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Plasma-derived medicinal products (PDMPs) are life-saving and life-improving therapies, but the raw material is in short supply: Europe depends on importation from countries including the United States. Plasma from donors resident in the United Kingdom has not been fractionated since 1999 when a precautionary measure was introduced in response to the outbreak of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). Cases of vCJD have been far fewer than originally predicted in the 1990s. Since the introduction of leucodepletion in 1999, and accounting for the incubation period, more than 40 million UK-derived blood components have been issued with no reports of TT vCJD. In February 2021, the UK Government authorized manufacture of immunoglobulin from UK plasma. Following separate reviews concluding no significant difference in the risk posed, the United States, Australia, Ireland and Hong Kong also lifted their deferrals of blood donors with a history of living in the United Kingdom. Other countries are actively reviewing their position. Demand is rising for PDMPs, and Europe faces a threat of supply shortages. Industry and patient groups are clear that using UK plasma would bring significant immediate benefits to patients and to the resilience of the European supply chain. From this scientific review, we conclude that UK plasma is safe for fractionation and urge blood regulators and operators to take account of this safety profile when considering fractionation of UK plasma, and to revise their guidelines on the deferral of donors who have lived in, or received a transfusion in, the United Kingdom.

In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question regarding the character of such an imposition. To develop this question, this article discusses three metaphysical interpretations of the Anthropocene: Clive Hamilton's, Timothy Morton's, and Bruno Latour's. Among many voices today, these authors are specifically relevant because they predominantly correlate the imposition of a new, nonmodern world with the scientific object "Earth"as it is developed in Earth system science. The purpose here is to elucidate the ways in which this correlation is made, and to inquire after the role of science-a modern activity par excellence-in the advent of the world of the Anthropocene. The critical question is how this role could be legitimated in the proclaimed absence of a modern framework ensuring science's status as a beacon of certainty and truth.

For contagious diseases like measles a successful immunization program can result in herd protection. Small outbreaks may still occur but fade out soon, because the possibilities for the pathogen to spread in the ‘herd’ are very small. This implies that people who refuse to participate in such a program will still benefit from the protection it offers, but they don’t do their part in maintaining protection. Isn’t that a case of freeriding—and isn’t that unfair towards all the people who do collaborate? If so, that might be considered an additional ground for making vaccination mandatory or compulsory. In this paper I argue that vaccination refusal can be considered as freeriding, but that this might not be unfair. The public good of herd protection is a peculiar public good because it supervenes on private benefits that are enjoyed by all who do opt for vaccination. For vaccinated individuals, the additional benefit of herd protection comes about, as it were, for free, and hence they can’t complain that others benefit without sharing in the burdens. There are however still other grounds for making vaccination compulsory or at least for seeing refusal as a morally wrong choice.

Blood service organizations employ various ways to ensure transfusion blood safety, including the testing of all donations for transfusion-transmissible infections (TTI) and the exclusion of donors who are at increased risk of a recent infection. As some TTIs are more common among men who have sex with men (MSM), many jurisdictions (temporarily) defer the donation of blood by sexually active MSM. This boils down to a categorical exclusion of a large group solely on the basis of their sexual orientation, which is seen as unduly discriminatory and stigmatizing. Blood service organizations in the U.K. and the Netherlands have recently changed their deferral policies for MSM. The problem of the MSM deferral involves a conflict between fundamental rights: the right of MSM to equal treatment and the right to health of the recipients of blood and blood products. We distinguish and discuss three broad alternative options to the current categorical deferral of MSM donations: (1) completely abandoning donor selection on the basis of sexual behavior, (2) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of each potential donor, and (3) individual risk assessment of the sexual activities of MSM only. The new U.K. policy falls within the second category, and the new Dutch policy is in the third category. We argue that each approach comes with moral costs but that the most reasonable option is different from the policies of both the U.K. and the Netherlands.

