GM Nation Research Articles

The Contested Publics of the UK GM Controversy: A Tale of Entanglement and Purification

Ten years ago the UK held one of the largest, most complex and politically charged exercises in the turn towards public engagement in the governance of the biosciences. Called ‘GM Nation’ this experiment arose as an attempt to mediate public concerns in the run-up to a government decision on whether to allow some varieties of GM crops to be commercially cultivated in the UK. Formed to mediate a controversy, ‘GM Nation’ itself became a focus of controversy, with claims that many of its public participants were already engaged in the GM issue and were thus not representative of a general public. In this way, the category of the public became a contested category, with at least two different versions of the public featuring in the GM controversy. Particularly important was the contrast between engaged or issue publics that emerged entangled in and increasingly familiar with the objects and issues of the controversy, and a general public, identified through its distance and disengagement from the GM issue. These different forms of public were articulated through different modes of engagement ranging from engaged publics found in hybrid forums such as local village meetings, to versions of the general public brought into being in some of the closed parts of ‘GM Nation’. Throughout all this, a wider public institutional architecture, improvised to govern the controversy, became the site of complex boundary work that attempted to separate science from politics, a feature that conditioned how these different versions of public would be articulated and received.

Accountable governance, accountable sustainability? a case study of accountability in the governance for sustainability

AbstractThis article provides a conceptual framework for, and comparative analysis of, public accountability in relation to three recent British exemplars of governance for sustainability: the GM Nation public consultation on the use of genetically modified crops in agriculture; the South East London Combined Heat and Power waste incinerator to achieve a shift away from landfill waste disposal; and the London Underground public–private partnership to provide more long‐term financial and technological investment in a key area of public transport. Each of these initiatives is characterized by distinct public accountability features arising partly from the context‐specific tensions between environmental sustainability and economic and technological development, and partly from the particular governance processes at work. Together, these features point to several significant accountability shortcomings facing the governance of sustainable development, including: the compartmentalization of decision‐making processes; the blurring of boundaries of responsibility; the prevalence of professional‐technocratic discourses; and the marginalization of publicity. The article concludes by outlining measures to improve accountability in the governance for sustainability. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Genetically modified food in the news: media representations of the GM debate in the UK

This paper analyses a corpus of articles on GM crops and food which appeared in six UK newspapers in the first three months of 2004, the year following the GM Nation? debate (2003). Using the methods of critical discourse analysis we focus on how specific and pervasive representations of the major stakeholders in the national debate on GM--the British public, the British government, the science of GM, and biotechnology companies--served significant rhetorical functions in the controversy. Of particular significance was the pervasive representation of the British public as uniformly opposed to GM crops and food which served rhetorically to position the British government as undemocratic and as being beholden to powerful political and economic interests. Of significance also in our analysis, is how the science of GM farming itself became a highly contested arena. In short, our analysis demonstrates how the GM debate was represented in the newsprint media as a "battleground" of competing interests. We conclude by considering the possible implications of this representation given the increasing emphasis placed on the importance of deliberative and inclusive forms of science policy decision-making.

Analysis of a normative framework for evaluating public engagement exercises: reliability, validity and limitations

Over recent years, many policy-makers and academics have come to the view that involving the public in policy setting and decision-making (or “public engagement”) is desirable. The theorized benefits of engagement (over traditional approaches) include the attainment of more satisfactory and easier decisions, greater trust in decision-makers, and the enhancement of public and organizational knowledge. Empirical support for these advantages is, however, scant. Engagement processes are rarely evaluated, and when they are, the quality of evidence is generally poor. The absence of standard effectiveness criteria, and instruments to measure performance against these, hinders evaluation, comparison, generalization and the accumulation of knowledge. In this paper one normative framework for evaluating engagement processes is considered. This framework was operationalized and used as part of the evaluation of a recent major UK public engagement initiative: the 2003 GM Nation? debate. The evaluation criteria and processes are described, and their validity and limitations are analyzed. Results suggest the chosen evaluation criteria have some validity, though they do not exhaustively cover all appropriate criteria by which engagement exercises ought to be evaluated. The paper concludes with suggestions on how to improve the framework.

Drama, Talk, and Emotion

This article argues that the quantitative and quasi-experimental approach to evaluating public participation exercises is deficient in at least two respects. First, casting participants in instrumental terms excludes that participants have an experience and that this may be dramatic and emotional. If people are to be invited, even obliged, to participate, then this experience should be considered in event evaluation. Second, current evaluation frameworks tend not to be sensitive to what actually happened in terms of the actions of participants and how these influenced the proceedings and outcome, thus ignoring that such events are fora where positions, values, decisions, and so forth are constructed and constrained rather than simply reported. This article considers the possible contribution of dramaturgical, discourse and conversation analytic, and ethnographic and phenomenological approaches to evaluating participation exercises and illustrates their potential with data gathered during the U.K. “GM Nation?” public debate.

