Governing the Transatlantic Conflict over Agricultural Biotechnology

Contending Coalitions, Trade Liberalisation and Standard Setting

Joseph Murphy, Les Levidow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134190928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Delays in approving genetically modified crops and foods in the European Union have led to a high profile trade conflict with the United States. This book analyses the EU-US conflict and uses it as a case study to explore the governance of new technologies.

The transatlantic conflict over GM crops and food has been widely attributed to regulatory differences that divide the EU and the US. Going beyond common stereotypes of these differences and their origins, this book analyses the conflict through contending coalitions of policy actors operating across the Atlantic. Governing the Transatlantic Conflict over Agricultural Biotechnology focuses on interactions between the EU and the US, rather than on EU-US comparisons. Drawing on original research and interviews with key policy actors, the book shows how EU-US efforts to harmonise regulations for agricultural biotechnology created the context in which activists could generate a backlash against the technology. In this new context regulations were shaped along different lines. Joseph Murphy and Les Levidow provide new insights by elaborating critical perspectives on global governance, issue-framing, standard-setting and regulatory science.

This accessible book will appeal to undergraduate and post-graduate students, academics and policy-makers working on a wide range of issues covered by political science, policy studies, international relations, economics, geography, business management, environmental and development studies, science and technology studies.

1 Global governance of new technologies

Introduction

The EU–US conflict over genetically modified crops and foods is a valuable opportunity to study the politics of a new technology. This opportunity exists because the conflict itself reveals practices and relationships that would otherwise remain hidden. Before the late 1990s, the regulation of biotechnology products took place in a relatively narrow world, involving a small number of experts. The backlash against the technology in Europe, however, changed that to a significant extent. It was followed by a commercial boycott and the de facto moratorium and a much wider range of actors engaged with the regulation of biotechnology products. Social scientists can exploit this opportunity. In this chapter we begin the process by developing concepts and arguments that we will use to analyse the case. We draw on a range of different social sciences, including International Relations, Political Science, Policy Studies and Sociology (Science and Technology Studies).

Our entry point for this chapter, and for the book as a whole, is the concept of ‘global governance’. We explore the relationship between the state and society through this concept. In the first section we develop a critical understanding of global governance, focusing especially on how collective problems are defined. In the second section we focus on public policy and post-empiricist approaches to policy analysis. To explore post-empiricist accounts of public policy in detail we examine the relationship between issue-framing and stakeholder coalitions. The third section focuses on trade liberalisation, particularly the relationship between regulatory harmonisation and standard-setting, and the role of judicial review in the event of a trade dispute. In the final section we discuss regulatory strategies to manage technological risk, especially the role and shaping of regulatory science.

Global governance: civil society and collective problems

Hajer and Wagenaar (2003) observe that ‘governance’ is part of a new vocabulary in International Relations, Political Science and Policy Studies. They speculate that this might be explained by academic fashion but ultimately conclude otherwise. The use of this vocabulary, they argue, reflects actual changes in politics and policy making, from the late 1980s onwards, which are empirically observable:

The new vocabulary seems to capture changes in both the nature and topography of politics. A new range of political practices has emerged between institutional layers of the state and between state institutions and societal organizations. The new language is rooted in an appreciation of the importance of these new political practices.

(Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003: 1)

The concept of governance, more than any other, tries to capture these changes. In this book we are primarily interested in political practices at the international level, rather than those that exist within countries, so to begin we can ask: what are the analytical and policy meanings of ‘global governance’?

Global governance: functionalist versus critical accounts

A valuable starting point is the use of global governance to refer to relations between governments at the international level. In practice, although there is no global government, legal authority and power have passed beyond the level of nation states. To a greater or lesser extent, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization are all examples of this. These organisations, therefore, play a mediating role in the relations between states, and to account for them concepts like global or transnational governance are necessary (Lipschutz, 1996: 249). Interestingly, this use of global governance draws attention to the differences between political practices at the national level compared to those at the international level. At the national level, governments do exist, and to some extent decisions can still be taken and implemented based on their authority alone. At the international level, however, there is no authoritative global government. This suggests that cooperation between governments, rather than a superior political authority, is needed to solve common problems.