The inclusion of stakeholders in science is one of the core ideas in the field of responsible innovation. Conspiracists, however, are not your garden-variety stakeholders. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the conflict between conspiracists and science is deep and intractable. In this paper, we ask how the game of responsible innovation can be played with those who believe that the game is rigged. Understanding the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation is necessary in order to understand the unvisited corners of the science-society interface in the post-pandemic future. We claim that pluralism, already part of the philosophical background that spurred responsible innovation, can offer insights into how conspiracism can be approached. As a case in point, we develop these insights starting from the policy on conspiracism developed in 2021 by the European Commission. We show that the ideal of inclusion can only be extended to conspiracists by accepting a pluralist framework, and we explain this pluralist response.

Public engagement is crucial to strengthen responsibility frameworks in highly innovative contexts, including as part of business organisations. One particular innovation that calls for public engagement is gamification. Gamification fosters changes in working practices to improve the organisation, efficiency and productivity of a business by introducing gratification and engagement mechanisms in non-gaming contexts. Gamification modifies the workforce’s perception of constraints and stimulates the voluntary assumption of best practices to the benefit of employees and enterprises alike. Here, we broadly discuss the use of gamification at work. Indeed, gamification raises several concerns about privacy, due to the massive collection, storage and processing of data, and about the freedom of employees: as the level of data protection decreases, so too does workers’ self-determination. We argue that the implementation of privacy by design can not only strengthen autonomy via data protection but also develop more viable instances of RRI in accordance with human rights.

Gene drives are potentially ontologically and morally disruptive technologies. The potential to shape evolutionary processes and to eradicate (e.g. malaria-transmitting or invasive) populations raises ontological questions about evolution, nature, and wilderness. The transformative promises and perils of gene drives also raise pressing ethical and political concerns. The aim of this article is to arrive at a better understanding of the gene drive debate by analysing how ontological and moral assumptions are coproduced in this debate. Combining philosophical analysis with a critical reading of the gene drive literature and an ethnographic study of two leading research groups, the article explores the hypothesis that the development of and debate about gene drives are characterized by a particular intervention-oriented mode of coproduction. Based on the results of this exploration, we highlight the need for a broadening of the perspective on gene drives in which empirical, moral, and ontological concerns are addressed explicitly in their interplay rather than in (disciplinary) isolation from each other.

The present dissertation took the free-energy principle (FEP) as its starting point, from which we tried to draw both philosophical and empirical consequences. Both chapter 2 and 3 departed from the idea that conscious perception depends on global amplification of sensory input, and that the basal ganglia (BG) and its irrigation by dopamine play a crucial role in gating information, conscious access, and the selection of a relevant internal model given available sensory data. The BG are thought to play this role due to their modulatory influence on thalamocortical connectivity. Because much of the evidence implicating the BG in these processes in humans is correlational, we explored two ways of manipulating BG activity experimentally. Chapter 4 investigates the philosophical heritage implicitly touched on by the FEP, which provides an alternative philosophical and historical background for present-day research in cognitive neuroscience. Friston’s FEP has been received with great enthusiasm. With good reason: it not only makes the bold claim to a unifying theory of the brain, but it is presented as an a priori principle applicable to living systems in general. In this paper, we set out to show how the breadth of scope of Friston’s framework converges with the dialectics of Georg Hegel. Through an appeal to the work of Catherine Malabou, we aimed to demonstrate how Friston not only reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from the perspective of neuroscience, but that the implicit alignment with Hegel necessitates a reading of the FEP from the perspective of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It is this reading that moves beyond the discussion between cognitivism and enactivism surrounding Friston’s framework; beyond the question whether the organism is a secluded entity separated from its surroundings, or whether it is a dynamical system characterized by perpetual openness and mutual exchange. From a Hegelian perspective, it is the tension between both positions itself that is operative at the level of the organism; as a contradiction the organism sustains over the course of its life. Not only does the organism’s secluded existence depend on a perpetual relation with its surroundings, but the condition for there to be such a relation is the existence of a secluded entity. We intended to show how this contradiction – tension internalized – is at the center of Friston’s anticipatory organism; how it is this contradiction that grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization. Chapter 5 is the report of a study attempting to contrast the FEP’s perspective with that of traditional cognitive neuroscience. While the FEP casts the brain as an organism’s predictive model of how its world works and will continue to work in the future in which action is afforded a central place, research on the brain’s predictive capacities remains beholden to traditional research practices in which participants are passively shown stimuli without their active involvement (as we also did in Chapters 2 and 3). The current study is an investigation into ways in which self-generated predictions may differ from externally induced predictions. Participants completed a volatile spatial attention task under both conditions (externally/cue-induced, internally/action-induced) on different days. We used the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, an approximate Bayesian inference model, to determine subject-specific parameters of belief-updating and inferred volatility. We found preliminary evidence in support of self-generated predictions incurring a larger reaction time cost when violated compared to predictions induced by sensory cue, which translated to participants’ increased sensitivity to changes in environmental volatility. Our results suggest that internally generated predictions may be afforded more weight, but these results are complicated by session order and duration effects, as well as a lack of statistical power.

