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

Science and Public Policy October 2001 0302-3427/01/050345-16 US$08.00 Beech Tree Publishing 2001 345

Science and Public Policy, volume 28, number 5, October 2001, pages 345 –360, Beech Tree Publishing, 10 Watford Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 2EP, England

Science and governance

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

Les Levidow and Claire Marris

Amid a wider debate over the European Union’s democratic deficit, ‘science and governance’ has attracted particular attention. Science and tech-nology 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. Tech- nological–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, underly-ing tensions emerge within proposed reforms, as illustrated by the case of agricultural biotechnol-ogy. If the aim is to relegitimise decision-making, it will be necessary to change the institutions re-sponsible for promoting innovation and regulat-ing risks, in particular their preconceptions of science, technology and public concerns. Les Levidow is at the Centre for Technology Strategy, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK; Tel: +44 1908 653672/652103; Fax: +44 1908 652175/654825; E-mail: [email protected]; Tel home: +44 20 7482 0266; Claire Marris is at INRA-STEPE, 65 Boulevard de Brande-bourg, F-94205 Ivry-sur-Seine, France; Tel: +33 1 49 59 69 38; E-mail: [email protected].

HETORICS OF OPENNESS have become prominent in European policy debates over science and technology since the late 1990s.

At national and European Union (EU) levels, there are frequent calls for greater transparency, participa-tion, dialogue, and so on. More than merely rhetori-cal, these terms can play several roles at once, for instance, delay contentious decisions, mediate con-flicts, broaden official expertise, and open up policy agendas.

At the EU level, openness has been linked with a wider debate over governance. This in turn responds to criticisms that the EU generally suffers from a democratic deficit. Within this debate science is identified as a special problem, as manifest in sepa-rate documents and conferences called ‘science and governance’.

Why are science and technology treated as a spe-cial problem of governance? How is the problem conceptualised in policy debates and institutional reforms? How do official concepts, such as ‘science-based regulation’ or the ‘precautionary principle’, relate to the underlying problems? To answer such questions, this article makes the following argument.

Through dominant models of science and tech-nology, policy frameworks serve to promote and conceal socio-political agendas, while pre-empting debate on alternative futures. In some cases this behaviour has led to a legitimacy crisis. Yet the problem is officially diagnosed as public distrust of regulatory institutions or even of science as such. As government searches for a remedy, rhetorics of openness have been tagged on to the dominant mod-els, rather than superseding them.

To elaborate that argument, first we analyse the overall policy debate on ‘science and governance’.

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Science and governance in Europe

346 Science and Public Policy October 2001

Then we illustrate the analysis by citing and linking some results of four research projects on agricultural biotechnology in Europe (see under Acknowledge-ments). Finally we draw conclusions about the pros-pects and tensions for institutional reform.

Here we understand ‘governance’ as describing processes which broaden and change the meaning of government. As an analytical framework, govern-ance has been defined as collective action resulting from interactions of multiple, mutually influencing actors, both within government and beyond its for-mal authority. Such processes tend to blur bounda-ries, often resulting in shared responsibilities among government, private organisations and voluntary ones (Stoker, 1998). In these ways, the legitimacy of decisions becomes dependent on new relationships which may lie beyond government control.

‘Science and governance’ issues

There is a long history of invoking technological imperatives to promote a single development model, while pre-empting alternatives. Particular technolo-gies have been represented as essential for social progress, even for economic survival. Since the 1980s, technological imperatives have been linked more closely with ‘competitiveness’. These links have been made by industry lobbyists to promote information technology and biotechnology in par-ticular. Such arguments have been taken up by some national governments and the European Commis-sion, as if they were simply adapting society to ob-jective constraints (Balanyá et al, 2000).

Technological-market imperatives

Since the early 1990s, the European Commission has adopted a particular discourse which defines specific socio-technological trajectories as the opti-mal or essential means to create wealth. This is illus-trated by the 1993 White Paper on “Growth,

competitiveness, employment”, which counselled general adaptation to inexorable competitive pres-sures: “The pressure of the market-place is spreading and growing, obliging businesses to exploit every opportunity available to increase productivity and efficiency” (CEC, 1993a, pages 92–93).

Moreover this White Paper characterised entire industries as “dependent” on specific technologies for their future survival. It cited information and communication technologies (ICT) as such an im-perative, given “the penetration of ICT-dependent products and services into everyday activities”. Therefore “Structural adaptability is becoming a ma-jor prerequisite for economic success” (CEC, 1993a, pages 92–93).

Moreover, in promoting a single trajectory, it conflated traditional biological methods and genetic modification as essential tools for the future. According to its prognosis, biotechnology has a direct impact on sectors which comprise 9% of value-added in the EU, the global revenues of the biotechnology industry would reach 100bn ECU by the year 2000, and “perhaps only modern biotech-nology has the potential to provide significant and viable thrusts …”. In this way, entire industries became rhetorically ‘based on biotechnology’, that is, economically dependent on the products of genetic modification (CEC, 1993a, pages 100–103). Such economic dependence has been difficult to verify empirically, or was even contradicted by later developments.1

Nevertheless, this determinist discourse has per-meated all EU policy documents issued over the last decade. For example, a later communication diagno-ses an increasing “gap” in R&D investment between Europe and its competitors (Japan and the United States), as if this posed a future threat (CEC, 2000a, page 4):

“More than ever, investing in research and technological development offers the most promise for the future. In Europe, however, the situation is worrying. Without concerted action to rectify this the current trend could lead to a loss of growth and competitiveness in an in-creasingly global economy. The leeway to be made up on the other technological powers in the world will grow still further. And Europe might not successfully achieve the transition to a knowledge-based economy.”

In a more recent consultation paper, setting out a “strategic vision of life sciences and biotechnology”, the Commission somewhat opens up its earlier fram-ing of the issue. In the case of biotechnology, cit i-zens are invited to discuss the question, “How may the twin objectives of competitiveness of EU agriculture and the trend towards sustainable prac-tices be reconciled?” (CEC, 2001a, page 7). Yet both objectives are presumed to depend on biotech- nological innovation. Although described as a belief,

Les Levidow is a Research Fellow at the Open University, where he has been studying the safety regulation and inno-vation of genetically modified crops. This research encom-passes the European Union, USA and their trade conflicts. For details, see the Biotechnology Policy Group webpage, <http://www-tec.open.ac.uk/cts/bpg.htm>. He also has been Managing Editor of Science as Culture since its inception in 1987. He is co-editor of several books, including: Science, Technology and the Labour Process; Anti-Racist Science Teaching; and Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society (Free Association Books, 1983; 1987; 1989). Claire Marris has a PhD in plant molecular biology and an MSc in Science Policy. For the last ten years she has con-ducted, in the UK and in France, social science research on risk, in particular in agricultural biotechnology. Her interests focus on the construction of scientific knowledge, the use of scientific expertise in risk regulation, and the impact of sci-ence and risk policy on public perceptions. She is particularly interested in the role that so-called lay-people could play in challenging the implicit framings that underlay science-based regulation and the production of scientific knowledge.