Beyond purely inter-governmental relations, global governance is also used to refer to the inclusion of transnational non-state actors in international decision-making processes (e.g. Young, 1997: 284). The actors involved can be from the private sector or civil society. When the concept of global governance is used in this way it begins to resemble the most common use of the concept of governance at the national level – diverse actors making policy in complex networks. Global governance in this sense is often defined in a procedural way. It refers to the establishment and operation of rules and institutions, which define responsibilities and manage cooperation between international policy actors, so that a shared objective can be reached. Increasingly the concept of global governance denotes the involvement of transnational non-state actors in policy making, in addition to interactions between governments. This terminological usage is replacing the narrower use of the concept to denote only relations between states.

How can the emergence of governance, including global governance, be explained? Why has this concept become so widely used over the past decade? From a functionalist perspective governance can be understood as a response by governments to problems of overload and complexity (Raman, 2003). Governance, therefore, from an instrumental point of view, is the way that governments deal with an increasing number of responsibilities and novel problems. Given the focus of this book it is significant that Hajer and Wagenaar (2003: 3) note:

It is probably no coincidence that these practices are more developed in ‘new’ spheres of politics such as the environment and the ‘life politics’ of food and technology.

A related view is that a key driving force behind governance is the poor performance of public policy in specific areas. It is argued, for example, that governance involves drawing more actors into the policy process because more perspectives on complex problems will produce better policies. From this perspective, global governance means reforming institutions and practices to make them more effective, while taking for granted the problem to be addressed. In relation to global environmental issues, Paterson has described this strategy as follows:

. . . a programmatic, reformist orientation to the institutional arrangements in global politics, principally the UN system. . . . How to reform the UN machinery to deliver more effective environmental governance . . . [in such debates governance is] expressed in terms of concerns about the fragmentation of existing environmental agreements into different issue areas, lack of sufficient authority to enforce compliance, and local coordination of the various environmental governance mechanisms.

(2003: 1–2)

Such functionalist accounts and agendas of global governance are a valuable starting point, but more critical accounts also exist. The latter focus on the legitimacy problems that some international organisations, and the governments who support them, began to experience in the 1990s. Some critics attribute these legitimacy problems to the pursuit of trade liberalisation and a neo-liberal form of political-economic globalisation. In her book Naming the Enemy, Amory Starr identifies this agenda as the enemy:

Corporations are busy dismantling economic boundaries to their operations, busting open new markets (which may not require moving fixed assets), homogenising consumer tastes, and harmonising civic standards downwards – while persuading citizens to interiorise their necessary flexibilisation, abandon social goals in pursuit of ‘international competitiveness’, and reorganise their human aspirations into something called ‘consumer choice’.

(Starr, 2000: 7)

From this perspective, trade liberalisation and political-economic globalisation created a legitimacy crisis out of which emerged the concept of global governance. Evidence of the legitimacy crisis is found, of course, in the ‘antiglobalisation’ protests that have regulatory challenged meetings of the EU Council, WTO, World Bank, G7/8 and others. As some political scientists argue, ‘economic globalisation and political change have created a crisis of the old hegemonic structures and forms of political consent, which are now coming apart . . . ’ (Lipschutz, 1996: 55; citing Gill, 1993: 22–33).

This more critical understanding of global governance has been developed specially around environmental issues. From a political-economy perspective, global environmental governance

. . . can be seen as a product of two phenomena: the pursuit of neoliberal forms of globalization; and the resistance to such centralization of power . . . neoliberal globalization involves the centralization of power to a mix of public and private organizations such as transnational corporations (TNCs), the WTO, the G7, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), or the World Economic Forum. Environmental questions are a key part of legitimizing such a project, with neoliberals keen to display their environmental credentials through organizations like the Business Council for Sustainable Development or via the promotion of innovative governance mechanisms such as emissions trading. But at the same time such governance is deeply problematic in environmental terms and is increasingly resisted across the world, in part because of such problematic aspects. There is thus also a ‘governance from below’ comprising both direct protests against institutions such as the World Bank or WTO, and the myriad of diverse activities by NGOs and social movements attempting to shape TNC practice and to regulate their power directly.

