrial development and politically contested policy process where governments increasingly become global actors. European Union (EU) biofuels policy rests upon arguments about societal benefits of three main kinds – namely, environmental protection (especially greenhouse gas savings), energy security and rural development, especially in the global South. Each argument involves optimistic assumptions about what the putative benefits mean and how they can be fulfilled. After examining those assumptions, we compare them with experiences in three countries – Germany, Brazil and Mozambique – which have various links to each other and to the EU through biofuels. In those case studies, there are fundamental contradictions between EU policy assumptions and practices in the real world, involving frictional encounters among biofuel promoters as well as with people adversely affected. Such contradictions may intensify with the future rise of biofuels and so warrant systematic attention.

Science and governance in Europe: Lessons from the case of agricultural biotechnology

Amid a wider debate over the European Unions democratic deficit, ‘science and governance’ has attracted particular attention. Science and technology have become a special problem because they are routinely cited as an objective basis for policy. Through dominant models of science and technology, policy frameworks serve to promote and conceal socio-political agendas, while pre-empting debate on alternative futures. Technological-market imperatives are invoked to mandate a single path towards economic survival. Expert advice is implicitly equated with ‘science’, in turn invoked as if scientific knowledge were a value-neutral basis for regulatory decisions. This has led to a legitimacy crisis. As governments search for a remedy, rhetorics of openness have been tagged onto the dominant models, rather than superseding them. Consequently, underlying tensions emerge within proposed reforms, as illustrated by the case of agricultural biotechnology. If the aim is to relegitimise decision-making, it will be necessary to change the institutions responsible for promoting innovation and regulating risks, in particular their preconceptions of science, technology and public concerns. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Genetically modified crops in the European Union: regulatory conflicts as precautionary opportunities

The first genetically modified crops and foods to be approved for commercial use in the European Union have prompted intense controversy. Food retailers and processors have been forced to take up the concerns voiced by their customers. New networks of groups have formed to oppose the technology. In response to these pressures, regulators who approved the products have had to reconsider questions they had previously dismissed or officially resolved. Governments have devised more precautionary measures of various kinds. For example, they have increased the burden of evidence for demonstrating safety, have broadened the practical definition of the ‘adverse effects’ which must be prevented, and have devised marketstage precautions for such effects. These extra measures manage the risk debate as well as any risks. In such ways, the technocratic model of European harmonization is being challenged and superseded. This may allow differences in national practices to be viewed as valuable expert resources for a different harmonization model, rather than as deviations from a universal rational norm. Regulatory conflicts offer precautionary opportunities, which could lead to more flexible and democratic procedures. Theoretical perspectives – on risk, uncertainty, precaution, European integration, expertise and the internal market – help illuminate these possibilities.

The Bio-Economy Concept and Knowledge Base in a Public Goods and Farmer Perspective

Currently an industrial perspective dominates the EU policy framework for a European bio-economy. The Commission’s proposal on the bio-economy emphasises greater resource-efficiency, largely within an industrial perspective on global economic competitiveness, benefiting capital-intensive industries at higher levels of the value chain. However a responsible bio-economy must initially address the sustainable use of resources. Many farmers are not only commodity producers but also providers of quality food and managers of the eco-system. A public goods-oriented bio-economy emphasises agro-ecological methods, organic and low (external) input farming systems, ecosystem services, social innovation in multi-stakeholder collective practices and joint production of knowledge. The potential of farmers and SMEs to contribute to innovation must be fully recognised. This approach recognises the importance of local knowledge enhancing local capabilities, while also accommodating diversity and complexity. Therefore the bio-economy concept should have a much broader scope than the dominant one in European Commission innovation policy. Socio-economic research is needed to inform strategies, pathways and stakeholder cooperation towards sustainability goals.

Recasting “Substantial Equivalence”: Transatlantic Governance of GM Food

When intense public controversy erupted around agricultural biotechnology in the late 1990s, critics found opportunities to challenge risk assessment criteria and test methods for genetically modified (GM) products. In relation to GM food, they criticized the concept of substantial equivalence, which European Union and United States regulators had adopted as the basis for a harmonized, science-based approach to risk assessment. Competing policy agendas framed scientific uncertainty in different ways. Substantial equivalence was contested and eventually recast to accommodate some criticisms. To explain how the concept changed, this article links two analytical perspectives. Regulatory-science perspectives illuminate how the scientification of politics and politicization of science led to shifts in the boundary between science and policy. Governance perspectives illuminate how the collective problem for policy was redefined to provide a new common ground for some stakeholders. Overall, substantial equivalence was recast to govern the social conflict and address legitimacy problems of regulatory procedures.