Science and Public Policy October 2001 347

this dependence is not questioned or opened up for debate:

“Many commentators believe that life sciences and biotechnology, following Information Technology, will be the basis for the next wave of knowledge-based economies with huge potential for improving the quality of life through the creation of highly skilled jobs, improved competitiveness and economic growth in Europe, better health care and new tools to address the different challenges such as protection of the environment.” (CEC, 2001a, page 5)

“The European Union must harness these new technologies at the core of the knowledge-based economy.” (CEC, 2001a, page 7)

If such predictions and imperatives are accepted as objective reality, they can operate as self-fulfilling prophecies. Yet these supposed technical impera-tives hide implicit values. Consequently, we argue, the claims that R&D and regulatory policies serve the public interest have lost credibility, while their prescriptive agendas have been increasingly chal-lenged as value-laden choices for society.

In response to such challenges, governments and other official bodies have sought to open up their policy-making procedures. Discourses of ‘science and governance’ or ‘stakeholder dialogue’ have gained prominence, especially in Europe. According to some observers, such as the Governance and Sci-ence Group, this new rhetoric of openness responds to problems which governments have created for themselves:

“They are responding to a legitimacy crisis — over prescriptive uses of science, monolithic notions of rationality and deterministic ideas about progress. Technoscientific R&D is driven by pressures to commoditize resources. Gov-ernment policy is driven by the dual aims of ‘wealth creation’ and ‘the quality of life’ — as if these were readily compatible.” (Ravetz, 2001)

Shift in deficit models

The new rhetorics are still largely based on mis-diagnosing the problem at stake for ‘science and so-ciety’. During the 1980s and early 1990s, policy makers, industry lobbyists, and some social science researchers adopted a deficit model, which assumed that public opposition to new techno-scientific de-velopments was founded on fear and ignorance among lay people. Proposed solutions therefore emphasised the need for better communication from scientists to the public.

That premise guided the ‘Eurobarometer’ initia-tive in the biotechnology sector. In successive

questionnaire surveys (1991, 1993, 1996, 1999), re-searchers sought to measure changes in public knowledge about, and support for, biotechnology. Eurobarometer surveys have looked for possible cor-relations between individual attitudes and knowl-edge, for instance, by asking interviewees whether such-and-such application is associated with ‘bio-technology’ and/or ‘genetic engineering’.

While apparently measuring scientific understand-ing by the citizen, this interview question really tested product recognition in the consumer. Respon-dents were constructed solely as consumers ignorant about the need to adopt biotechnology for economic survival (Hill and Michael, 1998, page 213; Davison et al, 1997). The Eurobarometer also includes a ‘biotechnology quiz’, which aims to measure knowledge of ‘objective facts’, as defined by scientists.

In these ways, the Eurobarometer surveys con-structed the public according to the deficit model, which assumes that factual ignorance explains opposition to biotechnology. Such surveys were aimed at designing better strategies to communicate scientific knowledge to lay people, to increase their understanding and thus to allay their fears.

This diagnosis — a public misunderstanding of science — had already been largely discredited by scholars, in particular from the field of sociology of science (Wynne, 1995). However, such critics were largely ignored until the managers of the Euro-barometer survey themselves conceded that their studies showed no direct link between knowledge and concern (Bauer et al, 1997; Gaskell et al, 1998). Indeed, contrary to initial assumptions, the results could be interpreted to suggest that more knowledge led to less support for biotechnologies.

Explanations for the problem eventually shifted away from public ignorance to mistrust.2 This new account generally diagnosed a mistrust of regulatory authorities and of scientific advice to government, though sometimes also a mistrust in science as a whole. By contrast, excessive or unwarranted trust is rarely identified as a problem.

Trust became a central notion in the discourse of policy makers, promoters of new technologies, and some social scientists. This diagnosis is emphasised in a recent report on Science and Society :

During the 1980s and early 1990s, policy makers, industry lobbyists, and some social science researchers adopted a deficit model, which assumed that public opposition to new techno-scientific developments was based on fear and ignorance



“Society’s relationship with science is in a critical phase. Science today is exciting, and full of opportunities. Yet public confidence in scien-tific advice to Government has been rocked by BSE; and many people are uneasy about the rapid advance of areas such as biotechnology and IT — even though for everyday purposes they take science and technology for granted. This crisis of confidence is of great importance both to British society and to British science” (UK House of Lords, 2000, page 5).

Similar discourses have become standard at the European Commission also. For example, according to the Commissioner for Research (Busquin, 2000):

“[Recent crises] are quite rightly giving rise to public concern and could threaten confidence in science. If we do not want this disenchant-ment to result in obscurantism and regression, the scientific debate must be thrown open.”

Together with this diagnostic shift from public igno-rance to loss of trust, official discourses increasingly propose ‘better debate’ or ‘stakeholder dialogue’ as the solution — not simply ‘better communication’. The House of Lords report for example devotes a whole chapter to “engaging the public” (UK House of Lords, 2000, pages 37–49).

This openness is further illustrated by recent proposals by the Commission. According to its diagnosis :

“… the image that Europeans have of science is also less positive than it was. Scientific pro-gress seems to inspire as much anguish as hope, and the gap between the scientific world and the people at large is growing … It is time therefore for an in-depth debate to define a pol-icy approach in order to reinvigorate research in Europe” (CEC, 2000a, page 5).

In order to achieve this goal, the Commission pro-poses “the development of new and sustained forms of dialogue between researchers and other social operators”, e.g. consensus conferences (CEC, 2000a, page 20).3

At the same time, the new focus on a crisis of ‘confidence’ has not entirely abandoned preconcep-tions about misplaced fears or public ignorance. As cited above, the Science and Society report mentions that people take science and technology for granted in their everyday life, as if this were somehow inconsistent with public mistrust in regulatory science. Commissioner Busquin’s reference to “obscurantism” goes even further.

On the one hand, offic ial proposals for ‘stake-holder dialogue’ are put forward as a novel ap-proach, developed from lessons learnt from past paternalistic institutional behaviour. On the other hand, they continue to frame the problem as a gap

between scientific knowledge and public anxiety — presumably a gap between rational judgements and irrational concerns. ‘Public debate’ and ‘input from society’ are sought mainly as a means to restore the legitimacy of science and technology, not as a means to reconsider innovation processes.

This framing is revealed even more explicitly in a recent call for proposals by the Commission. Char-acteristically entitled “Raising public awareness of science and technology”, it thus identifies inade-quate public awareness as the problem to address (CEC, 2001b). The call notably encourages propos-als for “dialogue with the public”, defined as “mechanisms for involving the public in science policy debates”. So far, so good, but the main objectives are defined as follows:

“… to bridge the gap between science in its European dimension and the public. In particu-lar, the activities envisaged are aimed at raising public awareness for scientific activities and technological deve lopments undertaken at the European level … This should help European citizens to understand better both the beneficial impact of science and technology on their day-to-day lives as well as limitations and possible implications of research and technological de-velopments.” (CEC, 2001b).

The call also encourages research proposals which will “identify best practice and develop and demon-strate new approaches for improving the communi-cation of science related information”; “demonstrate and explain the impact of science, its use, and its applications on the daily lives of European citizens in a manner accessible to them”. Finally, participants in this programme are expected to be involved in “the impartial dissemination, promotion and use of balanced factual scientific information”.

