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In the risk debate over genetically modified (GM) crops, their status as ‘‘environmentally-friendly products’’ has been controversial. The 1990 precautionary legislation of the European Union was designed to anticipate potential harm from GMOs in advance. Yet the acceptability of harm - or even its definition - has been contentious in evaluating commercial products. The legislation has been interpreted in ways which implicitly link concepts of precaution and ‘‘sustainable development’’. In the mid-1990s risk regulation, the European Union framed ‘‘risk’’ within a commitment to intensive agriculture. Its familiar hazards were accepted as a normal baseline for evaluating the effects of GM crops. The regulatory procedure regarded choices of crop protection measures as irrelevant or interchangeable, and therefore regarded some future options as dispensible, regardless of whether they would be environmentally preferable. At least implicitly, safety claims presupposed environmental advantages of GM crops in reducing agrochemical usage. That risk-framing came under challenge from widespread protest and expert disagreements. In response, some governments applied more precautionary measures. They broadened the definition of the ‘‘adverse effects’’ which must be avoided, devised market-stage precautions for such effects, and increased the burden of evidence for demonstrating safety. Soon the EU-wide procedure began to formalize such approaches. In the contested definitions of relevant harm, there are deeper issues about the sort of environment which should be protected, sustained or created. Thus GM crops have become a test case for environmental norms, within a broader debate about how to construct a sustainable agriculture.

Abstract Informed by the European Union's waste hierarchy, UK policy has normatively shifted the ontological status of waste from matter out of place to a resource for which uses must be found in order to achieve environmental goals of decarbonisation and waste reduction. Technologies linking waste-management with renewable energy have been supported within an ecomodernist framework of market incentives for stimulating private-sector investment in new waste treatment technologies. Under pressure of EU targets, the UK's policy measures have had several aims: to reduce landfill disposal, increase resource recycling or reuse, expand waste-based renewable energy and thus reduce GHG emissions. As techno-market-fixes, new facilities were meant to convert waste for more beneficial uses, bring it up the hierarchy and localise its management. Consequent tensions can be illuminated by linking concepts of technology scaling and socio-material metamorphosis with critical perspectives on ecomodernism. Although the ecomodernist framework stimulated some waste-management improvements, other outcomes contradict the policy objectives of localising and converting waste for more beneficial uses. These contrary outcomes are illustrated by two technologies, anaerobic digestion (AD) and mechanical and biological treatment (MBT), each with multiple possible spatial scalings and techno-configurations. Financial instruments have most incentivised the easiest socio-material metamorphosis for lucrative returns, especially to produce energy (electricity or gas) for grid systems, suiting large operators. For more environmentally beneficial uses of waste, there have been difficulties in overcoming its recalcitrance for producing commercially viable outputs, e.g. digestate replacing chemical fertilisers, compost improving soil and 'dirty' plastics replacing virgin plastics. Techno-configurations and material flows have been scaled towards global goods, distant from the feedstock source. Through the ecomodernist framework, the state's responsibility for such outcomes has been blurred with the private sector and shifted to anonymous markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the role of social sciences and humanities (SSH) in innovating European Union research programmes. Topics covered include the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in backing research agendas that embed SSH, the purpose of SSH in the European research programme Horizon 2020, and the purpose of SSH in enabling Europe as an Innovation Union.