Democratizing technology—or technologizing democracy? Regulating agricultural biotechnology in Europe

Abstract The case of agricultural biotechnology illustrates how a technological choice reifies its own problem definition. The inherent socio-agronomic problems of intensive monoculture are reified as genetic defects, which therefore must be corrected at the molecular level. Biotechnology structures a dependency which is reified as a social relation between things—such as between crop genetics and plant pests. In these ways, socio-political choices take the form of “discoveries”, e.g. external threats and/or molecular-level opportunities found in nature. Within its self-perpetuating logic, any limit or failure must be remedied by more of the same solutions, e.g. through a genetic-pesticide treadmill. In response to public controversy, the state has devised various participatory exercises, which have a double-edged role. They provide a wider audience for public debate, while setting the terms for expert regulatory procedures, generally within a neoliberal “risk–benefit” framework. Safety regulation reifies biotechnological risk as an attribute of novel genetic characteristics, conceptually delinked from the practices which they facilitate. Environmental harm is defined in biotechnological terms, e.g. by emphasizing potential costs to intensive monoculture. Such procedures may be said to biotechnologize democracy. To democratize technology, then, would mean to challenge the prevalent forms of both “technology” and “democracy”.

Proactive and reactive approaches to risk regulation: The case of biotechnology☆

Abstract The evolution of regulatory systems to control the development and use of products containing live genetically manipulated organisms (GMOs) is raising important questions about the nature and desirability of proactive approaches to risk regulation and their impact on industrial innovation. This article attempts to elucidate some of the complex issues underlying pressures for so-called product-based (as opposed to process-based) approaches to the regulation of GMOs, to relate the product/process argument to the more general objectives of promoting reactive or proactive approaches to risk regulation and to compare the situation of GMOs with broader issues of precautionary risk regulation. In conclusion the implications of these issues for the future development of the biotechnology-based industries and for risk regulation in general are discussed.

How biotechnology regulation sets a risk/ethics boundary

In public debate over agricultural biotechnology, at issue hasbeen its self-proclaimed aim of further industrializingagriculture. Using languages of ’risk‘, critics and proponentshave engaged in an implicit ethics debate on the direction oftechnoscientific development. Critics have challenged thebiotechnological R&D agenda for attributing socio-agronomicproblems to genetic deficiencies, while perpetuating the hazardsof intensive monoculture. They diagnosed ominous links betweentechnological dependency and tangible harm from biotechnologyproducts.In response to scientific and public concerns, theEuropean Community enacted precautionary legislation for theintentional release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Inits implementation, choices for managing and investigatingbiotechnological risk involve an implicit environmental ethics.Yet the official policy language downplays the inherent valuejudgments, by portraying risk regulation as a matter of’objective‘ science.In parallel with safety regulation, thestate has devised an official bioethics that judges where to’draw the line‘ in applying biotechnological knowledge, as ifthe science itself were value-free. Bioethics may also judge howto ’balance‘ risks and benefits, as if their definition were notan issue. This form of ethics serves to compensate for theunacknowledged value-choices and institutional commitmentsalready embedded in R&D priorities.Thus the state separates’risk‘ and ’ethics‘, while assigning both realms to specialists.The risk/ethics boundary encourages public deference to theexpert assessments of both safety regulators and professionalethicists. Biotechnology embodies a contentious model of controlover nature and society, yet this issue becomes displaced andfragmented into various administrative controls. At stake arethe prospects for democratizing the problem-definitions thatguide R&D priorities.

European Union regulation of agri-biotechnology: precautionary links between science, expertise and policy

Despite various institutional reforms in the European Union (EU), regulatory procedures for genetically modified (GM) products are still held up by disagreements among experts; claims about a products safety often correspond to a narrower account of precaution than broader counter-claims from objectors. In the EU, we argue, these conflicts have given practical meaning to the concept of precaution, rather than any explicit interpretation of an a priori principle. Through dynamic tensions between the various claims and accounts of precaution, EU regulatory-expert procedures have identified and addressed more scientific uncertainties than before. Yet decisions about GM products still face legitimacy problems, because they arise fundamentally from the great burden placed on science as the basis for societal choices about agri-biotechnology. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Divergent Paradigms of European Agro-Food Innovation The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) as an R&D Agenda

The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) has gained prominence as an agricultural R&D agenda of the European Union. Specific research policies are justified as necessary to create a KBBE for societal progress. Playing the role of a master narrative, the KBBE attracts rival visions; each favours a different diagnosis of unsustainable agriculture and its remedies in agro-food innovation. Each vision links a technoscientific paradigm with a quality paradigm: the dominant life sciences vision combines converging technologies with decomposability, while a marginal one combines agro-ecology with integral product integrity. From these divergent visions, rival stakeholder networks contend for influence over research policies and priorities, especially within the Framework Programme 7 (FP7) on Food, Agriculture, Fisheries and Biotechnology (FAFB), which has aimed to promote a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy. Although the FAFB programme has favoured a life sciences vision, agro-ecological approaches have gained a presence, thus overcoming their general lock-out from agricultural research agendas. In their own way, each rival paradigm emphasises the need for collective systems to gather information for linking producers with users, as a rationale for the public sector to fund distinctive research priorities.