Biotechnology and the politics of regulation

This paper aims to refine thinking about the politics of regulating crop biotechnologies. Firstly it explores the purposes regulation serves in commercial, as well as broader social and political terms, arguing that risk management, facilitating trade and generating public trust are three of its key functions. Secondly, the two predominant approaches to the regulation of biotechnology (product-based and process-based) are analysed. It is shown how these and other approaches to regulation, such as the harmonisation of risk assessments and the standardisation of IPR protection, have been internationalised and exported to developing countries through the activities of governments, international organisations and biotechnology firms.Finally, ways of thinking about the policy process are outlined, emphasising the importance of bureaucratic politics and routine to understanding responses to the challenge of regulating GMOs. In this regard, an extra set of challenges are identified as being particularly relevant to developing countries, including issues of capacity and the power relations that characterise their relationships with other governments and multinational firms.Future policy responses to innovations in crop biotechnology, the author concludes, will be a product of shifting configurations of political forces operating across levels, from the national and regional to the international, and involving coalitions and conflicts between public and private actors that will shape, in significant ways, the contours of what is considered possible and desirable. Ensuring that the needs of the poorest, whose livelihoods may be transformed in positive and negative ways by the new technologies, requires us to locate the political opportunities, institutional linkages and social coalitions necessary to ensure that those voices feature centrally in ongoing discussions about how to govern the future development of GMOs. [adapted from author]