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

Abstract: The EU aspires to global leadership in developing ‘sustainable biofuels’ which can substitute for fossil fuels and thus reduce GHG emissions, while also enhancing energy security and rural development. Yet EU biofuel targets provide extra incentives for dispossessing rural communities in the global South, especially through land grabs and agro-industrial production methods. Since 2007 North–South NGO networks have denounced ‘agrofuels’ for such harm, thus provoking a high-profile controversy. Despite those criticisms, the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) set a mandatory target for European transport fuel to contain 10% renewable energy – in practical terms, meaning mainly biofuels by the 2020 deadline. In managing the consequent tensions, the EU system has elaborated a prior vision of a feasible, desirable future through sustainable biofuels. This combines several elements: mandatory targets incentivising investment in biofuels, R&D funds stimulating future novel biofuels, techniques commoditising natural resources in the name of protecting them, sustainability criteria homogenising the environment, and rural development models dependent on agro-industrial methods; those elements have become linked through circular reasoning. The EU’s political accountability is reduced to carbon accounting; in turn it is channelled into expert debates over modelling methods and uncertainties. Arguments about indirect land-use change (ILUC) became an implicit proxy for wider conflicts over the EU’s 10% target. Through the ILUC debate, biofuel critics have been drawn into expert procedures which obscure people’s experiences of harm in the global South. By these methods, the EU system can pursue global leadership for ‘sustainable biofuels’, while depoliticising its global plunder of resources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although the concept “sustainable development” has scope to open up societal futures, this opportunity has been limited by dominant agendas promoting capital-intensive innovations. Civil society organisations (CSOs) have criticised these agendas, especially through campaign activities, while also intervening in these issues through research activity. Such interventions were extended by our project, “Co-operative Research on Environmental Problems in Europe”, which brought together CSOs and academics as partners to carry out joint research. Focusing on agricultural practices and innovations, the project analysed divergent accounts of sustainable agriculture. Through academic-CSO cooperation, critical concepts from CSOs (e.g. agrofuels and agroecology) became perspectives for research and for wider stakeholder involvement. These concepts helped to deepen critical analysis of the EU's dominant innovation agenda, which is seen by many CSOs as unsustainable development – perpetuating sustainability problems in the name of addressing them. Itself a societal intervention, the research process also strengthened CSOs’ efforts to intervene in EU policy frameworks, to challenge dominant innovation agendas and to promote alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent EU policy has linked research agendas with societal challenges, which has resulted in an increased emphasis on the need for exchange of knowledge between research and non-research actors, especially civil society organisations. Concurrent with this, has been a call for democratic accountability of research agendas and science that addresses Grand Societal Challenges. The challenge of environmental sustainability features strongly in these discussions with an emphasis on global warming, the tightening of energy, water and food supplies, and the overarching goal of achieving an ‘eco-efficient economy’. However, this challenge can be defined in various ways, with different definitions orienting towards different solutions many of which we argue may be contradictory to the goal of environmental sustainability. In this commentary we illustrate how dominant research agendas are often orientated towards the partisan agendas of influential stakeholders, favouring myopic technological fixes and marginalising other civil society actors and critical insights from social science. Our main recommendations include a more dominant role for social sciences, involving civil society more actively in research agenda setting, increased communication, information sharing and capacity building, and increased interdisciplinarity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) has intersected with a wider debate about ‘sustainable agriculture’, especially in Europe. Agbiotech was initially promoted as an alternative which would avoid or remedy past problems of intensive agriculture, but such claims were soon challenged. Agbiotech has extended the dominant agri-industrial paradigm, while critics have counterposed alternatives corresponding to an agrarian-based rural development paradigm. Amid controversy over environmental and health risks in the late 1990s, an extra issue emerged − the prospect that genetically modified (GM) material would become inadvertently mixed with non-GM crops. In response the European Commission developed a policy framework for ‘coexistence’ between GM, conventional and organic crops. This policy has aimed to ensure that farmers can freely choose among different production systems, which would develop side by side, yet specific proposals for coexistence rules favour some choices over others. Such rules have been contested according to different policy agendas, each promoting their model of future agriculture. Moreover, a Europe-wide network of regional authorities has promoted ‘GM-free zones’ as a territorial brand for green, localised, high-quality agri-food production, whose diverse qualities depend upon symbolic, immaterial characteristics. This alternative has been counterposed to the agri-industrial production of global commodities – symbolised by the European Union, especially its product authorisation procedure for the internal market. ‘Coexistence’ policy was intended to mediate policy conflicts over GM crops, yet it has become another arena for contending agricultural systems, which may not so readily co-exist in practice. Wherever an agrarian-based rural development paradigm gains local support, its alternative agricultures are in contradiction rather than coexistence with GM crops. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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

GM crops have become a test case for the conflicting slogans of ‘the precautionary principle’ versus ‘sound science.’ The issues can be illustrated by developments in regulatory science for Bt maize in the European Union. As this case study suggests, risk assessment is always framed by some account of the relevant uncertainties. These in turn depend upon how the environment is valued and how scientific questions are posed about cause–effect pathways of potential harm. The slogan of ‘sound science’ hides such judgements, by representing ignorance or value-judgements as ‘science.’ By contrast, precaution can challenge such judgements, identify new unknowns, generate different criteria for evidence, open up new scientific questions, and make these judgements more transparent. It is doubtful whether these complexities have been fully acknowledged by specialists, and thus whether the continued risk debate is due solely to a public misunderstanding of science. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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

The article explains the role of embedding social sciences and humanities (SSH) in technoscientific research, as promoted by the European Union programme Horizon 2020. Topics covered include the Vilnius Declaration promoting SSH as means of enabling innovation and development of society, the concept of embedding SSH in relation to the U.S. military approach of letting journalists cover the Iraq War in 2003, and the role of SSH in future policy frameworks of the European Union.

Comments on the role of precautionary principle in the European Union (EU) laws regulating agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech). Discussion on the concept of precaution; Reasons behind the idea that agbiotech has become a difficult case for precaution; Highlights of a study on precautionary expertise for genetically-modified crops in EU member states.