Journal
SUSTAINABILITY
Volume 13, Issue 14, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/su13147643
Keywords
GMO regulation; non-safety considerations; consultation; perplexity; sustainability; ethics; GMOs; genome editing
Funding
- Research Council of Norway [283387]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study critically analyzes the process of proposing relaxation of regulations on GMOs in Norway, finding unequal treatment of stakeholder concerns and a reduction in discussion of broader social, cultural, and ethical issues. To prevent such narrowing of stakeholder concerns in the future, the study proposes using Latour's model for political economy as a tool to gauge the openness of consultations for biotechnology regulation.
In Norway, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are regulated through the Gene Technology Act of 1993, which has received international attention for its inclusion of non-safety considerations. In 2017, the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board triggered a process to revise the Act that included a public consultation and resulted in the Proposal for relaxation. Using poststructuralist discourse analysis, we critically analyze the premises and processes through which the proposal for relaxation was developed-including the public consultation-to understand the range of stakeholder concerns and how these concerns shaped the final proposal. We find that the proposal does not include all concerns equally. The Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board's privileging of technological matters and its preference for tier-based regulation skewed the proposal in a way that reduced broader societal concerns to technological definitions and marginalized discussion of the social, cultural, and ethical issues raised by new gene technologies. To prevent such narrowing of stakeholder concerns in the future, we propose Latour's model for political economy as a tool to gauge the openness of consultations for biotechnology regulation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available