Thus, in these official discourses, public distrust is often still attributed to deficient public knowledge of science. Consequently, better communication is still seen as a key solution. In that regard, scientific knowledge is assumed to be amenable to purely fac-tual, impartial dissemination. The new rhetoric con-tinues to be grounded in earlier misconceptions, so that tensions emerge in policy documents and gov-ernance practices.

Extra-scientific concerns?

Public distrust or opposition to new technologies is often attributed to ‘extra-scientific’ concerns, and in particular to ‘ethical issues’, not merely to ignorance. In these ways, governments and other official bodies speak as if value-free scientific knowledge was readily available, as if scientific evi-dence were separable from values, and as if expert advice could thereby stand separate from ‘other con-cerns’. In official discourses, ‘scientific’ and ‘other’ concerns are characterised as entirely separable.



According to a UK document, for example (May, 2000, page 9):

“Scientific advice is only one element among the considerations which may have to be taken into account, and which might include social, political, economic, moral or ethical concerns. Departments will need to judge how and at what stage the scientific and other concerns are to be brought together in the decision making process.”

These more recent discourses represent a further opening, insofar as concerns from the lay public are not systematically rejected as unfounded and irrele-vant for decision making. Indeed, in some political discourses and regula tory procedures, such ‘ethical’ or ‘other’ concerns are increasingly given more credibility; proposals are made to consider such con-cerns within decision making. For example, Codex Alimentarius is engaged in contentious discussions about ‘other legitimate factors’ which could be taken into account in risk analysis.

However, such practices relegate ‘extra-scientific’ concerns to a subjective realm; they are thereby as-sumed to be evaluated differently by various indi-viduals or groups, according to their vested interests or values. Such concerns are contrasted to objective scientific facts, which are assumed to be amenable to consensus.

By systematically distinguishing ‘other concerns’ from ‘science’, official discourses further reinforce the notion that science itself is value-free and neu-tral. Such a distinction dismisses public suspicions about the hidden values inherent in science itself. Ultimately, it also means that these ‘extra-scientific’ factors are still considered to be of secondary impor-tance compared to ‘scientific fact’.

This perspective is particularly apparent in the agricultural biotechnology debate (Wynne, 2001). Official bodies relegate various intellectual perspec-tives to a secondary realm of ‘non-science issues’ or ‘ethical concerns’. In this way, the public is constructed so as to reinforce stereotypical dichotomies between scientific and public perceptions of science, and likewise between ‘science’ and ‘society’.

Moreover, according to that discourse, it is only

the ‘applications’ of science which need to be sub-jected to political debate, because of their social or ethical ‘implications’. For example, in restructuring its research programmes, the Commission aims “to lay the foundations for a new contract between European citizens and science by putting research back at the heart of society and subjecting its appli-cations to informed political debate, as befits their social implications” (CEC, 2000c).

Such misguided preconceptions about the public, and about science, constitute an important part of the problem (Wynne, 2001; Marris, 1999; 2001c). Recent reforms continue to be based on the same misdiagnosis of the source of the ‘science and society’ problem. Consequently, they simply add ‘extra-scientific concerns’ at the margins, while maintaining the pretence of value-free, omniscient scientific endeavour and expert advice.

By contrast to those accounts, more fundamental diagnoses and proposals were debated at an October 2000 conference on “Science and Governance in a Knowledge Society”. According to some speakers there, public participation should have an evaluative and transformative role for science. From the work-shop on “Science, citizens and the decision-making process”, the rapporteur concluded (DG-JRC and Research, 2000, page 2):

“Public inputs to policy debates are not merely ‘opinions’, but may be relevant knowledge, values or questions which scientists have ne-glected. There needs to be a long-term process of mutual learning between the public and sci-ence, which will necessarily involve new insti-tutional relationships and forms. This will require deliberate experiments in the design of new hybrid institutions and roles.” (italics in original)

From the workshop on “Anticipating risks”, the rap-porteur concluded (DG-JRC and Research, 2000, page 3):

“The need to involve normative considerations in dealing with precautionary-oriented scien-tific issues is also an element that has a trans-forming capacity. Many of these issues call for various forms of participatory processes within which stakeholder involvement is important both for the formulation of concepts and ques-tions as well as for the implementation... The broadening of what is really meant by a technology product, including the shift into providing services, changes the character of innovation characteristics.” (italics in original)

Such perspectives challenge prevalent models of what counts as science and technology, especially the familiar dichotomies between science/values, expert/lay, product/process, and so on. As they rightly emphasise, public responses to science and

By systematically distinguishing ‘other concerns’ from ‘science’, official discourses further reinforce the notion that science is value-free and neutral, thus dismissing public suspicions about the hidden values inherent in science itself



technology policy are in fact responses to the social, ethical and economic values that are recognised by the lay public as being inherent to science. Thus, as technoscience is increasingly seen and promoted as a major determinant of our society’s future, the lay public is reacting against the hidden imposition of those values on their lives.

Regulatory science as implicit politics

Just as technological imperatives pre-empt alterna-tive accounts of social progress, so the former as-sumptions both guide and conceal value-frameworks in regulatory science, which thereby operates as an implicit politics. According to EU policy language and institutional reforms, the task is to separate risk assessment from risk management, the stage at which procedures may properly incorporate social, political or ethical values. Although there may be good reasons to keep expert advice structurally sepa-rate from decisions, prevalent policy language assumes that risk assessment can be kept value-neutral.

Challenging that assumption, sociologists of sci-ence have highlighted normative and epistemologi-cal issues which invariably arise in risk assessment. At issue is how to conceptualise unknowns, the lim-its of available scientific knowledge, the cognitive biases inherent in risk research, and thus the terms for wider participation in such judgements (Carr, 2000; Stirling, 1999; Marris, 1999; Wynne, 2000, Levidow, 2001).

According to the Governance and Science Group, official experts have incorporated ethical and cul-tural assumptions into their policy advice, yet gov-ernment represents this as ‘science’, thus discrediting science as well as their own policy deci-sions (Ravetz, 2001). Such public debates often focus on contentious products that have provoked European public opposition, commercial blockages and thus trans-Atlantic trade conflicts; these include hormone-treated beef and genetically modified (GM) food.

Partly in response to such conflicts, the European Commission issued guidelines on the ‘precautionary principle’, which say little about issues of scientific knowledge or risk assessment. According to the guidelines, scientific uncertainty may justify risk-management measures, provided that they are “proportional to the chosen level of protection”. Meanwhile responsibility must be assigned to obtain extra information which would permit “a more com-prehensive risk assessment” (CEC, 2000b).

To fulfil that responsibility, European Commis-sion staff have encouraged ‘precautionary research’, whose content has not been elaborated. Most official statements imply that more science will resolve the uncertainty, without any need for re-evaluating scientific and regulatory procedures. Uncertainty is usually conceptualised simply as technical impreci-sion which requires more systematic research

efforts. According to the Communication from the Commission (CEC, 2000b, page 7):

“A decision to take measures without waiting until all the necessary scientific knowledge is available is clearly a precaution-based approach … measures based on the precautionary princ i-ple should be maintained so long as scientific information is incomplete or inconclusive … Measures should be periodically reviewed in the light of scientific progress, and amended as necessary.”

