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Community food growing (CFG) builds community bonds and placemaking through emotional attachments. This process has been illuminated by grassroots visual storytelling, whereby CFG participants made short video stories about their experiences. The stories inspired community-building for better futures so as to encourage greater support for and participation in CFG. These stories were analysed to illuminate the social basis and roles of CFG. Participants" stories highlight some key aspects, namely: solidaristic mutual-aid relationships around food-growing, cooking, eating and distribution; cooperative, creative, adaptive capacities for collectively responding to common difficulties; empathetic bonds among participants across various differences (such as ethnicity, age and prior skills); a food culture strengthening participants' knowledge and supply of healthy food; and the social-organisational skills for facilitating and inspiring those group practices. As these video stories show, community-building processes are radically hopeful: they acknowledge difficult issues and emotions, alongside aspirations for a different future. Together those roles helped to strengthen place-attachments for more participants. By screening the video stories, moreover, participants have made the process more visible and attractive. This provides a stronger basis to identify exemplary practices, extend their strengths, spread the societal benefits and attract greater commitments. Although many urban and peri-urban spaces are potentially available for expanding CFG, successful initiatives depend on social-organisational skills to facilitate self-confidence, empathetic cooperation and place attachments among volunteers. Support measures from Local Authorities are generally fragmented across several policy areas and so warrant integration. Communitybuilding skills can provide a focus for such policy integration around the multiple roles and benefits of CFG initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Green Revolution exemplifies the capital-intensive modernization model of resource plunder and labor exploitation. This has provoked small-scale producers and civil society groups to counterpose an agroecology-based solidarity economy (EcoSol-agroecology), especially in Latin America. But their efforts encounter dominant models – of innovation, management, markets, nature, etc. – which limit alternatives. To clarify a transformative agenda, advocates have elaborated agroecological innovation through several complementary practices. Nature is framed as agri-biodiversity complementing socio-cultural diversity. Short food-supply chains (circuitos curtos) build consumer support for production methods enhancing producers' livelihoods, providing socio-economic equity and conserving natural resources. Through diálogos de saberes, i.e. knowledge exchange among farmers and with external experts, cultivation and water-management methods are designed or adapted as socio-environmental technologies. Capacities are built for collective self-management of those solidarity relationships. In such ways, agroecological innovation co-produces specific forms of nature, technoscientific knowledge and society; their practices construct a distinctive socionatural order. Such order arises through several instruments – making identities, institutions and discourses – as understood by STS co-production theory. Here this theory illuminates two Brazilian agroforestry initiatives whose cooperative practices seek to transform their own participants' lives and wider agri-food systems. By combining diverse sources, composite cultures deepen the social basis of territorial belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To implement EU climate policy, the UK's New Labour government (1997–2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promoted technological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy, especially by treating waste as a resource. This framework discursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as visions of feasible and desirable futures available through technoscientific development. According to the dominant imaginary, techno-market fixes stimulate low-carbon technologies by making current centralized systems more resource-efficient (as promoted by industry incumbents). According to the alternative eco-localization imaginary, a shift to low-carbon systems should instead localize resource flows, output uses and institutional responsibility (as promoted by civil society groups). The UK government policy framework gained political authority by accommodating both imaginaries. As we show by drawing on three case studies, the realization of both imaginaries depended on institutional changes and material-economic resources of distinctive kinds. In practice, financial incentives drove technological design towards trajectories that favour the dominant sociotechnical imaginary, while marginalizing the eco-localization imaginary and its environmental benefits. The ecomodernist policy framework relegates responsibility to anonymous markets, thus displacing public accountability of the state and industry. These dynamics indicate the need for STS research on how alternative sociotechnical imaginaries mobilize support for their realization, rather than be absorbed into the dominant imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the organic conversion process has been much studied, farm-level transitions to agroecosystems are less well understood. What transition pathways do they take? How can (or does) farmers' learning help to make such changes? What support measures can (or do) facilitate such learning? To answer such questions, a UK study identified farmers undergoing an agroecological transition and compared their practices with two prevalent models. As regards the Efficiency – Substitution – Redesign (ESR) model, our case-study farms had all three changes, but they were rarely sequential; agroecosystem redesign did not follow from Efficiency or Substitution measures, which readily provide endpoints rather than transitional stages. As regards the 'trigger events' model – Trigger, Active Assessment and Implementation – the three stages were often overlapping; triggers arose only when farmers' interpreted difficulties or opportunities as grounds to implement changes, which they had generally considered beforehand. More fundamentally, case-study farmers were unlearning conventional expectations by undergoing cognitive and affective shifts. Together those two models (ESR and trigger events) can provide heuristic devices for identifying farmers' agroecological trajectories in their diverse forms. Going further, better models of farmers' learning and action will be necessary for facilitating agroecological transitions and guiding relevant support measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines two theoretical perspectives: future technological expectations mobilising resources, and social representations assimilating new ideas through anchoring onto familiar frames of reference. The combination is applied to the controversial case of thermal-treatment options for municipal solid waste, especially via gasification technology. Stakeholders' social representations set criteria for technological expectations and their demonstration requirements, whose fulfilment in turn has helped gasification to gain more favourable representations. Through a differential 'anchoring', gasification is represented as matching incineration's positive features while avoiding its negative ones. Despite their limitations, current two-stage combustion gasifiers are promoted as a crucial transition towards a truly 'advanced' form producing a clean syngas: R&D investment reinforces expectations for advancing the technology. Such linkages between technological expectations and social representations may have broader relevance to socio-technical change, especially where public controversy arises over the wider systemic role of an innovation trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including anti-militarism, alternative technology movement and renewable energy technologies.