Digital technologies play an increasingly important role in addressing environmental challenges, such as climate change and resource depletion. Yet, the characteristics and implications of digitalized environmental governance are still under-conceptualized. In this perspective, we distinguish three dimensions of governance: (1) seeing and knowing, (2) participation and engagement, and (3) interventions and actions. For each dimension, we provide a critical perspective on the shifts that digital technologies generate in governance. We argue against the assumption that the use of digital technologies automatically results in improved outcomes or in more democratic decision-making. Instead, attention needs to be paid to the wider political and normative context in which digital technologies are proposed, designed, and used as environmental governance tools. We conclude with key questions for academics and policymakers to broaden the debate on responsible design and use of digital technologies in environmental governance.

As populations increase and economic affluence expand, conventional farmers will be unable to meet the demand for food. Two main scenarios offer different solutions. The first scenario aims to further intensify scientific- and technology-driven agriculture research. The second scenario aims to radically switch to nature-based solutions in agricultural systems. There seem to be two interpretations of the nature-based solutions scenario: on the one hand, the interpretation of the IUCN regards nature-based solutions, such as regenerative agriculture, as using nature and denies a link with biomimicry; and on the other hand, the interpretation of the EU regards regenerative agriculture as an example of biomimicry. This raises the question: is regenerative agriculture a prime example of biomimicry or is it only a very important way to use nature in agriculture? To answer this question, we take a step back and philosophically reflect on biomimicry. Based on two definitions of mimesis, we distinguish between two concepts of biomimicry, a ‘strong’ concept which emphasizes natural principles and copying natural models, and a ‘weak’ concept, which emphasizes inspiration by nature and creative invention. Secondly, we describe and analyze regenerative agriculture as part of the nature-based solutions scenario and interpret regenerative agriculture first as ‘weak’ and then as ‘strong’ biomimicry. Both interpretations have their problems. To address these, we propose a new concept of biomimicry based on a new definition of mimesis. This enable us to differentiate between biomimicry, strict imitation of nature, and nature-inspired invention. We argue that our conceptualization of biomimicry helps to operationalize regenerative agriculture as a biomimetic technology.

Previous Responsible Innovation (RI) research has provided valuable insights on the value conflicts inherent to societally desirable innovation. By observing the responses of firms to these conflicts, Value-sensitive Absorptive Capacity (VAC) captures the organizational capabilities to become sensitive to these value conflicts and thus, innovate more responsibly. In this article, we construct a survey instrument to assess VAC, based on previous work by CSR and RI scholars. The construct and concurrent validity of the instrument were tested in an empirical study, including 109 employees of 30 food manufacturing firms. The results from the survey were then compared with the conceptual VAC dimensions. With this comparison, we do not only contribute to the substantiation of the VAC construct, but we also show how inductive and deductive approaches can be combined to build theory regarding RI in a transdisciplinary manner.

Kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) is een sterk opkomende techniek met legio nuttige toepassingsmogelijkheden. Tegelijkertijd maakt AI commerciële en politieke beïnvloeding van grote groepen mensen mogelijk. Daarnaast dreigen de beperkingen van AI over het hoofd te worden gezien. Informatie is nog geen kennis en zonder context is er nog geen werkelijk inzicht. Met behulp van inzichten uit de filosofie van Herman Dooyeweerd wordt uiteengezet dat het gebruik van AI zonder nader inzicht in de betekenisan onderliggende data leidt tot een reductie van de werkelijkheid.