In these extracts, uncertainty is defined simply as a lack of scientific knowledge that can eventually be reduced by further research. Yet later the same document states that (CEC, 2000b, page 13):

“Scientific uncertainty results usually from five characteristics of the scientific model: the vari-able chosen, the measurements made, the sam-ples drawn, the models used and the causal relationship employed. Scientific uncertainty may also arise from a controversy on existing data or lack of some relevant data.”

Here uncertainty is defined much more widely than in the rest of the document, which implicitly limits scientific uncertainty to knowledge gaps that can readily be filled by greater research efforts. Accord-ing to alternative definitions of uncertainty, existing knowledge in itself may be uncertain and subject to alternative interpretations; moreover, uncertainty can arise through the confrontation of different scientific methods, models and disciplines. Uncertainty also concerns domains of scientific ignorance: we do not necessarily know (or agree on) the type of data that needs to be collected.

These deeper definitions of uncertainty imply that subjective or controversial choices are unavoidably made, and interpretations drawn, within risk assess-ment research. Indeed, according to alternative in-terpretations of the precautionary principle, much uncertainty is irreducible, especially in the environ-mental domain. On those grounds, scientific igno-rance and indeterminacy must be taken into account in research and regulatory policy (Wynne, 1992). In risk assessment, “the framing of the problem also frames our future ignorance, because what is ex-cluded from enquiry at this stage will not be discov-ered” (Funtowicz et al, 2000).

This perspective is elaborated by a report that the Commission funded to inform its policy on the pre-cautionary principle. This report challenges the fre-quently asserted distinction between “science-based regulation” and decisions based on the precautionary principle (Stirling, 1999, page 38):

“It has been shown that [this distinction] consti-tutes a false and misleading dichotomy. A more valid and useful distinction might be made



between the relatively ‘narrow’ basis for regu-lation provided by risk assessment and the rela-tively broad framework associated with ‘precaution’. While they are distinguishable under a variety of criteria and social values, these approaches might be seen to be equally ‘scientific’ in nature (under a minimal charac-terisation of the connotations of ‘science’). However, where the characterisation of ‘sci-ence’ is extended to include an acknowledge-ment of the multidimensional scope of risk, the incommensurability of different classes and aspects of risk and the formal conditions of strict uncertainty and ignorance (rather that just the narrow formal concept of risk), then it is the ‘precautionary’ approach which is revealed as being the most ‘scientific’.”

Such a perspective could help to counter crit icisms of the precautionary principle for being ‘unscien-tific’, that is, not based on ‘sound science’.4

Unfortunately, the first Commission document on ‘science and society’ reiterated the old stereotypical models, while ignoring the critical perspectives sketched earlier. For example, it argues that: while the precautionary principle suggests how to act in the face of scientific uncertainty, it will mean “more precise and more reliable risk-assessment methods”; knowledge for decision-making “has to be complete, certain and accurate”. Furthermore, the R&D policy agenda must be opened up because science and re-search affect “competitiveness, growth, jobs and the quality of life”. A European knowledge-based econ-omy must become “the most competitive and most dynamic in the world” (CEC, 2000d).

With respect to public participation, the ‘science and society’ document states that: “Dealing with technological risk and ‘science/society’ more gener-ally calls for the development of new forms of dia-logue between researchers, experts, political decision-makers, industrialists and members of the public, especially at the European level” (CEC, 2000d, page 16). Yet the document repeatedly al-ludes to the threats “imagined” by the public, and implicitly dismisses “perceived risk”, which is “of-ten far removed from the actual risk” (CEC, 2000d, page 11).5

Through such language, novel practices are squeezed back into the dominant models which gen-erated the legitimacy crisis in the first place. The conceptual mixtures do not express simply logical inconsistencies, confusions or bad faith by officials. Nor do the tensions illustrate a gap between rhetoric and practice.

Rather, even when totally sincere, most rhetorics of openness mis-diagnose the problem that needs to be addressed, and thereby propose inadequate solutions. The ‘science and society’ issue has been marginally redefined from ‘how to educate the ignorant public’ to ‘how to regain trust in science’.

Even when proposing ‘new forms of dialogue’,

however, they continue to identify the public (and the media) as the source of the problem. Further-more, they continue to entertain an artificial bound-ary between (supposedly objective) ‘science’ and (supposedly subjective) ‘other factors’, which are labelled as ‘societal’ or ‘ethical’, or ‘political’. In those ways, the mixed discourses express practical contradictions of ‘science and governance’.

Democratising expertise?

‘Governance’ has become a high-profile issue for all areas of EU responsibility. The European Commis-sion has undertaken to make the policy-making process more inclusive and accountable by involving citizens. Eventually its White Paper on governance catalysed a more fundamental analysis of legitimacy problems for science and technology. In the associ-ated report on “Democratizing expertise”, European Commission staff emphasise the inherent, normal conflicts around scientific knowledge in policymak-ing (Liberatore, 2001, page 2):

“The experts themselves are thus key actors of ‘governance’ … While being increasingly re-lied upon, however, expertise is also increas-ingly contested … Scientific expertise must therefore interact and at times conflict with other types of expertise, while at the same time being subject to the normal cut-and-thrust of academic debate within the scientific disci-plines themselves. In general, the lack of trans-parency in the way expertise is selected, used and diffused by governments is considered by many (e.g. parliaments, media, civil society organisations) to undermine the legitimacy of the policy process.”

This account attributes the legitimacy problem to unacknowledged choices in constituting official expertise and evaluating scientific knowledge. To remedy that problem, it proposes various measures such as:

“‘Democratising expertise’ should not be understood as sacrificing quality, but as extend-ing the traditional procedures for assessing

Most rhetorics of openness mis-diagnose the problem and thereby propose inadequate solutions: the ‘science and society’ issue has been marginally redefined from ‘how to educate the ignorant public’ to ‘how to regain trust in science’



quality. This refers not only to scientific ex- cellence but also to the ability to respond to policy and social concerns.” (Liberatore, 2001, page 7)

“As a general rule, the evidence used to shape policy decisions, and how it was used, should be published … Rather than providing a sim-plistic ‘black and white’ message that could prove inaccurate or wrong, the strategy should ensure that uncertainties and controversies, where they exist, should be made explicit.” (Liberatore, 2001, page 20)

“Knowledge used for policy-making and public debate should not only be excellent from a sci-entific point of view; it also needs to be ‘socially robust’, responding to policy, social, economic needs or concerns. This involves ex-pertise beyond tradit ional and professional ‘peer’ community to include those with practi-cal or other knowledge about the issue at hand.” (Liberatore, 2001, page 22).

According to the report, then, decision-making procedures should acknowledge the choices and uncertainties that are normally hidden by scientific advice. Such an argument overlaps with those cited earlier, for instance, regarding the inherent value judgements in risk assessment (Stirling, 1999; Ravetz, 2001). The recommendations in “Democra-tizing expertise” stand in tension with the prevalent EU policy language and current structure of ‘inde-pendent’ expertise.