(Paterson et al., 2003: 2)

From a critical perspective on global governance, therefore, new political practices, such as participation in policy making and even the discourse of governance itself, express a legitimacy crisis. They also provide strategic ways to manage that crisis. In their governance role, states can influence the meanings of issues for non-state actors as well as their engagement with decision making. A state-like governance system can then include ‘alliances between coalitions in global civil society and the international governance arrangements associated with the UN system’ (Lipschutz, 1997: 96).

Based on this discussion we can say that social, political and economic developments at the global level in the 1990s created the context from which (global) governance could emerge as an analytical concept and a policy prescription. As an analytical concept it has been used in critical and uncritical ways, and as a policy prescription it offers a strategy to deal with problems of complexity and legitimacy. Protests against environmental destruction, Third World debt and loss of jobs, amongst other issues, have challenged a diverse range of policy actors. Governance has emerged as a way of understanding and dealing with this. As a result we have seen a rapid increase in references to governance in academic and policy documents, and international bodies and governments have consulted more and developed more participatory forms of decision making. In the following section we look at how global governance involves defining and redefining problems.

Global governance: the definition of collective problems

The legitimacy crisis being experienced by the WTO, World Bank, G7/8, OECD and more recently the European Union has created an opportunity for new transnational networks to form in an effort to influence global rules and institutions. Examples of global networks from the development arena include Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History. New transnational networks like this can be rainbow coalitions; and they are often closely linked to international inter-governmental institutions (Lipschutz, 1997: 96). This proximity offers the opportunity to influence policy. At the same time, however, it also draws NGOs and others into a global governance process that they do not control. This opportunity, therefore, comes with political risks, which depend on how a governance process frames policy issues and structures stakeholder relations.

In the political-science literature, governance is often understood as cooperation to deal with collective problems. For example:

. . . governance involves the establishment and operation of social institutions . . . capable of resolving conflicts, facilitating cooperation, or, more generally, alleviating collective-action problems in a world of interdependent actors.

(Young, 1994: 15)

This focus on the role of collective-action problems, however, can easily lapse into naive functionalism. This would happen if we assume that such problems exist consensually and separately to the policy process.

In practice global governance processes frame collective-action problems in particular ways. As a result we must analyse the work involved in the definition of collective problems, or, perhaps more accurately, the definition of problems as collective ones. In practice some actors often seek to define ‘the problem’ before other stakeholders are involved. Consequently they may be incorporated into agendas which are not their own, or they may struggle to define collective problems differently, or pose different collective problems. These processes can increase conflict. From this perspective the process of defining problems as collective ones becomes a key concern for the analysis of global governance.

A useful starting point is ‘process management’, which indicates that problem-definitions can be expanded or changed through an interactive process involving different views. Young (1997: 286) has argued further that ‘The idea of process management also helps us to grasp the role that regimes can play in deepening or even transforming our understanding of the problems that led to their creation’. Although this account describes inter-state relations, the concept of ‘process management’ can also encompass governance relations between the state and civil society. We explore related processes further below by focusing on the role of issue-framing in policymaking processes.

Global governance of agricultural biotechnology

Relatively little critical research has been done on the global (or transatlantic) governance of agricultural biotechnology. In broad terms this justifies our focus on it in this book. That said, before concluding this section we will outline some critical accounts of the global governance of agricultural biotechnology along the lines discussed above (Buttel, 2000; Newell, 2003). Newell addresses global governance explicitly while Buttel’s contribution is relevant because he makes observations on the role of civil society in conflicts around globalisation and international economic integration. In Chapter 7 we will explore some of the points raised by these authors further.