Industry has been upgrading its production processes through eco-innovation combining environmental and economic benefits, thus reducing some resource burdens which otherwise lie outside economic accounting. Some companies have shown interest in evaluating investment options for resource burdens and total value added across a whole-system value chain. Our EC research project developed a method for whole-system assessment of eco-innovation with multi-stakeholder cooperation. In three cases presented here, tensions arise among various aims, resource burdens, system levels, beneficiaries and timescales, thus complicating the concept of eco-innovation as a win–win strategy. Radical eco-innovation would depend on extra functions, value-chain actors and resource usages which can provide greater overall benefits. But such investment faces many systemic obstacles. Eco-innovation remains path dependent, thus limiting the scope to internalise environmental externalities. The tensions and difficulties cast doubt on an EC strategy emphasising uptake of eco-innovative technologies as the means to decouple economic growth from resource burdens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based policy-making has been a much-debated concept. This paper builds on various insights for a novel perspective: policy-driven, narrative-based evidence gathering. In a case study of UK priority setting for bioenergy innovation, documents and interviews were analysed to identify links between diagnoses of the problem, societal visions, policy narratives and evidence gathering. This process is illuminated by the theoretical concept of sociotechnical imaginaries- technoscientific projects which the state should promote for a feasible, desirable future. Results suggest that evidence has been selectively generated and gathered within a specific future vision, whereby bioenergy largely provides an input-substitute within the incumbent centralised infrastructure. Such evidence is attributed to an external expertise, thus helping to legitimise the policy framework. Evidence has helped to substantiate policy commitments to expand bioenergy. The dominant narrative has been reinforced by the government's multi-stake- holder consultation favouring the incumbent industry and by incentive structures for industry co- investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eco-innovation combines economic advantage with lower ecological-resource burdens. Eco-innovation has been generally directed at energy input-substitutes, component recycling, etc. Some companies have made investments reducing resource burdens in the production process. This study investigated options for eco-efficiency improvement in two large manufacturing companies, Volvo and Arla Foods. Their impetus for eco-innovation comes from the companies' environmental policies, as well as from external drivers such as future higher costs and resource scarcity. Relative to their respective industrial sector, these companies represent strong prospects for reducing resource burdens in water-service processes, especially from chemical inputs and wastewater. Such eco-innovations involve more complex interactions beyond the production site, so the options warrant a whole-system comparative assessment. The EcoWater project has analysed the entire water-service value chain through meso-level interactions among heterogeneous actors (process-water users, providers and wastewater treatment companies). The project has developed a methodology to obtain the necessary information, to involve stakeholders in the assessment and to facilitate their discussion on alternative options. Each study stimulated internal company discussions on the need and means to evaluate whole-system effects of investment decisions. Inter-organisational cooperation helped to anticipate how meso-level resource-efficiency relates to lower burdens in wastewater treatment. The assessment method can be extended to any water-service system. By comparing options, the method can facilitate better decisions improving meso-level resource efficiency. As wider implications, some improvement options may complicate 'eco-innovation' as double-eco benefits: win-win for whom, where and what level? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to comparative environmental politics by integrating comparative analysis with debates about ontological politics as well as science and technology studies. Comparative environmental analysis makes two tacit assumptions: that the subject of comparison (e.g., an environmental policy framework) is mobile and can be detached from its contexts; and that studying this subject in more than one location can identify its diffusion and implementation anywhere. These assumptions are sites of ontological politics by predetermining (or restricting) environmental outcomes. Environmental analysis needs to consider how its own comparative acts might reify supposedly global frameworks rather than acknowledging how different localities appropriate and give meaning to them in diverse ways. The concept of civic epistemologies illustrates how domestic politics are organized around supposedly global concepts, rather than how global concepts diffuse around the world, as illustrated here by a comparative analysis of the United Nations' Green Economy Initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including imaginaries of the public created as threat by synthetic biology institutions, role played by public in development of technoscientific knowledge and progress in technoscientific areas.