GM crops: sources of public suspicion

Clearly the governance debate involves tensions about the nature and role of scientific expertise in decision making. These tensions are exemplified by conflicts over agricultural biotechnology, whose products have been largely blocked in Europe. Often this situation is portrayed only as a problem: regula-tory delays and bans are accommodating public irra-tionality, without any scientific grounds, while slowing down technological progress. However, there are different ways to tell the story, each with different implications for the policy process and for alternative future scenarios.

Although technology has been part of the prob-lem, it also could be part of the solution, together with institutional changes. The outcome depends on how the governance issues are conceptualised and managed. For the case of GM crops, then, let us examine public attitudes, regulatory reforms, commercial pressures, and their more general implications for science and governance.

Commercialisation of GM products has been largely blocked in Europe. The EU has not approved any additional GM crops for cultivation since 1998.

Several member states formalised this indefinite de-lay in June 1999. Some have restricted or banned commercial use of specific GM crops which had already gained EU-wide approval.

In practice, however, commercial forces have been more important than regulatory controls in re-stricting markets for GM products in Europe. React-ing to real or perceived consumer opposition to GM-derived foods, retail chains and food processors have mostly excluded food products derived from GM ingredients. The main market is for animal feed, which is also coming under pressure from protest groups.

Even for the few GM crops that have gained EU approval for commercial cultivation, few farmers have bought the seeds because they face uncertainty about marketing the grain. Paradoxically, European Commission policy documents had portrayed the European agro-food industry as dependent on bio-technology, yet eventually the dependency ran the other way around (see again note 1).

All those blockages result from public suspicion and protest, which has many sources. According to focus-group research with ordinary citizens in five European countries, public concerns express resent-ment towards decision-making procedures, not an absolute opposition to GM products as such (Wynne et al, 2001; Marris, 2001a; 2001c).

In particular, when people reject GM food, it is less a consumer choice than a last resort, by default of any means to act as citizens. People are expressing unease at the prevalent direction of the agro-food system, which remains beyond democratic control; they can see no political means to influence decisions. They regard the decision-making procedure as relying too much on particular expert claims, whose risk–benefit judgements lack transparency.

Public unease is rational from its own situational perspective (CSEC, 2001; Marris, 2001a; 2001c). Comments in the focus groups can be paraphrased as follows:

• ‘Progress’ is being defined according to particular technological trajectories, thus marginalising or pre-empting alternatives.

• Proponents offer no evidence for environmental benefits (such as reducing harm from agrochemi-cals) or social benefits (such as feeding the world).

• Regulatory institutions downplay uncertainty about risks, especially long-term and irreducible uncertainty, and exclude such consideration from their decision-making.

• Regulatory decisions claim to be entirely ‘sci-ence-based’ yet implicitly incorporate non-technical concerns, such as economic and ethical criteria.

Such views make people suspicious about ‘scien-tific’ claims for safety, given the various implicit



criteria considered in risk evaluations and regulatory decisions. People demand that these criteria be more transparently explained.

For their views on agbiotech, people draw on their experiences of many other regulatory sectors. Ac-cording to some official accounts, the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or ‘mad cow disease’) affair suddenly created a crisis in confidence among consumers — as if they had previously trusted regu-latory institutions.

However, according to this focus-group research, the BSE crisis simply confirmed their suspicions about normal institutional behaviour, already famil-iar from other sectors such as asbestos, salmonella in eggs, pesticides, and HIV-contaminated blood. These comments contradict familiar claims that the BSE crisis uniquely explains hostile attitudes to-wards GM products.

According to the comments of ordinary citizens, moreover:

• Lessons of the BSE crisis have not been learned by policymakers and their scientific advisors, nor have they been applied to agricultural biotechnology.

• Risk management and communication continues to assume that all risks can be anticipated, or even that they have been.

• Decision-making includes no (or inadequate) measures to reduce and monitor risks of new products and technologies after they have been approved for commercial use (Wynne et al, 2001; Marris, 2001a; 2001c).

As the next section illustrates, the focus-group par-ticipants were making criticisms which can be traced to past and ongoing institutional practices.

Risk regulation opened up

For regulating GMOs (genetically modified organ-isms) in the European Community, the original legislation included significant precautionary ele-ments. Under the Deliberate Release Directive 90/220, applicants must submit a prior risk assess-ment, and member states must ensure that GMO re-leases cause no “adverse effects” to the environment or human health (EEC, 1990). Later this framework was officially justified by citing the potential for GMOs to cause “ecological imbalances” (CEC, 1993b). All those phrases have wide scope for inter-pretation. However, the application of the Directive was constrained by supposedly objective market imperatives and accounts of progress.

Intensive model in safety claims

In the early 1990s, agbiotech was promoted as an essential tool for economic competitiveness — in other words, for Europe to attract investment, to in-crease productivity and thus protect or expand

employment. For GMO regulation, the EC Directive 90/220 was “unfavourably perceived by scientists and industry”, by virtue of hindering biotechnology investment and economic competitiveness, argued the Commission. It sought to ensure that “advances in scientific knowledge are constantly taken into account and that regulatory control is based on po-tential risks” (CEC, 1993a, pages 100–103).

Thus the Commission implied that industry’s un-favourable perception of the EC Directive should be accommodated, rather than challenged. It also pre-sumed that science already had adequate knowledge of ‘potential risks’, as a basis for regulatory controls. Industry-wide lobby groups warned government that companies would shift R&D investment to North America if product approvals were unduly delayed.

In the mid-1990s the EU regulatory procedure came under political pressure to approve GM products more quickly. It did so on a controversial basis. Advocates defined the relevant scientific un-certainties in a sufficiently narrow way as to justify approval, rather than claim to resolve all uncertain-ties about potential effects.

For example, a long-standing issue has been the relationship between the use of GM crops and of agrochemicals. Critics argue that the familiar ‘pesti-cide treadmill’ would be supplemented by a ‘genetic treadmill’, so that farmers would become dependent on a series of techno-fixes, as illustrated by the two main GM crops. Herbicide-tolerant weeds could spread that trait to weeds through gene flow and/or from selection pressures from the herbicide sprays. GM insecticidal maize could generate selection pressure for resistance among insect pests, thus un-dermining the efficacy of Bt foliar sprays as well as the crop itself.

If such effects materialised, then they could preclude future options which have relative environmental advantages. Denmark had policie s for dras- tically reducing agrochemical usage, so its regulators demanded greater assessment of how the inadvertent spread of herbicide tolerance could affect overall herbicide usage. Several member states demanded more studies on how to avoid insect resistance.

In safety claims for GM crops, however, such treadmill effects were dismissed as mere ‘agricul-tural problems’; they were officially regarded as ac-ceptable or irrelevant to the EC Directive. According to proponents of approval, farmers could use other herbicides or chemical insecticides if necessary. As one advisor commented in a 1995 interview,

A 1993 policy document presumed that science already had adequate knowledge of ‘potential risks’, as a basis for regulatory controls



“A weed is not a problem if you can control it”, implying that the method was irrelevant. Thus pest-control options were treated as interchangeable and therefore dispensable.