Attempts to decrease socioeconomic health disparities face various challenges, which include ethical questions about prioritization and value-conflicts. To deal with these questions in a way that takes equal standing as a central value, this paper explores the potential of a relational egalitarian capability approach to local health equity policies. Especially for local health equity policies, a relational egalitarian capability approach seems promising as it offers more perspectives for action and evaluation additional to considerations of distributive justice. To scrutinize if this approach can offer an adequate normative basis for health equity policies and be a helpful ethical guide in practice, five desiderata are identified that a relational egalitarian capability approach to local health equity should fulfil. These desiderata stem from a consideration of political-ethical pluralism and scarcity of time and resources as non-ideal conditions characterizing public policy practice, as well as of three questions that any capability approach should answer to be applicable in practice. For each of the five desiderata, a brief outline is given of what relational egalitarian theories and the capability approach offer in response to the questions implied by these desiderata. Ultimately, these questions need to be answered in relation to specific policies in particular contexts.

In this article, I address and argue against the tendency to understand the anthropocene as inaugurating the end of nature. I conduct two key moves. First, by way of an engagement with the concept of anthropocene technology I explain how understanding the anthropocene as the end of nature prevents us from recognizing what the anthropocene is all about: interventionism. Secondly, I illustrate how a nondualist understanding of the human-nature relation allows us to recognize interventionism as the hallmark of the anthropocene without falling back into the hierarchical human-nature conceptions that underlie interventionism. A nondualist framework that conserves the human-nature distinction helps us in our ability to relate critically to contemporary science and technology in the anthropocene. I illustrate the conceptual narrative of the article through the specific case of gene drive technology development.

Biomass such as crops and agricultural waste is increasingly used as the primary resource for products like bioplastics and biofuels. Incorporating the needs, knowledge, skills and values of biomass producers in the design of global value chains – the steps involved in creating any finished product from design to delivery – can contribute to sustainability, reliability and fairness. However, how to involve biomass producers, especially if they are resource poor, remains a challenge. To make sure that inclusion in global biobased value chains is both fair and effective, the capabilities of relevant actors need to be taken into account, especially of those producing biomass. Access to resources determines to what extent a specific actor can participate in a global value chain. Therefore, differences in capabilities should be a central consideration when new (biobased) value chains are designed. Using the capability approach as an ethical framework to realize inclusion, we discern three complementary strategies for setting up inclusive value chains. Firstly, designing for local conversion factors second, providing adaptive design for new capabilities, and third, investing in local conversion factors. Applying these strategies can lead to context-sensitive design of biorefineries that allow for true inclusion of local stakeholders. We support these claims with reference to case-studies of sugarcane production in Jamaica, modified tobacco in South Africa and the non-edible parts of corn (stover) in the US.

Zoonoses, biting incidents, hereditary problems, and other issues can threaten the welfare of both humans and dogs. The Dutch government and animal welfare organizations seem to have little effect in their campaigns to influence the behavior of (potential) dog keepers, who can experience dissonance when faced with these campaigns and use coping strategies to relieve the dissonance instead of changing their behavior. In this study, in focus group discussions, dog keepers with pedigree dogs, high-risk dogs, foreign shelter dogs, and dogs purchased at puppy farms shared their experiences with opinions on dogs and were confronted with negative opinions on their dogs. The data were analyzed using a coping strategies framework. Most coping strategies were found in all groups, but were used in response to different dilemmas, with different manifestations. These differences should be kept in mind when behavior change in dog keepers is opportune. Special attention should be given to differentiating target groups, as use of the detachment coping strategy suggests that boundaries might be set differently than expected. Broad attention on problems with and for dogs can address perceived dissonance and prompt behavior change. In dialogue with dog keepers, in influential campaigns and in policy formulation, the chances of success are greater if initiators are aware of the strategies that they may encounter.

The potential for vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for vaccination policy and ethics. In this paper, I discuss recent evidence that the current COVID-19 vaccines have only a modest and short-lived effect on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and argue that this has at least four important ethical implications. First, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen primarily as a self-protective choice for individuals. Second, moral condemnation of unvaccinated people for causing direct harm to others is unjustified. Third, the case for a harm-based moral obligation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is weak. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, coercive COVID-19 vaccination policies (e.g., measures that exclude unvaccinated people from society) cannot be directly justified by the harm principle.

