Emotions matter for public engagement in the emerging biobased economy

This thesis explores the role of emotions for triggering public engagement in the emerging bio-based economy. Emotions have been found to be important in people’s communication, judgement formation decision making and interactions with our surroundings. In current engagement practises there is hardly any attention for emotions; how they can be vented, elicited or taken into account in a meaningful way. Approaches such as Q methodology, art and dinners have been studied as alternative means to elicit and articulate emotions hence triggering public engagement. Especially for such a distant issue as the emerging bio-based economy emotions might be a way to get people to consider what it all means, initiating their engagement.BT/Biotechnology and Societ

Biobased Bikken, meer dan eten!

Online - publicatieBT/Biotechnology and Societ

Unravelling emotional viewpoints on a bio-based economy using Q methodology

A transition to a bio-based economy will affect society and requires collective action from a broad range of stakeholders. This includes the public, who are largely unaware of this transition. For meaningful public engagement people's emotional viewpoints play an important role. However, what the public's emotions about the transition are and how they can be taken into account is underexposed in public engagement literature and practice. This article aims to unravel the public's emotional views of the bio-based economy as a starting point for public engagement. Using Q methodology with visual representations of a bio-based economy we found four emotional viewpoints: (1) compassionate environmentalist, (2) principled optimist, (3) hopeful motorist and (4) cynical environmentalist. These provide insight into the distinct and shared ways through which members of the public connect with the transition. Implications for public engagement are discussed.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Consumer choice: Linking consumer intentions to actual purchase of GM labeled food products

With a mandatory labeling scheme for GM food in Europe since 2004 measuring actual consumer choice in practice has become possible. Anticipating Europeans negative attitude toward GM food, the labeling was enforced to allow consumers to make an informed choice. We studied consumers actual purchase behavior of GM food products and compared this with their attitude and behavioral intention for buying GM food. We found that despite a majority of consumers voicing a negative attitude toward GM food over 50% of our European respondents stated that they did not actively avoid the purchase of GM food and 6% actually purchased one of the few available GM labeled food products in the period between September 2006 and October 2007. Our results imply that a voiced negative attitude of consumers in responses to questionnaires about their intentions is not a reliable guide for what they actually do in supermarkets. We conclude that the assumption of a negative attitude with regard to GM food is at least in part construed.BT/BiotechnologyApplied Science

Advisering herinrichting Eendragtspolder: onderzoek naar de fosfaatbeschikbaarheid

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The producer society and the transition towards a biobased society: Institutional innovation for a sustainable future

The biobased economy is a concept proposed by policymakers to accommodate the transition towards a sustainable society. This concept however is not familiar outside of policymaking and some academic circles, while a socio-technical transition supposes the shared commitment of the whole society. The need for this commitments becomes even bigger as society develops into a network society, which becomes increasingly irresponsive to one-sided governmental command.The paper contends that this dual problem should be overcome, the concept of a producer's society is introduced as a policymaker's perspective that allows the resolution of the need for having wide societal commitment to the transition towards a biobased economy and the need to make have a government that can address the network society in an effective manner. The concept of the producer's society entails that government should see citizens as the producers of their own environment, instead of either inactive policy consumers or active deliberative citoyens.Technology, Policy and Managemen