Buttel (2000) tries to explain why the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology was undermined in the late 1990s. He begins by pointing out that by the mid- to late 1990s the scene was set for the widespread and rapid adoption of this technology. Various agreements of the World Trade Organization in particular were in place and suggested this would happen – for example, the agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, Technical Barriers to Trade and Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Things did not, however, go smoothly. To explain this Buttel identifies agricultural biotechnology as the issue that bridged the gap between the specific concerns of various NGOs, particularly environmental groups, and their emerging and wider concern over trade liberalisation. With this in mind Buttel (2000: 1) wonders ‘ . . . whether GMOs might be the Achilles Heel of the globalization regime, or conversely whether the globalization regime is the Achilles Heel of GMOs’.

Buttel’s argument has a theoretical underpinning – the concept of the ‘globalization regime’, a regime of accumulation which includes a food regime. He argues that the globalization regime

. . . consists of a set of institutions and regulations to govern the profitable movement of financial and industrial capital, as well as goods and services, across world borders. The basis of the coincidence of interest underlying the globalization regime is partly that of adherence to notions of the mutual benefits of trade through the economics of comparative advantage. But this coincidence of interest is based most fundamentally on several common or coincident interests of states, international financial institutions, multinational enterprises, and has led to the establishment of the World Trade Organization as well as regional trade blocs . . . [However] it is apparent that the globalization regime has serious weaknesses that threaten its long-term future. Many of these weaknesses pertain to agriculture and agricultural biotechnology.

(Buttel, 2000: 2)

This approach suggests that institutional and regulatory arrangements are explained by the need to create the conditions under which capital will accumulate. However, this theory also suggests that regimes of accumulation tend to make themselves vulnerable in various ways. In particular, Buttel identifies agricultural biotechnology as a weak link of the globalisation regime.

In the chapters that follow we will focus on the role of civil society in challenging institutions and regulatory frameworks rather than discussing the challenge to the globalisation regime more generally. As mentioned above, Buttel argues that concerns over agricultural biotechnology intersected with nascent concerns over trade liberalisation to create a potent basis for protest. It served to ‘ . . . greatly expand the traditional anti-trade liberalization coalition . . . ’ (2000: 6). He argues that US environmental groups were particularly important in this process. By 1999 not a single major US environmental NGO publicly supported the WTO, and most were actively opposed. This was a significant shift from the early 1990s when only a minority opposed the creation of NAFTA, which had a similar agenda. This shift was stimulated partly by various WTO dispute judgements that appeared to undermine environmental or consumer protection. On this basis, agricultural biotechnology is described as ‘a bridging issue’ – something that is contested in itself and as a symbol of a wider policy agenda.

Newell (2003) also discusses the relationship between the governance of agricultural biotechnology and globalisation processes. He focuses on production, investment, regulation and political authority; he examines how ‘global economic forces circumscribe the scope for effective environmental regulation in particular issue areas’ (2003: 60). In relation to regulation of agricultural biotechnology, after critically discussing such controversial ideas and processes as sound science, substantial equivalence and regulatory harmonisation, he argues:

The point here is not that the different regulatory forms have been hegemonically constructed in commercial terms. Clearly, in Europe particularly, the role of NGOs has been key in contesting the benefits of biotechnology and providing support to a precautionary approach. But emphasizing commercial considerations [in the analysis] has provided an account of why some discourses of regulation are privileged, both at the national level and in activities of the principal international bodies. This privileging reflects both the salience of corporate strategic concerns, and their relationship to governments’ own priorities, underscoring the importance of a political economy approach to understanding the governance of biotechnology.

(Newell, 2003: 65)

This important observation will be explored in the chapters that follow, by showing in detail how corporate strategic concerns and government priorities combined in relation to the trade in GM products.

In this section we have identified important concepts and arguments which we will explore further in the chapters that follow. First, we have established global governance as a concept that deals with conflicts over economic globalisation (in critical and uncritical ways). ...