Also at issue were acceptability norms for poten-tial effects. According to proponents of Bt insecti-cidal maize, their cultivation would cause less environmental harm than agrochemicals. Yet the latter were being sprayed on few farms anyway, so the safety claim was taking for granted an even more chemical-intensive regime than existed. Austrian regulators would accept no more harm from GM crops than from organic agriculture and so de-manded more specific evidence to support safety claims; such demands came from a country which was heavily promoting organic methods as an eco-nomically competitive model (Torgerson and Seifert, 2000).

In dismissing such objections to safety claims, proponents accepted the familiar problems of inten-sive agriculture as a normal baseline of comparison. At least implicitly, some undesirable effects from GM crops were deemed acceptable by regulators for an agricultural system which must increase produc-tivity and thus economic competitiveness. For risk-assessment purposes, Europe was being conceptual-ised as a homogeneous economic environment for an agricultural factory. Thus wider policy judgements influenced the regulatory account of ‘potential risks’ and criteria for scientific evidence (Levidow et al, 1996; 1997).

A related issue has been presumed benefits, for example, in the case of herbicide-tolerant crops. Ac-cording to their proponents, the associated herbicide sprays would cause less harm than the combination of narrow-spectrum ones being replaced by them. On the other hand, according to some critics, herbi-cide-tolerant crops would be marketed to farmers as a more efficient way to control weeds; and this fea-ture would increase the use of broad-spectrum herbi-cides, in turn causing as much or more harm to wildlife than current herbicide practices.

Presumed benefits of herbicide-tolerant crops un-derlie the favourable views of many regulators and advisors. Such views can subtly influence the crite-ria for evidence of risk or safety. However, such im-plicit assumptions were not open to formal scrutiny within risk-assessment procedures. Regulatory legislation provided for no assessment of benefits, and no government department had clear responsi-bility for comparing the effects of different herbicide regimes.

Consequently, questions about benefits were openly raised only by critics, and mainly at a later stage when a controversy had erupted in the public sphere. Unfortunately, this meant that such issues were labelled as ‘political arguments’ beyond risk assessment, as if implicit assumptions about benefits were not already involved in risk assessment. Likewise, such assumptions are rarely acknowl-edged in recent policy debates about the need for

assessment of benefits, since this is proposed as a separate stage after risk assessment (for instance, CEC, 2001a; Persley and Chon Low, 2001).

Regulatory reform

In late 1996, the first US shipments of GM soya and maize provoked a campaign against GM food prod-ucts. The ensuing public debate highlighted the envi-ronmental and food-safety issues. This debate has featured disagreements among scientists — not sim-ply a divide between ‘the public versus science’. Some scientists publicly dispute the interpretation and design of safety tests. Many scientists signed petitions demanding a moratorium on commercial use of GM products, thus reinforcing NGO (non-governmental organisation) demands along those lines.6

Eventually the regulatory procedures shifted un-der pressure of public protest. By the late 1990s, the early dissent of some EU member states became mainstream arguments in the EU-wide procedure. Eventually those concerns were incorporated into new, evolving criteria for evidence and market-stage controls (OU BPG, 2000; Levidow and Carr, 2000a; 2000b).

In some cases, for example, regulators evaluated a broader range of environmental effects than before and emphasised their predictive uncertainties. New rules subjected each GM crop to market-stage pre-cautions, for instance, special protocols for cultiva-tion, field monitoring, ecological testing, and so on.

Regulators encouraged (or even required) efforts to develop more sophisticated GM techniques, for instance, substitutes for antibiotic -resistance marker genes, site-directed mutagenesis, same-species transgenes, and use of tissue-specific or inducible promoters. Some of those changes have been for-malised in the revision of Directive 90/220, for ex-ample, through time-limited approvals and monitoring requirements (EC, 2001).

Thus the scientific framing of GMO regulation has shifted in many significant ways which respond to public concerns and to the early dissent by some EU member states. The risk-assessment criteria have not simply become more strict; they have also be-come more open to continuous debate about envi-ronmental norms and predictive uncertainty (as anticipated by von Schomberg, 1996). Indeed, regu-latory conflicts have opened up the supposed bound-ary between science and values.

Consequently, tensions arise over the role of sci-ence in risk assessment, for example, as manifest in draft principles for future regulation of biotechnol-ogy. On the one hand, argues the Commission, measures should be based on the precautionary principle “where scientific evidence is insufficient, inconclusive or uncertain.” On the other hand, “Community regulatory requirements should be proportionate and commensurate with the degree of identified risk …” (CEC, 2001a, page 20).7 The



latter principle assumes that all risks are reliably identifiable or even quantifiable before setting regu-latory requirements in the first place; indeed, it ex-cludes any uncertainties which are not readily quantif iable.

Moreover, the document asserts, “no peer-reviewed scientific evidence exists for any adverse effects to human health or the environment of the GMOs which have so far been authorised for mar-keting” (CEC, 2001a, page 17). Such a claim evades the contentious issues around test methods and risk analysis, thus reinforcing a familiar source of public mistrust. Not surprisingly, tensions among models continue to arise in policy language and in regula-tory practice.

Regulatory science debated: UK example

Since the late 1990s, regulatory assumptions have been more openly scrutinised and deliberated through official procedures. As safety claims under-went greater debate, official expertise was criticised for pro-biotechnology bias and vested interests. Even academic and public -sector scientists were perceived as tainted by financial dependence on industry.

In response to such criticisms, some governments have broadened advisory committees to include more lay representatives, ecological expertise, and even overt critics of GM products. Citizen confer-ences have given a lay panel the opportunity to ques-tion experts and reach their own judgements on GM crops (Levidow and Carr, 2000b; Marris, 2001b; Marris and Joly, 1999; Roy and Joly, 2000). At least implicitly, these institutional reforms broadened po-litical responsibility for product-approval decisions, thus potentially making them more difficult.

There have been related conflicts over the criteria for scientific evidence. Regulators have acknowledged scientific uncertainty by citing (or re-interpreting) the precautionary principle. They have questioned the scientific methods and the rele-vance of available evidence for safety claims; they requested research on more complex cause–effect pathways of potential harm.

At the same time, governments speak as if more scientific evidence and ‘independent’ expertise will resolve the risk issues. For example, the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer has acknowledged scientific un-certainties: “In the case of GM food we are testing for unexpected and unwanted effects on human health and on the environment”. He reassures the public that “no nasty surprises lie in wait” from GM products, thus implying that available testing meth-ods are adequate (May, 1999, pages 3–4). These is-sues can be illustrated by the UK controversy over herbicide-tolerant crops.

In response to public protest against GM crops, the UK Government established an Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC)

in June 2000. Although members were appointed as individuals, they implicitly represented diverse stakeholder viewpoints, for instance, from industry, NGOs, public-sector research, farmers, and so on. According to the Government, the new body should advise Government on policy issues, for instance, setting a general direction for the role of GMOs in agriculture, defining which impacts will and will not be acceptable, and identifying the potential for bio-technology to contribute to sustainable agricultural practices.