To develop an adequate ethical framework for a futureproof zoo, we have to employ what I would call a ‘bifocal’ view, in which zoo animals are seen simultaneously as individuals in need of specific care and as members of a species in need of protection. From such a bifocal view, the zoo’s policy should aim to strike a fair, morally acceptable balance between its effort to ensure the welfare of individual animals and its obligation to contribute to species conservation. I will argue that the prospects of the zoo to achieve such a balance are promising. Since early 21st century, zoos have made serious and sustained efforts to ensure and enhance animal welfare. The zoo’s huge animal welfare concerns are reflected in the development of animal enrichment programs and the increased use of training technics. At the same time, the zoo’s contribution to species conservation has also improved considerably. Zoos have found solutions for the problems created by their lack of space, such as innovative enclosure designs, specialization, regional and global cooperation, the interactive exchange of in situ and ex situ populations, and the shift away from large charismatic mammals towards smaller species. Zoos have also improved their conservation performance by broadening their conservationist role to include research, training, education, awareness campaigns, and direct financial and technical support for in situ projects. I will occasionally illustrate certain developments using examples drawn from ARTIS Zoo, the fifth oldest zoo in the world, located in the centre of my hometown Amsterdam.

No Brasil, o estabelecimento da política de defeso não tem levado em conta os conhecimentos de pescadoresartesanais, que são, comumente, marginalizados e não reconhecidos perante às políticas públicas que os atingem.Em nossos estudos, encontramos uma marcada incompatibilidade entre o conhecimento de pescadores artesanaisdo estuário do rio Itapicuru, litoral norte da Bahia, sobre o período reprodutivo de algumas espécies marinhasutilizadas como recursos pesqueiros e os períodos de defeso estabelecidos em lei. Os conhecimentos dos pesca-dores sugerem que duas espécies de robalo bem como quatro espécies de camarão estão sendo protegidas emperíodos do ano dissonantes da época reprodutiva percebida pelos pescadores. Propomos, assim, uma mudançanos procedimentos de tomada de decisão subjacentes às legislações de defeso, assim como a revisão da legislaçãoespecífica para robalos e camarões, levando-se em conta o conhecimento de especialistas tradicionais. Especial-mente na formulação de novas políticas de defeso, consideramos fundamental a participação destes últimos. Paraalcançar uma compreensão mais robusta e precisa da situação, propomos colocar em diálogo o conhecimentocientífico acadêmico e os conhecimentos de pescadores artesanais, em uma abordagem de pesquisa participativa.Processos participativos como os que propomos aqui e, eventualmente, de coprodução do conhecimento, não sópermitem melhorar as práticas de gestão e conservação ambiental e formulação de políticas públicas, mas tam-bém podem desempenhar um papel de empoderamento para comunidades pesqueiras, assim como para outrospovos do campo e povos indígenas.

During the second half of the twentieth century, several philosophers of technology argued that their predecessors had reflected too abstractly and pessimistically on technology. In the view of these critics, one should study technologies empirically in order to fully understand them. They developed several strategies to empirically inform the philosophy of technology and called their new approach the empirical turn. However, they provide insufficient indications of what exactly is meant by empirical study in their work. This leads to the critical question of what counts as an empirically informed philosophy of technology in the empirical turn. In order to answer this question, we first elaborate on the problems that the empirical turn philosophers tried to address; secondly, we sketch their solutions, and, thirdly, we critically discuss their conceptions of empirical study. Our critical analysis of the empirical turn contributes to new efforts to engage in an empirically informed philosophy of technology.

This article deals with the question of how self-organization in living organisms is realized. Self-organization may be observed in open systems that are out of equilibrium. Many disequilibria-conversion phenomena exist where free energy conversion occurs by spontaneously formed engines. However, how is self-organization realized in living entities? Living cells turn out to be self-organizing disequilibria-converting systems of a special kind. Disequilibrium conversion is realized in a typical way, through employing information specifying protein complexes acting as nano engines. The genetic code enables processing of information—derived from coding DNA—to produce these molecular machines. Hence, information is at the core of living systems. Two promising approaches to explaining living cells containing sequences carrying information are mentioned. Also discussed is the question of whether a second concept of self-organization—namely, the Kantian concept—applies.