Innovative irrigation practices can enhance water efficiency, gaining an economic advantage while also reducing environmental burdens. In some cases the necessary knowledge has been provided by extension services, helping farmers to adapt and implement viable solutions, thus gaining more benefits from irrigation technology. Often investment in technological improvements has incurred higher water prices, however, without gaining the full potential benefits through water efficiency. Farmers generally lack adequate means and incentives to know crops’ water use, actual irrigation applications, crops’ yield response to different water management practices, and thus current on-farm water-efficiency levels. Those general difficulties are illustrated by our two case studies investigating options, stimuli and difficulties to improve water-efficient practices. The two areas have strong stimuli for improvement but lack a knowledge-exchange system to help farmers and resource managers identify scope for improvements. Partly for this reason, farmers’ responsibility for efficient water management has been displaced to hypothetical prospects, e.g. extra supplies from reuse of treated wastewater or a long-term low water pricing. In both cases a displaced responsibility complements the default assumption that farmers’ irrigation practices already have adequate water-use efficiency. Under current circumstances, agricultural water management will maintain the unknown water-efficiency level and farmers will have weaker incentives to make efforts for more efficient practices. A continuous knowledge-exchange is necessary so that all relevant stakeholders can share greater responsibility across the entire water-supply chain. On this basis, more water-efficient management could combine wider environmental benefits with economic advantage for farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agroecology has three practical forms—a scientific discipline, an agricultural practice, and a social movement. Their integration has provided a collective-action mode for contesting the dominant agro-food regime and creating alternatives, especially through a linkage with food sovereignty. At the same time, agroecology has been recently adopted by some actors who also promote conventional agriculture. Agroecology can play different roles—either conforming to the dominant regime, or else helping to transform it—contingent on specific empowerment strategies. Tensions between “conform versus transform” roles can be identified in European agroecological research, especially in three areas: farm-level agroecosystems development; participatory plant breeding; and short food-supply chains remunerating agroecological methods. To play a transformative role, collaborative strategies need to go beyond the linear stereotype whereby scientists “transfer” technology or farmers “apply” scientific research results. To the extent that farmer–scientist alliances co-create and exchange knowledge, such gains can transform the research system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cooperative research involves upstream engagement of practitioners, introducing diverse knowledges and expertise in ways that can, in theory at least, generate new knowledge that is socially robust and publicly accountable. And yet, judging cooperative research solely in terms of accountability may underplay the transformative and nonaccountable/nonconvergent nature of research--the production, in other words, of the new when collectives are drawn together. Using examples from research that sought to provide environmental civil society organisations (CSOs) with the resources to shape cooperative research, this paper argues that cooperative research may not simply mark an extension of public engagement with science but can also seed an anticipatory and thus creative research process. For cooperative research to play this role there is a need to highlight the human and nonhuman attachments that underpin cooperative research activity. We argue that such activity might best have as its aim the empowerment, not simply of participants, but of the political situations that CSOs can help to foment. [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 well-known eco-efficiency concept helps to assess the economic value and resource burdens of potential improvements by comparison with the baseline situation. But eco-efficiency assessments have generally focused on a specific