Public Consultation and GMO Policy—A Very British Experiment

AbstractThis article describes the UK experience with public consultation procedures in the field of environmental policy and law. It analyses the different challenges for such procedures, particularly on issues where there seems to be a conflict between scientific information on environmental or health risks and deeply held public values. As a conscious departure from established practices GM Nation tried to engage the public in a new form of debate about the risks and benefits associated with GM agriculture. The article describes how this exercise was conducted, how it actually worked out in practice and also discusses some of the criticisms raised and problems encountered.

Consulting citizens: technologies of elicitation and the mobility of publics

The new centrality of “the public” to the governance of science and technology has been accompanied by a widespread use of public consultation mechanisms designed to elicit from citizens relevant opinions on technoscientific matters. This paper explores the configuration of legitimate constituencies in two such exercises: the UK “ GM Nation?” public debate on food biotechnology, and a Swedish “Transparency Forum” on the risks of mobile telephones. We consider the apparently paradoxical combination in these two examples of a tendency to produce static images of the public with a high valuation of mobility—of citizens and their opinions—as the key outcome of deliberation. We discuss the organizers' careful delineation of a distinction between “stakeholders” and the “general public,” and their aversion to any sort of “eventfulness” in public deliberations. Finally, we introduce the classical notion of the “idiot”—the individual who minds exclusively his or her own private affairs— and argue for the need to develop a new vocabulary to evaluate the politics of “listening to the public.”

Citizen engagement processes as information systems: the role of knowledge and the concept of translation quality

An important direction in recent thinking about public understanding of science and technology is embodied in the international trend within many democratic countries towards the promotion of citizen engagement. These developments entail the participation and deliberative involvement by lay publics in planning, decision-making and policy-making situations. In this paper we argue that citizen engagement exercises can usefully be understood as information systems. This characterization leads us to propose that the effectiveness by which such exercises utilize sources of knowledge—what we term their translation quality—should be adopted as a new criterion for their evaluation. We illustrate the applicability of this proposal by analyzing the GM Nation? public debate, a government-sponsored citizen engagement exercise that took place in Britain in 2002—3.

On evaluating the GM Nation? Public debate about the commercialisation of transgenic crops in Britain

The public debate about GM crops that took place in Britain in 2002–03 was an unprecedented experiment for the UK in public engagement. The Government, which sponsored the exercise, made a pledge: to take into account lay perspectives, as well as the views of its expert advisers, when making a decision about the possible commercialisation of this controversial technology. As officially accredited but independent evaluators of the debate, we were given unique behind-the-scenes access to the organisation and execution of the debate process. In this paper we report on our findings, which reveal a debate process that, whilst innovative, suffered from a number of important flaws: in terms of both design and implementation. These shortcomings in part reflect constraints on time and budget, and the context of political pressure in which the debate took place. However, they also demonstrated a lack of design knowledge and availability of appropriate expertise: matters with an important bearing on future plans for such initiatives.

The Politics of Talk

Talk of public dialogue and engagement has become fashionable internationally, and particularly within Europe. Building especially upon recent British experience, this paper argues that ‘public talk’ (that is, talk both by and about the public) represents an important site for science and technology studies analysis. The relationship between ‘new’ and ‘old’ approaches to scientific governance is considered. Drawing upon a series of official reports, and also the GM Nation? public debate over genetically modified food, the paper suggests that, rather than witnessing the emergence of a new governance paradigm, the current approach can more accurately be portrayed as an uneasy blend of ‘old’ and ‘new’ assumptions. Eschewing a straightforward normative account, the paper explores the social construction of public talk, the relationship between talk and trust, the search for the ‘innocent’ citizen, and the pursuit of social consensus. Current initiatives should not simply be criticized for their inadequacies, but should also be viewed as symptomatic of the state of science–society relations. In that way, stresses and strains within the politics of public talk assume wider analytical significance than the ‘mere talk’ epithet would suggest.

A Comparison of Responses to Internet and Postal Surveys in a Public Engagement Context

Involving the public in policy setting, or public engagement, is becoming increasingly popular in many democratic societies. Among the various ways of enacting engagement, the use of the Internet to either collect opinions or conduct public debate is seen as holding out great promise. However, the benefits of using the Internet over other communication media are uncertain because empirical research is limited. This article describes a comparison of data collected through two different media in the context of a “real-life” event, the 2003 U.K. “GM Nation?” public debate. The results suggest that demographically, the samples answering the questionnaires in the different formats differed significantly. However, there were no consistent differences between the approaches on a number of response effects.