Synthetic biologists design and engineer organisms for a better and more sustainable future. While the manifold prospects are encouraging, concerns about the uncertain risks of genome editing affect public opinion as well as local regulations. As a consequence, biosafety and associated concepts, such as the Safe-by-design framework and genetic safeguard technologies, have gained notoriety and occupy a central position in the conversation about genetically modified organisms. Yet, as regulatory interest and academic research in genetic safeguard technologies advance, the implementation in industrial biotechnology, a sector that is already employing engineered microorganisms, lags behind. The main goal of this work is to explore the utilization of genetic safeguard technologies for designing biosafety in industrial biotechnology. Based on our results, we posit that biosafety is a case of a changing value, by means of further specification of how to realize biosafety. Our investigation is inspired by the Value Sensitive Design framework, to investigate scientific and technological choices in their appropriate social context. Our findings discuss stakeholder norms for biosafety, reasonings about genetic safeguards, and how these impact the practice of designing for biosafety. We show that tensions between stakeholders occur at the level of norms, and that prior stakeholder alignment is crucial for value specification to happen in practice. Finally, we elaborate in different reasonings about genetic safeguards for biosafety and conclude that, in absence of a common multi-stakeholder effort, the differences in informal biosafety norms and the disparity in biosafety thinking could end up leading to design requirements for compliance instead of for safety.

South Boom Boom is an attempt to survive in apnea, a continuous labor, a possibility to re-imagine the world, a way to escape captivity, to draw fugitive lines, to resist, to fight and fly, to conceive resistances, to migrate, to reinvent a catastrophe, to deform the shapes of oppression across time. This magazine aims to function as an anticolonial statement expressed from that absurd position of studying and living here as someone who both has to pay the highest tuition fee while being considered as “poor and underdeveloped”. The SOUTH BOOM BOOM project included performative conferences, which aimed to discuss the importance of dissident invisibility in art and education to explore how institutions can articulate and enact an anti-racist and anti-colonial agenda.

As evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing reliance on smartphone apps such as digital contact tracing apps and vaccination passports to respond to and mitigate public health threats. In light of the European Commission’s guidance, Member States currently offer such apps on a voluntary, ‘opt-in’ basis. In this paper, we question the extent to which the individual choice to use these apps – and similar future technologies – is indeed a voluntary one. By explicating ethical and legal considerations governing the choice situations surrounding the use of smartphone apps, specifically those related to negative consequences that declining the use of these apps may have (e.g., loss of opportunities, social exclusion, stigma), we argue that the projected downsides of refusal may in effect limit the liberty to decline for certain subpopulations. To mitigate these concerns, we recommend three categories of approaches that may be employed by governments to safeguard voluntariness.

In coming to grips with the advent of the Anthropocene, contemporary philosophers have recently pushed beyond its many physical implications (e.g., global warming, reduced biodiversity) and social significance (e.g., climate justice, economics, migration) to interpret the Anthropocene metaphysically. According to such interpretations, the Anthropocene imposes nothing less than a wholly new understanding of the world. This raises the question regarding the character of such an imposition. To develop this question, this article discusses three metaphysical interpretations of the Anthropocene: Clive Hamilton's, Timothy Morton's, and Bruno Latour's. Among many voices today, these authors are specifically relevant because they predominantly correlate the imposition of a new, nonmodern world with the scientific object "Earth"as it is developed in Earth system science. The purpose here is to elucidate the ways in which this correlation is made, and to inquire after the role of science-a modern activity par excellence-in the advent of the world of the Anthropocene. The critical question is how this role could be legitimated in the proclaimed absence of a modern framework ensuring science's status as a beacon of certainty and truth.

In this concluding chapter, we want to take a broader perspective and, based on the contributions to this book, identify the key lessons from the NewHoRRIzon project about RRI implementation in general and via Social Labs in particular. From a bird’s eye perspective, the NewHoRRIzon Social Labs can be seen as interventions that depend on and are affected by several interrelated levels which might be separated roughly in the micro-level of Social Labs, the meso level of organisations, and the macro-level of national and European research and innovation systems and policy making.