site, while neglecting wider effects, for example, through interactions between water users and wastewater treatment (WWT) providers. To address the methodological gap, the EcoWater project has developed a method and online tools for meso-level analysis of the entire water-service value chain. This study investigated improvement options in two large manufacturing companies which have significant potential for eco-efficiency gains. They have been considering investment in extra processes which can lower resource burdens from inputs and wastewater, as well as internalising WWT processes. In developing its methodology, the EcoWater project obtained the necessary information from many agents, involved them in the meso-level assessment and facilitated their discussion on alternative options. Prior discussions with stakeholders stimulated their attendance at a workshop to discuss a comparative eco-efficiency assessment for whole-system improvement. Stakeholders expressed interest in jointly extending the EcoWater method to more options and in discussing investment strategies. In such ways, optimal solutions will depend on stakeholders overcoming fragmentation by sharing responsibility and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technoscientific innovation has played a central role in UK biofuel policy. When the government was proposing mandatory targets in 2007-08, public controversy over 'unsustainable biofuels' was channelled into prospects for future biofuels to avoid environmental harm and land-use conflicts. This vision serves as an imaginary--a feasible, desirable future. Societal benefits have been envisaged according to specific models of economic competitiveness, valuable knowledge, and environmental sustainability-- together comprising a prevalent imaginary of future 'sustainable biofuels'. This has informed institutional change along two lines. First, targets are envisaged as a temporary transition until future 'advanced biofuels' make liquid fuel more sustainable. Second, UK research institutes realign their priorities towards seeking investment from foreign counterparts and global energy companies, in the name of making UK science and industry more competitive. Together these measures have been justified as necessary for a transition to advanced biofuels which would better contribute to a low-carbon economy. Although this imaginary may eventually be transformed into reality, initially realised has been institutional change that reinforces infrastructural dependence on liquid fuel for the internal combustion engine. As an imaginary, then, 'sustainable biofuels' can help explain how a policy agenda promotes one future, while marginalising alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK bioenergy innovation pathways have been locked into current energy infrastructure through technological expectations, especially the reciprocal requirements of state bodies and industry. Over the past decade UK policy has given bioenergy an increasingly important role for decarbonising the energy system; technoscientifi c innovation has been expected to expand the range of biomass that can be sustainably converted to energy. Needing industry investment to fulfi l its policy aims, the UK government has faced requirements to provide long-term support measures. Innovation priorities have been shaped by policy arrangements closely involving industry with state bodies. Their expectations for future benefi ts have mobilised resources for bioenergy innovation mainly as input-substitutes within current energy infrastructural patterns; novel path creation lies within a path dependence. Although technical progress has encountered diffi culties and long delays, expectations for economic and environmental benefi ts have built support, while confl ating national benefi ts with private-sector interests. Through such expectations, innovation priorities wishfully enact some desired futures from among those which had been advocated in policy documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on Great Britain policy documents on decarbonisation over past 10 years and green house gas (GHG) savings including bioenergy. It informs that bioenergy has been defined broadly on the basis of biomass sources such as crop and food waste. It further informs that the 2012 UK Bioenergy Strategy clarified aims and priorities to support general principle such as cost effective contribution to carbon emission in Great Britain.