Within an implicit division of labour, its role was intended to complement the long-standing Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE). Since 1990, the latter had been providing scientific advice on specific GM products and risk research. More recently it set up a sub-group on how to define harm to biodiversity (ACRE, 2001). AEBC initia-tives have blurred the boundary between the roles of the two advisory bodies.

As mentioned earlier, herbicide-tolerant crops have attracted controversy over several risk scenar-ios. Specially at issue in the UK is how the associ-ated broad-spectrum herbicides may affect wildlife habitats in and near agricultural fields, and how to set the appropriate baseline of comparison with GM crops. As a means to resolve the conflict, the UK Government decided to fund an ambitious series of farm-scale evaluations (FSE).

These experiments were intended to provide conclusive evidence for an eventual decision about approving herbic ide-tolerant crops for commercial use. As in the past, regulators claimed a predictive certainty for regulatory science: “The results of these farm-scale evaluations will ensure that the managed development of GM crops in the UK takes place safely” (DETR, 1999).

However, the experiments generated local oppos i-tion and scientific controversy around the country. The scientific methods were questioned, even by some research scientists. Environmentalists chal-lenged several key features of the experimental de-sign, for instance, the chosen measures of biodiversity, the presumed extrapolation from sam-ple species to biodiversity, and differences between controlled trials and realistic commercial farming.

Indeed, these weaknesses suggest “that some

With regard to herbicide-tolerant crops specially at issue in the UK is how the associated broad-spectrum herbicides may affect wildlife habitats in and near agricultural fields, and how to set the appropriate baseline of comparison with GM crops



motivation other than science” is driving the trials, argued one critic who is also an AEBC member (Mayer, 2000). Thus, having initially challenged implicit regulatory assumptions about benefits, crit-ics now challenged the scientific methods for testing claims for benefits.

In response to this debate, the AEBC decided to evaluate methodological issues of risk research. It established a sub-group on the design and interpreta-tion of the farm-scale trials. The sub-group posed questions about the scientific methods, the defin i-tions of harm, the prospects for informing regulatory decisions, and the limits of what can be learned from the trials (AEBC, 2001a).

Simply by raising such questions, the AEBC chal-lenged the Government’s implicit model of regula-tory science as an omniscient, neutral guide to safety decisions. Its public consultation events provided a rare opportunity for people to express their doubts. According to one member of the public speaking there, sceptics had been “silenced by science” at an official meeting on the farm-scale evaluations.

In its eventual report, the AEBC emphasised that the field trials had methodological limits, in both space and time, which in turn would limit their role in decision making: “The FSEs alone will not pro-vide an unequivocal analysis of the ecological im-pact of the crops under trial” (AEBC, 2001b, page 54). Thus the AEBC report encouraged further de-bate on the value choices in regulatory science and its appropriate role.

This case illustrates the inherent tensions of gov-ernance processes. Facing a legitimacy problem, government seeks to broaden responsibility by incorporating stakeholder viewpoints on extra-scientific issues. Yet an advisory body has scope to re-interpret its own remit. Despite official efforts to distinguish between scientific concerns ‘and other’ ones, new practices open up regulatory issues to public scrutiny, thus undermining any science/values boundary.

Alternatives stimulated

Beyond stimulating regulatory changes, public pro-test has given further stimulus to alternative agricul-tural innovations which were already being developed. Food retail chains require and help farm-ers to adopt cultivation methods which avoid pest problems and so reduce the need for agrochemicals. They promote integrated crop management (ICM), which enhances knowledge of how best to use vari-ous methods and inputs (EUREP, 1999). Through some ICM methods, farmers potentially gain independence from purchased inputs from suppliers.

Some efforts at process and input innovation diverge from intensive agricultural models. Retail chains fund research on soil-management methods which strengthen plant resistance to pests and disease. Organic food lines are expanded by

supermarket chains; organic breeding institutes de-velop pest-tolerant seeds which may be more durable in the face of novel pests (Levidow, 2000; Levidow and Bijman, forthcoming). Small-sized seed companies direct their R&D at non-GM pest- and disease-resistant seed varieties which comple-ment ICM (Grávalos and García, 2000).

Thus the agro-food industry undergoes pressure to change not only the characteristics of products, but also the concept of innovation (compare with DG-JRC & Research, 2000). Beyond product-based solutions, different cultivation processes are devel-oped. Agricultural extension agencies encourage farmers to adopt biological alternatives to agro-chemicals. Through structural changes in Greek cotton farming, for example, pheromones are starting to replace pyrethroid sprays (Anon, 2001).

Consequently, future scenarios for European agri-culture are not limited to conventional versus GM inputs. Both options are challenged by a debate over what kind of agriculture and society we want. To portray the GM debate as simply ‘for or against’, therefore, is to caricature the public as preferring agrochemicals. Nevertheless such a caricature is promoted by referring to GM techniques as ‘the technology’, a term which excludes alternative innovations.

Different accounts of progress contend for influ-ence over the policy process. Government comes under pressure to fund R&D on other methods for reducing agrochemical usage. ‘Sustainable devel-opment’ policies come under pressure to supersede input dependence and intensive methods, rather than simply to limit their environmental effects. This ten-sion arises more subtly in the Commission’s consul-tation document when asking, “To what extent might agricultural biotechnology innovations … increase farmer dependency on fewer suppliers for integrated crop management and protection sys-tems?” (CEC, 2001b, page 7), since the question assumes that ICM in turn depends on input suppliers.

As environmentally less harmful methods are de-veloped for crop protection, these alternatives serve as more stringent comparators than the chemical-intensive methods that underlay early safety claims for GM crops. The chosen comparator influences criteria for scientific evidence in regulatory decisions or delays. Public debate makes explicit the links between such criteria and agricultural models, thus again challenging the putative boundary be-tween science and values.

Conclusion: tensions of science and governance

Amid a wider debate over the EU’s democratic deficit, ‘science and governance’ has been made a high-profile agenda. As we argue here, science and technology have become a special problem because they are routinely cited as an objective basis for



policy. Technological–market imperatives are in-voked to mandate a single path towards economic survival. Official expert advice is implicitly equated with ‘science’, in turn invoked as if scientific knowledge were a value-neutral, even omniscient basis for regulatory decisions.

Through these models, policy frameworks serve to promote and conceal socio-political agendas, while pre-empting debate on alternative futures. At issue, for example, is how innovation can best create wealth, how values should (and already do) inform regulatory science, and how government can gain social legitimacy for decisions. These normative issues have been pre-empted by various prescriptive models of technology, regulatory science and the public.

These consequent prescriptions have led to a legitimacy crisis, especially in Europe. Claims that R&D and regulatory policy serve the public good have lost credibility. In response, governments search for a remedy through rhetorics of openness.

However, such efforts are tagged on to the domi-nant models of science, technology and the public, rather than superseding them. Untrustworthy, un-democratic processes are mis-diagnosed as a prob-lem of public distrust of regulation or even of science as such. Consequently, underlying tensions emerge within institutional reforms and within the discourses promoting them. Those tensions are illustrated by European conflicts around agricultural biotechnology.

