Although the development of improved seeds has witnessed significant advances over the last decades, the adoption of improved seeds and varieties by smallholder farmers is variable. This suggests that research methods for studying farmers’ seed demand are not yielding information that reflects the real-life decisions and behaviours of farmers in the choice and acquisition of their seeds. We suggest that research methods for analysing farmers’ seed demand shape seed availability. This is supported by the theory of social life of methods. We argue that access to and attractiveness of seed are highly context-specific for a farmer, for example, influenced by his/her social position, the role of the crop or variety in the farming system, the linkage to the market, agro-ecological conditions, and that context is highly variable. We also argue that many of our research methods are weak on capturing real-life context and provide fragmented snapshot-nature understanding and biases of farmers preferences and needs for seeds. We call for more integrated understanding of seed systems as a whole and a more holistic methodological research approach that better captures the variable real-life context of farmers while providing the metrics that are needed by seed actors and policymakers to enable informed decisions.

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delivery 21 . For example, Gehrke's recent study 9 on the public's understanding of nanotechnology and tolerance for different regulatory responses puts forward a compelling case that the public's distrust of companies and governments means they are more favourably predisposed to labelling as a form of regulation, rather than traditional 'top-down' regulation. Thus, there may be reasons to explore labelling as a first 'light-touch' approach to nanotechnology regulation, while the science matures sufficiently to inform the development of more traditional methods.

Humans and rats relate to each other in a variety of ways. Consider the different ways that humans relate to rats in the sewer, the laboratory, and the living room: depending on the location of the encounter, human-rat relations can be characterized as hostile, instrumental, or friendly. Rather than searching for a single human-animal relation, this article suggests that the multiple and contradictory relations between humans and nonhuman animals deserve an explanation. The article argues that the multiplicity of human-animal relations can be better understood by approaching them as situated practices: as practical and precarious accomplishments that take place in specific settings. This approach is applied to the relation between humans and fancy rats. By studying how humans in particular settings come to befriend the same animal that is simultaneously despised and feared as dirty and treacherous when encountered elsewhere, the article shows how these relationships emerge as enactments of situated practices.

This article contributes to the debate about how regulatory science for agricultural technologies can be 'opened up' for a more diverse set of concerns and knowledges. The article focuses on the regulation of 'socio-economic considerations' for genetically modified organisms. While numerous countries have declared their intent to include these considerations in biotechnology decision-making, it is currently unclear both what counts as a socioeconomic consideration and how such considerations should be assessed. This article provides greater clarity about how socioeconomic considerations can be included in regulations by drawing upon the experience of two countries whose efforts in this field are particularly advanced: Kenya and South Africa. Based on extensive fieldwork, this article identifies the contours of an emerging regulatory regime by presenting two practice-based models for including socioeconomic considerations in biotechnology decision-making. Whereas Kenya has taken a bottom-up process prior to assessing the first technologies and strongly emphasises scientific expertise, South Africa has instead established regulatory standards in an ad hoc fashion on a case-to-case basis, with a less prominent role for scientific evidence. The discussion of the distinct characteristics and tensions of both models provides insight into two potential pathways for including socioeconomic considerations in the regulation of agricultural technologies.

India and South Africa have invested in nanotechnology since the early 2000s and have identified risks to human health and the environment as an important issue for governance. This is exemplary for a wider trend in which 'developing countries' play an increasingly prominent role in the development, production and use of emerging technologies. This validates the claim of the world risk society thesis that countries around the world are now confronted with the risks of emerging technologies. Little is known, however, about the way developing countries deal with the potential risks of emerging technologies. Starting from the observation that the risk colonization of nanotechnology in developing countries cannot be taken for granted, this article draws upon the relational theory of risk in order to investigate how nanotechnology became understood as an object of risk in South Africa and India. The article shows that nanotechnology was constituted as an object of risk in rather different ways in India and South Africa, demonstrating that the spread of risk discourses -and the emergence of a world risk society -cannot be understood without attending to the local context. The article shows that way risk is understood and dealt with changes as risk discourses travel around the world, giving many different faces to the world risk society.