What Green Economy? Diverse agendas, their tensions and potential futures

The 'green economy' has become a prominent global concept for debating desirable futures, while recasting or marginalising ‘sustainable development’. The dominant agenda promotes state incentives for private-sector solutions through two parallel approaches: A techno-environmental Keynesian agenda attempts to stimulate eco-innovation which can become more resource-efficient and economically competitive. And a green markets agenda seeks to make natural resources more economically visible, as a basis to alleviate poverty. Like sustainable development, green economy agendas claim to redress the socially unequal access to natural resources. These claims have been widely questioned, thus generating extra remedial proposals, opposition and alternative frameworks. The debate features diverse agendas for co-constructing ‘green’ with ‘economy’, especially for assigning economic value to natural resources or environmental burdens. Struggles over potential futures take the form of disputes over defining, allocating and valuing resources – i.e. what counts for a ‘green economy’

Contending European agendas for agricultural innovation

Amid expectations for a European ‘transition to sustainable agriculture’, there are competing transitional processes. Given the widely acknowledged harm from agro-industrial systems, ‘unsustainable agriculture’ has divergent diagnoses and innovative solutions. This rivalry can be analysed as contending innovation agendas; the analysis here combines theoretical paradigms of agricultural innovation. In an EU policy context of a Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE), there are divergent accounts of its key terms: biological resources, economy, relevant knowledge and knowledge-producers. Likewise, divergent accounts are found of innovation, intensification, resource efficiency, resilience, bio-energy, horizontal integration, etc. These divergent agendas are promoted by distinct stakeholder networks. The dominant agenda favours laboratory-based techno-scientific innovation as a source of ‘efficient’ inputs, which can use renewable resources more efficiently for competitive advantage in global value chains. By contrast, other agendas promote farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, especially via agro-ecological methods which can reduce energy inputs, increase productivity and add value through quality. With those contending agendas, rival stakeholder networks seek to influence R&D priorities. From the standpoint of multifunctional agriculture, such contending agendas can play complementary roles in different rural spaces. Some agro-food practices may combine aspects of different paradigms. As a concept, Agricultural Knowledge Systems may provide a common space for interchanges between divergent agendas and their research priorities. However, these innovation agendas promote conflicting visions of the future

Precautionary Expertise for GM Crops (PEG): EU Workshop Report

This policy workshop was organised as part of the research project, ‘Precautionary Expertise for GM Crops’ (PEG), funded by the European Commission. The project includes research partners in seven member states (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and UK) and is co-ordinated by the Open University (UK). For regulating GM crops and their food uses, the precautionary principle has been widely accepted in Europe, but its meaning can be contentious. Indeed, it can have diverse meanings. The PEG project is analysing how current European practices – regulatory measures, expert bodies and stakeholder roles – compare with different accounts of the precautionary principle. How do these accounts inform policies and practices regarding GM crops? And how do they facilitate (or impede) efforts to mediate conflicts? From the findings of the research, we will suggest: • how to clarify EU guidelines, so that they better reflect national regulatory measures, and so that decision-making procedures can be publicly accountable and scientifically defensible • how expert bodies could better accommodate public-scientific controversy within their judgements • how national practices could contribute to an EU-level precautionary expertise • how to enhance policy learning about these issues among users of the research findings. To achieve these aims, the project has involved stakeholders and policy-makers at an early stage of the research, in order to ensure that it is policy-relevant and incorporates emerging issues. EU-level advisory panel meetings were held in Brussels in March and September 2002, to consult on the research plan and preliminary results. Advisors were also consulted about how best to structure scenario-analysis exercises for the policy workshops. These workshops were held by national partners in their countries in early 2003. Drawing upon those experiences, the project coordinator organised an EU-level workshop in July 2003. This report discusses the context, background, method, results and implications of that workshop

Innovating thermal treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW): Socio-technical change linking expectations and representations

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 (MSW), 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

Normalizing Novelty: Regulating Biotechnological Risk at the U.S. EPA

Drs. Levidow and Carr examine EPA\u27s regulation of biotechnology in the field of genetically modified organisms

Marketizing higher education: neoliberal strategies and counter-strategies

[The article had no abstract; the following text is drawn from the Introduction and Conclusion.] Higher education has become a terrain for marketization agendas. Since the 1980s universities have been urged to adopt commercial models of knowledge, skills, curriculum, finance, accounting, and management organization. Neoliberal strategies for higher education have the following features: all constituencies are treated through business relationships; educational efficiency, accountability and quality are redefined in accountancy terms; courses are recast as instructional commodities; student-teacher relations are mediated by the consumption and production of things, e.g. software products, performance criteria, etc. These general tendencies are manifest in diverse ways across geopolitical contexts: the 'information society' as a paradigm for ICT in education; the World Bank 'reform agenda' for the self-financing of higher education; Africa, where higher education is being forcibly marketized and standardized through financial dependence; North America, where some universities attempt to become global vendors of instructional commodities; Europe, where state bodies adopt industry agendas of labour flexibilisation as an educational model, in the guise of technological progress; and the UK, where ICT design becomes a terrain for contending educational agendas. This analysis can inform counter-strategies, especially the following elements: demonstrating links among neoliberal forms; linking resistances across constituencies and places; de-reifying Information and Communication Technology (ICT); and developing alternative pedagogies

Precautionary uncertainty: regulating GM crops in Europe

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

Democratizing agri-biotechnology? European public participation in agbiotech assessment

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

Sustainable Intensification: Agroecological Appropriation or Contestation?

For at least the past decade, global institutions have been promoting sustainable intensification (SI) to raise yields with less environmental harm through a broad ‘toolkit’ including agroecological methods. In the European context, agri-intensification has diverse forms and policy agendas. SI has been advocated to help keep farmers on the land by making their cultivation methods more market-competitive, while conserving biodiversity elsewhere; this approach complements a land-sparing strategy. By contrast, a different intensification agenda promotes biodiverse agroecosystems, complementing a land-sharing strategy. The latter corresponds with an alliance of farmers and civil society organisations (CSOs) promoting agroecology to transform the dominant agro-food regime. In their efforts towards supportive policies, such alliances have gained larger budgets for agroecological methods in the EU’s R&D programmes. But their efforts at ‘greening the CAP‘ have resulted in rules which still subsidise higher-yield practices without necessarily benefiting agri-biodiversity. By recognising these tensions, practitioners can better develop strategies for intervening in various agri-policy arenas, even where SI remains implicit