Concern over the spread of infectious animal diseases has led to attempts to improve the biosecurity behaviour of farmers. Implicit within these behavioural change strategies are different geographies of knowledge that enact different versions of disease. Some versions are fixed whilst others attempt to live with disease by accommodating difference. This paper explores how these different strategies fare in attempts to promote biosecurity to farmers. The paper compares farmers' responses to 'high-risk' and 'population' strategies of biosecurity behaviour change in relation to bovine tuberculosis in cattle. Drawing on quantitative assessments of biosecurity and farmer interviews, the paper suggests that biosecurity behaviour change initiatives that draw on locally situated practices and knowledges of disease are more likely to have an impact on biosecurity behaviour than those which attempt to standardise biosecurity and disease. Through a process of constant tinkering and rewiring biosecurity to fit local social and ecological conditions, approaches like the high-risk strategy represent one way of living with the uncertainties of disease. It is argued that thinking more broadly about the nature of disease should lead policymakers to re-evaluate the purpose of disease control and their approaches to it. KEY WORDS: biosecurity, animal disease, geographies of knowledge, behaviour change, bovine tuberculosis bs_bs_banner

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This article explores the links between biosecurity policy and rural differentiation. It attempts to show how biosecurity policy has been fundamentally affected by uncertainty over the rules of the game of policy-making -what Hajer has called the 'institutional void'. In particular, the article attempts to show how this void has created a new political space in which the traditional practices of dealing with animal disease have been challenged and reshaped. Crucial to this is a discourse of partnership that permits new actors and forms of expertise to construct different approaches to biosecurity at new spatial scales. These actions legitimate a new spatiality of disease control, thereby contributing to the differentiation of the countryside. The article uses a case-study of policy attempts to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis in England and Wales.

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