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

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

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

Revisiting public debate on Genetic Modification and Genetically Modified Organisms. Explanations for contemporary Dutch public attitudes

Genetic Modification (GM) has been a topic of public debates during the 1990s and 2000s. In this paper we explore the relative importance of two hypothesized explanations for these controversies: (i) people's general attitude toward science and technology and (ii) their trust in governance, in GM actors, and in GM regulations, in explaining the Dutch public's Attitude toward GM applications, and in addition to that, the public's GM Information seeking behaviour. This will be conducted through the application of representative survey methodology. The results indicate that Attitudes toward GM applications are best predicted by both the attitude toward science and technology and three trust measures. GM information seeking is predicted by gender and educational level, as well as attitude toward science and technology, trust in organisations and trust in regulations (negative). Overall, psychological variables seem better predictors than demographics. Implications for future research on information seeking behaviour are discussed.Beheer Grootschalige (EU) Projecte