Since the mid-1990s, agbiotech R&D and regula-tory policies have been implicitly linked by a ‘com-petitiveness’ imperative. In promoting GM crops, European policy cast innovation as products which could increase agricultural efficiency on a US-type intensive model, as if this were the optimal way to create wealth. Within that framework, safety claims could regard the normal hazards of intensive mono-culture as acceptable or irrelevant to risk assessment. Accordingly, environmental uncertainties were de-fined so narrowly as to be resolvable for safety approval of GM crops.

That policy framework has contributed to a le-gitimacy crisis for agbiotech and government policy throughout Europe. The technological trajectory came under attack for industrialising agriculture in ways which seek to maximise quantitative output

over other qualities. Safety claims came under attack for downplaying uncertainties and concealing value-judgements.

Since the late 1990s, European regulatory changes have responded to NGO pressures and demands from some member states. Risk-assessment procedures now evaluate a broader range of potential effects and acknowledge greater scientific uncertainty than be-fore. Yet governments treat unknowns as technical imprecisions which will be readily resolved by more scientific knowledge; omniscience has been deferred until the future rather than being questioned.

Dominant models of objective science are being promoted in more subtle ways. Some advisory pro-cedures now encompass more diverse views than before, yet public concerns are relegated to ‘other’ extra-scientific concerns, thus maintaining the sci-ence/values dichotomy. At the same time, by ac-commodating critical perspectives, some advisory procedures inadvertently open up public debate on values in regulatory science; thus government cannot entirely control the political outcome of its own initiatives.

In response to commercial and social pressures, some R&D projects seek process innovations, for instance, less-intensive methods that enhance and utilise farmers’ knowledge about how to avoid pest problems. Yet these innovations are not officially valued as technologies, as wealth-creation nor as a means for competitive advantage. R&D policy is still driven by criteria of economic productivity and economic competitiveness, as if these were objective imperatives rather than political choices. Wider par-ticipation is advocated for evaluating ‘societal im-pacts’ of near-market innovations, but not for influencing the direction of R&D trajectories.

In all those ways, new rhetorics of openness play a double-edged or contradictory role. They can con-ceal and perpetuate earlier prescriptive models in new guises, or else open them up for democratic change, even do both at the same time. By default, some reforms are directed mainly at modifying the behaviour and attitudes of the public, so as to regain trust in the dominant models of science; such initia-tives may worsen the legitimacy problem, for in-stance, by inadvertently discrediting all forms of ‘dialogue’. Through these reforms, however, the legitimacy of decisions becomes more dependent on new relationships whose dynamics lie beyond gov-ernment control; thus they potentially supersede stereotypical dichotomies between science/society, fact/values, and so on. The analysis here aims to in-form and encourage the latter process.

As a lesson from the agbiotech case, then, the ‘science and governance’ agenda faces more com-plex tasks than simply offering transparency and participation within the terms of earlier policy frameworks. If the aim is to relegitimise decision-making, government will need to ‘un-learn’ many institutional assumptions and to redefine the problem at stake. Rather than seeking ways to

New rhetorics of openness play a contradictory role: they can perpetuate earlier prescriptive models in new guises, or open them up for democratic change, or even do both at the same time



change the public, it is necessary to change the insti-tutions responsible for promoting innovation and regulating risks. In particular they need to change their preconceptions of science, technology and pub-lic concerns. In such a process, public concerns offer a useful starting point and social resource for organ-isational learning.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on material from four research projects, the first three funded by the European Commission under the Framework Programme IV between 1997 and 2000:

• PABE: ‘Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnology in Europe’, funded by the ELSA-FAIR programme (Wynne et al, 2001; Louet, 2001; Marris, 2001a; 2001b; 2001c).

• SRTC: ‘Safety Regulation of Transgenic Crops: Completing the Internal Market?’, funded by the ELSA programme (OU BPG, 2000; Levidow and Carr, 2000a; 2000b).

• PITA: ‘Po licy Influences on Technology for Agriculture: Chemi-cals, Biotechnology and Seeds’, funded by the TSER programme (OU BPG, 2001).

• ‘L’Innovation Controversée: le débat public sur les OGM en France’ funded by the French Ministry of Agriculture (Joly et al , 2000).

Some ideas come from a workshop on Food, Agriculture and Biotechnology: Recent Controversies, STS Research and the Policy Process’ (held in Lisbon on 8–9 February 2001 and spon-sored by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)), especially a talk by Rob Hagendijk, “Sci-ence, technology and governance in Europe: an agenda for com-parative research”. Useful comments on an earlier draft were provided by him, Helge Torgerson and Christophe Bonneuil. Part of the work was conduc ted when Claire Marris was at the C3ED, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

Notes

1. According to a consultancy report, agricultural biotechnology will be essential for European farmers to maintain export markets, as well as for small and medium-sized seed com-panies to remain competitive. (Ballantine and Thomas, 1997, page 35). Amid the European blockages of GM products in the late 1990s, how ever, farmers and seed companies there did not lose competitiveness, perhaps because they could still sell non-GM products. According to a 1999 survey of such companies, their competitiveness was unlikely to de-cline. For the average sales per development worker, there were no correlations with the use of GM technology across the various companies. Likewise, expected changes in em-ployment over the next three years did not differ according to the type of technology in current use (Arundel et al, 2000; Arundel, 2001).

2. Rather than attribute this problem uniquely to Europe, some commentators acknowledge a more widespread shift. Ac-cording to the US-based President of Monsanto: “That shift has been a movement from a ‘trust me’ society to a ‘show me’ society. We don’t trust government — and thus govern-ment rulemaking and regulation is suspect. We don’t trust companies — or the new technologies they introduce into the marketplace” (Verfaillie, 2000).

3. Although the introduction highlights this diagnosis, less than one page of this 38-page document is actually devoted to proposals and actions for ‘dialogue’. The rest is all about how to stimulate European R&D in order to ‘fill the gap’ with the USA.

4. A phrase more commonly heard in the USA, ‘sound science’ originally denoted the public scrutiny of scientific evidence for its quality and relevance to decision-making. More re-cently, however, the phrase has been deployed to silence doubts about whether the available evidence is adequate for

safety approval of products. As a political slogan, ‘sound sci-ence’ tends to conceal value-laden features of safety claims, their weak scientific basis, their normative framing and their socio-political influences (Levidow and Carr, 2000c).

5. Furthermore, in the chapter on “stepping up the sci-ence/society dialogue”, only one section is devoted to “new forms of dialogue”. The other four are devoted to (re)legitimising science, for instance, “improving the public’s knowledge of science”, promoting “a scientific information system for Europe”, “boosting the attractiveness of science and careers in science”, and increasing the role of “women in science and research”.

6. In Europe, scientists who took part in the public debate by signing petitions did so to demand a moratorium. By con-trast, in the USA, some scientists also signed petitions to support the development of GMOs (Joly et al, 2001).

7. This account reverts to the scientistic language in earlier documents which were framed by a competitiveness impera-tive. For example, the Commission asserted “the need for balanced and proportionate regulatory requirements com-mensurate with the identified risks” (CEC, 1994). That account may contradict the Commission’s later policy on the precautionary principle, whereby measures should be “pro-portional to the chosen level of protection”, rather than to the risk (CEC, 2000b, page 3).

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

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