Social Divisions of Trust: Scepticism and Democracy in the GM Nation? Debate

This paper reviews recent developments in research on institutional and expert trust across a number of disciplines to show that a deferential and accepting public stance in relation to officially sanctioned judgements is increasingly being replaced by a more sceptical approach. One outcome is a move towards greater public engagement in issues of high profile new technology. This paper reviews the literature and considers the most substantial public engagement exercise in the UK so far—the GM Nation? debate in 2002–3. It shows that scepticism is widespread but that the relation between scepticism and trust differs across social groups. Among the more privileged scepticism undermines trust. Among working class and less well‐educated groups scepticism and trust are correlated positively.

Difficulties in evaluating public engagement initiatives: reflections on an evaluation of the UK GM Nation? public debate about transgenic crops

In the realm of risk management, and policy-making more generally, “public engagement” is often advocated as an antidote to pathologies associated with traditional methods of policy-making, and associated deficit-model-driven communication strategies. The actual benefits of public engagement are, however, difficult to establish without thorough evaluation of specific engagement processes. Unfortunately, rigorous evaluation is difficult, and, perhaps for this reason, it has rarely been undertaken. In this paper we highlight a number of these difficulties in the light of our experiences in evaluating a major engagement initiative, namely the GM Nation? publice debate on the possible commercialization of transgenic crops, which took place in Britain in 2003. The difficulties we identify seem likely to be relevant to many, if not most, engagement evaluations. They are concerned with both theoretical/normative ( how one should evaluate) and practical ( how one does evaluate) issues. We suggest a number of possible solutions to these evaluation difficulties.

Using Surveys in Public Participation Processes for Risk Decision Making: The Case of the 2003 British GM Nation? Public Debate

This article takes as its case study the "GM Nation?" public debate, a major participation process on the commercialization of agricultural biotechnology, which occurred in Britain during the summer of 2003. We investigate possible self-selection biases in over 36,000 open questionnaire responses on the risks and benefits of genetically modified crops and food obtained during GM Nation? A comparison sample of equivalent responses from a statistically representative sample (n = 1,363) of the British general public obtained shortly after the conclusion of the debate is reported. This comparison shows that the GM Nation? open responses were indeed not fully representative of British "public opinion" regarding agricultural biotechnology. Rather, such opinion is not a unitary whole, but fragmented, with considerable ambivalence coexisting alongside outright opposition to GM agriculture. The methodological implications for multistage participation processes are discussed: in particular, the need to anticipate outcomes of complex design decisions, and to include representative public surveys as standard where measures of broader public attitudes to risk are an important objective.

Science policy and society: the British debate over GM agriculture.

The outcome of 'GM Nation?'--a public debate on genetic modification and the commercial growing of GM crops in Britain--was published in 2003. The objective of this public consultation was 'to promote an innovative, effective and deliberative programme of debate, against the background of the possible commercial production of GM crops in the UK...[and] provide meaningful information to Government about the nature and spectrum of the public's views, particularly at the grass roots level, to inform decision making'. Complementing an independent evaluation of GM Nation?, this article puts the debate into context, comments on the legitimacy of this, and similar exercises in public consultation, and develops some ideas on the future of public consultation on technological innovation.

GM Nation? Debate

In September 2003, the UK published the results of an unprecedented national debate on GM issues, ‘GM Nation?’ to help guide the Government’s consideration for potentially adopting the applications of this technology. Some believe it was just a PR exercise, but the unequivocal message emerging from the debate is of overwhelming public uncertainty. The report revealed that questions abound over the safety of GM food, the environmental impact of growing GM crops, and where the public can get hold of trusted, nonpartisan information. People understand the potential uses of GM but want to comprehend the issues better in order to have informed opinions. However, far from information quelling people’s fears, many become more concerned as they engage in GM issues. Furthermore, there is an increasing mistrust of multinational companies and the possibility of early commercialisation of a little-understood technology. The UK’s report has caused a stir in Europe, where Green Party MEP Dr Caroline Lucas claimed that the European Parliament’s Environmental Committee has admitted ‘for the first time the possibility of a GM-free UK’. Outside of Europe, the use of GM crops in developing countries is a further concern. Opinion is clearly still divided, not just in the public domain, but also through the scientific community. Here, Heredity presents two different views, written by eminent scientists involved in the GM field.

Not yet a GM nation

Mediawatch: The British public were overwhelmingly sceptical about the prospects of genetically modified crops following a major consultation exercise, but the press response was not wholly supportive of their position. Bernard Dixon reports.