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]

The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure is a key arena for establishing global legal norms for what counts as relevant knowledge. As a high-profile case, the WTO trade dispute on GMOs mobilized scientific expertise in somewhat novel ways. Early on, the Panel put the dispute under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement through a new legal ontology; it classified transgenes as potential pests and limited all environmental issues to the ‘plant and animal health’ category. The selection of scientific experts sought a multi-party consensus through a fast adversarial process, reflecting a specific legal epistemology. For the SPS framing, focusing on the defendant’s regulatory procedures, the Panel staged scientific expertise in specific ways that set up how experts were questioned, the answers they would give, their specific role in the legal arena, and the way their statements would complement the Panel’s findings. In these ways, the dispute settlement procedure co-produced legal and scientific expertise within the Panel’s SPS framework. Moreover, the Panel operated a procedural turn in WTO jurisprudence by representing its findings as a purely legal-administrative judgement on whether the EC’s regulatory procedures violated the SPS Agreement, while keeping implicit its own judgements on substantive risk issues. As this case illustrates, the WTO settlement procedure mobilizes scientific expertise for sophisticated, multiple aims: it recruits a source of credibility from the scientific arena, thus reinforcing the standard narrative of ‘science-based trade discipline’, while also constructing new scientific expertise for the main task – namely, challenging trade restrictions for being unduly cautious. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Since the Europe-wide 'risk' controversy over GM crops in the late 1990s, an extra issue has emerged: the prospect that GM material would become inadvertently mixed with non-GM products, which consequently may require a 'GM' label under EU law. The stakes for segregating non-GM crops were framed in contending ways. Agbiotech proponents sought to license a biotechnologised nature as an eco-efficiency benefit, while framing admixture risks as an agronomic management problem which needs rules for co-existence. By contrast, biotech critics have foreseen a dangerous disorder of 'GM contamination', while framing this prospect as an ever-wider 'risk' issue, encompassing threats to human health, the environment and even democratic accountability. These contending frames intensified disputes over the appropriate rules for segregating GM crops from other agricultures. At stake were different visions of the socio-natural order, expressed by different accounts of risk, freedom and desirable futures. Conflicts of accountability took the form of disputes over market freedom versus coercion and unfair burdens on farmers; these concepts framed expert evidence and thus made it more contentious for any 'science-based policy', featuring disputes about whether specific management proposals were based on 'politics rather than science'. For these reasons, biophysical admixture per se cannot entirely explain why the segregation problem became such a contentious 'risk' issue; a comprehensive explanation lies in contending policy frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipating or responding to European public concerns over agbiotech, state bodies have sponsored participatory exercises in technology assessment (TA). Some participants have sought to open up technological decisions vis-à-vis alternative futures and normative choices, but such efforts have been marginalized; the trajectory of biotechnological innovation has been protected from challenge. Questions about agbiotech as control have been displaced and channeled into regulatory issues and control measures. To some extent, participatory TA exercises have helped to hold governments accountable for regulatory criteria, but not for innovation choices. These participatory TA exercises generally internalize assumptions about agbiotech as societal progress. Despite aspirations to democratize technological choices, the exercises tend to biotechnologise democracy. The prospects for democratization depend upon wider, autonomous forms of participation – neither sponsored nor welcomed by state bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

US and European Union (EU) approaches to the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are often explained using the ideas of 'sound science' and the 'precautionary principle'. These stereotypes, however, can be misleading. They can conceal conflicts within jurisdictions and important interactions between them. This paper avoids these ideas and instead analyses conflicts and interactions associated with the regulation of GMOs in the USA and the EU, using the example of Bt maize - a genetically modified crop. It focuses on risk assessment as a standard-setting process, and explains changes in regulatory standards. In this case, public protest and trade conflict created an opportunity for a transatlantic network of critical scientists to challenge regulatory standards and for non-governmental organizations to press for higher ones. The paper links two analytical perspectives to account for how this happened. 'Regulatory science' helps to explain what happens when the 'private' government-industry-academia network associated with risk regulation is opened up to greater public scrutiny. It also helps to explain how the context and content of regulatory science mutually shape each other. 'Trading up' helps to explain opportunities and pressures to raise regulatory standards associated with US-EU trade liberalization and trade conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Focuses on the controversy concerning an experiment conducted by the group of Arpad Pusztai which aims to establish novel methods for safety testing of genetically modified foods at the Rowett Research Institute (RRI) in Aberdeen, Scotland. Termination of Pusztai's employment; Critical report issued by RRI about the experiment; Lack of funding for further research in order to investigate the methodological limitations of the experiment.