Climate change and related shifts in weather conditions result in massive biodiversity declines and severe animal suffering. This article explores the measures that can be taken to decrease animal suffering and prevent species from going extinct. Taking the Iberian lynx as a case study, we assess the extent to which it is beneficial for animal welfare and species conservation to do nothing or reduce other threats, provide food or shelter, relocate the species via assisted migration, or bring the population into captivity. We argue that, given the Iberian lynx’s non-invasive characteristics, assisted migration may be the best way to protect the species while ensuring animal welfare and protecting wildness and other ecosystem values.

Sustainable fishing is one of the most pressing challenges for mankind and requires insightful knowledge of the drivers that may foster or hinder predatory exploitation. It has been widely recognized that Indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources, such as fisheries, worldwide. Nevertheless such knowledge continues to be marginalized and unacknowledged by a range of academic scientists and policy makers. In the present paper, we tackle this issue by discussing laws regarding closed fishing seasons, which are part of the Brazilian environmental policies for protecting marine fauna, from the perspective of artisanal fishers’ knowledge. In Brazil, these laws are typically based on governmental decisions (i.e., by administrative organizations and researchers acting as consultants) without taking fishers’ knowledge into account. Through semi-structured interviews with traditional experts of fishing villages situated along the northeast coast of Brazil, we aimed to investigate their knowledge of fish reproductive periods and analyze how it is related to the closed seasons at work in their region. We found an exact agreement between fishers’ knowledge and closed season regulations on the reproductive period of the mangrove crab (Ucides cordatus), but a conflict regarding the reproductive period of two snook species and four species of shrimps. We highlight the potential of fishers’ knowledge contributions to environmental regulations and we also explore three challenges of incorporating epistemic diversity in environmental policy. We conclude by advocating for a reflexive transdisciplinarity that highlights the potential of Indigenous and local knowledge while critically reflecting on the methodological and political challenges of transdisciplinary practices.

Insect farming for animal feed production is considered a promising alternative to the traditional feed manufacturing sector, because of its low ecological footprint and circular use of required resources. However, treating insects as mini-livestock is accompanied by various questions on the suitable rearing conditions needed to achieve high-quality products, while considering insect welfare. Although there are concepts which have long served as a compass for animal welfare regulations, these have been under increasing criticism. Also, they have been drawn up for vertebrate animals and are, therefore, not entirely applicable to insects. We hold that the development of commonly accepted methods for keeping insects as mini-livestock demands deep knowledge on insect biology and a dynamic discussion on insect welfare. We plead for an evaluation of the relevant ethical and empirical aspects of insect rearing conditions and for establishing welfare criteria based on these evaluations. By addressing several questions and uncertainties from an interdisciplinary perspective of entomology, animal ethics and philosophy of mind, we argue that taking into account current knowledge on insect biology could aid in the emergence of a novel, well-informed and integrated perspective on insect welfare. Ultimately, our goal is to trace the necessary biological factors for designing implementable and appropriate insect rearing conditions, in order to avoid ethical mistakes that have historically been made in animal production systems.

Digital Twins are conceptualized as real-time digital representations of real-life physical entities or systems. They are explored for a wide array of societal implementations, and in particular to help address fundamental societal challenges. As accurate digital equivalents of their real-life twin, Digital Twins substitute their physical twin in knowledge production and decision-making processes. They raise high expectations: they are expected to produce new knowledge, expose issues early, predict future behavior, and help to optimize the physical twin. Data play a key role here because they form the building blocks from which the Digital Twin representation is created. However, data are not neutral phenomena but products of human-technology interaction. In this article, we therefore raise the question of how a Digital Twin data collection is created, and what implications does this have for Digital Twins? To answer this question, we explore the data collection process in three cases of Digital Twin development at a university. Connecting to Jasanoff's theoretical framework of regimes of sight, we approach the creation of a data collection as acts of seeing and recording that influence how reality is represented in data, as well as give a certain legitimacy and authority to the data collection. By examining the acts of seeing and recording and their respective roles in producing the data collection, we provide insight into the struggles of representation in Digital Twins and their implications.