Abstract
Over the past twenty years, agricultural biotechnologies have generated chronically unresolved political controversies. The standard tool of risk assessment has proven to be highly limited in its ability to address the panoply of concerns that exist about these hybrid techno/organisms. It has also failed to account for both the conceptual and material networks of relations agricultural biotechnologies require, create and/or perform. This paper takes as a starting point that agricultural biotechnologies cannot be usefully assessed as isolated technological entities but need to be evaluated within the context of the broader socio-ecological system that they embody and engender. The paper then explores, compares and contrasts some of the methodological tools available for advancing this systems-based perspective. The article concludes by outlining a new synthesis approach of comparative cartographies of agri/cultures generated through multi-sited ethnographic case-studies, which is proposed as a way to generate system maps and enable the comparison of genetically modified (GM) food with both conventional and alternative agri-food networks for sustainability assessment. The paper aims to make a unique theoretical and methodological contribution by advancing a systems-based approach to conceptualising and assessing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and proposing a synthesised methodology for mapping networks of relations across different agri/cultures.
Highlights
Over the past twenty years, modern agricultural biotechnologies have been the subject of chronically unresolved political controversies worldwide
While approaches to governance have largely been restricted to regulation through a technical assessment of risks to human health and the environment, resistance to the commercialisation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) stems from a wide spectrum of concerns, covering issues well beyond the scope of risk assessment [1,2,3,4]
We propose a set of methodological guidelines for creating comparative cartographies of agri/cultures for the purposes of advancing a systems-based approach to our understanding and assessment of GMOs
Summary
Over the past twenty years, modern agricultural biotechnologies have been the subject of chronically unresolved political controversies worldwide. In the text that follows, we review some of the available work from across different disciplines and traditions that may be useful for advancing such an approach and evaluate their relevance and comprehensiveness for the task at hand This includes work within the fields of agri-food research, actor network theory, ethnographic following and social cartographies. We propose a set of methodological guidelines for creating comparative cartographies of agri/cultures for the purposes of advancing a systems-based approach to our understanding and assessment of GMOs. We use the term agri/cultures here to emphasise the important socio-cultural aspects of agricultural systems and the way in which they are entangled with the biological-material dimensions. We use the term in the plural to draw specific attention to the existence of different cultures of agriculture (i.e., different beliefs and behaviours that come together to characterize a way of life and are passed down through generations) such as those embodied in GM, conventional and alternative approaches, and which need to be mapped and compared if we are perform an assessment of their sustainability and acceptability
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