Through the precautionary principle, governments acknowledge the limits of science as a basis for policy, while seeking to clarify scientific uncertainty. This tension is exemplified by the European risk regulation of genetically modified (GM) crops. The risk debate has been translated into various precautionary approaches, each with its own cognitive framing of the relevant uncertainties. Early safety claims took for granted intensive agricultural models; normative judgements served to downplay uncertainties which were not readily reducible, thus justifying commercial approval of products. In the late 1990s public protest strengthened broader accounts of uncertainty, for example through more stringent environmental norms and more complex causal pathways of potential harm. Fact-finding methods were debated as a value-laden choice for how best to generate more relevant knowledge. As risk-assessment research challenged assumptions in safety claims, critics cited the results as evidence of greater uncertainty. Invoking the precautionary principle, regulatory procedures delayed or restricted commercial use of GM crops. They not only increased the burden of evidence for safety, but also stimulated and requested knowledge about more complex uncertainties. Criteria for relevant evidence were implicitly linked with different framing visions for agriculture. Such value conflicts made scientific uncertainty more important — rather than vice versa. When risk research methods were challenged, fact/value boundaries were blurred, thus increasing 'uncertainty' — rather than vice versa. In these ways, the risk controversy was constituted by divergent accounts of the relevant scientific uncertainty. Uncertainty was constitutive, not merely contextual. In general, then, precaution offers a means to justify uncertainty — not simply vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on genetically modified crops as a utilitarian bioethics in market fetishism. Consideration of three ethical principles; Significance of agricultural biotechnology; Argument on the issue of industrializing agriculture.

Focuses on the protest against genetically modified (GM) products in Great Britain. Components of GM products threatening to nature and the society; Deployment of pollution metaphors; Demand of protestors for a shift away from intensive agricultural methods.

Analyzes how risk regulation frames the cause-and-effect uncertainties about potential harm from genetically modified crops. Implication of the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms in Europe and the United States (U.S.); Regulatory system for genetically modified organisms in the U.S.; Implications for scientific research.

While both journals were the result of collective efforts, the key figure initiating them was Robert M. (Bob) Young. The I Free Associations i Editors (Kurt Jacobsen and David Morgan) invited Bob's colleagues to provide articles for a special issue likewise encompassing all aspects of his contribution. Commemorating Robert M. (Bob) Young (1935-2019): Free Associations Special Issue. [Extracted from the article]

Focuses on regulatory approaches to genetically modified crops, with more attention to maize by the United States (US) and Europe. Emphasis on the risk of insect resistance; Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) Maize and its regulatory context; Significance of the insertion of the Bt gene into maize. INSET: Insect Resistance.

Focuses on the effects of biotechnological controversies and risk on the attitudes of people towards science in Great Britain. Definition of science; Correlation between technoscientific developments and modernization risks; Influence of product labelling on consumer behavior.

Discusses the controversy in Britain over the intentional release of genetically modified baculovirus with a gene inserted for a scorpion toxin in the habitat. Media reaction to it; Hazards of a field trial; Statutory controls and guidelines for the trials; How it acts; Profile of scorpion-toxin virus; Details of the experimentation; Government's stand regarding the issue; Response of society; Outcome of the controversy.

Examines the impact of agricultural biotechnology regulation on the release of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in Europe. Risk management of the GMO release; Anticipation of hazards brought by the GMO release by risk management institutions; Assessment on the restraints of research and development.

Investigates government regulation of biotechnology in Europe. Disputes over genetically-engineered crops; Theoretical perspectives on regulatory framing; Manifestations of regulatory framing in setting boundaries of risk assessment; Role and limits of regulatory science; Boundary areas for science.

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.