History and Past Activities
|
|
History and Past Activities |
Les Levidow:
Centre for Technology Strategy, Open University
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom
Phone. +44-1908- 653672 Fax +44-1908- 652175
e-mail: L.Levidow@open.ac.uk
Technologizing Democracy?
Deliberating Agricultural Biotechnology in Europe
In recent years we have seen many efforts to involve public participation in technology assessment, often with the aim to democratize technology. Yet conflicts erupt over how problems should be defined for technological solutions. This is because technologies work 'by reorganising the social as well as the physical world so as to affirm them' (Wynne).
In the case of agricultural biotechnology, the inherent socio-agronomic problems of intensive monoculture are attributed to genetic deficiencies, which therefore must be corrected at the molecular level. Choices of agricultural strategy are reified as 'discoveries', e.g. external threats and/or molecular-level opportunities found in nature. Within its self-perpetuating logic, any limit or failure must be remedied by more of the same solutions, e.g. through a genetic-pesticide treadmill.
Since the 1980s, and especially since the mid-1990s, the biotechnological problem-definition has been challenged by European protest campaigns, which counterpose alternative agricultural scenarios. In response to such public controversy, the state has devised various participatory exercises such as 'consensus conferences' (in Denmark, Germany, the UK and France). These deliberative procedures have a double-edged role. They provide a wider audience for public debate and critical arguments, while generally framing a 'risk-benefit' analysis within the biotechnological problem-definition of managing intensive agriculture.
Conflicts over technology as socio-political control are reduced to issues of predictive control and/or risk management. Such a framework sets the terms for expert regulation, in ways which limit citizen participation. Consequently, the deliberative procedures tend to biotechnologize democracy. To democratize technology, then, would mean to challenge the prevalent forms of both 'technology' and 'democracy'.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006