The governance of genome editing techniques for the European bio-based industry

Abstract

Genome editing techniques (GETs) could support the transition towards a circular bio-based economy. This would require a regulatory framework that enables technical and scientific progress while ensuring safety for humans and environment. In this context, there is a debate among stakeholders in Europe whether products resulting from GETs should be subject to the GMO legislation. This paper analyses different stakeholder positions and underlying arguments on this question based on the Politically Inherent Dynamics Approach (PIDA). This takes into consideration the role of actor interests, the problem structure, institutions and alternative instruments. The analysis, based on a series of expert interviews and a Delphi survey, reveals that differing stakeholder positions are strongly shaped by differing beliefs and interests. This leads to a divergence in the definition of the problem structure, and the related solutions, in terms of the institutional setup and alternative instruments considered. It highlights the need to reach a shared vision among actors of the problems that need to be solved, in order to understand if GETs can be considered as one potential 'solution', embracing the precautionary and innovation principles. Alternative instruments are proposed, including a call for higher stakeholder engagement and diverse regulatory instruments.

Aviation policy instrument choice in Europe: high flying and crash landing? Understanding policy evolutions in the Netherlands and Germany

“…PIDA aims to explain policies in which the institutional framework plays a major role and conflicts and changes in actor behaviour occur in the political process because of their inherent dynamics and problem structures. So far, the approach has been used to analyse different cases in environmental policy (Vogelpohl et al 2021a(Vogelpohl et al , 2021b and more recently in housing policy (Slavici 2021) or governance of European genome editing (Ladu 2020).…”

Driving bans for diesel cars in German cities: The role of ENGOs and Courts in producing an unlikely outcome

“…Furthermore, PIDA includes some suggestions about causal mechanisms, that is, generalizable ways in which the factors (and their interplay) may produce results. PIDA has so far been applied on a number of issues for analyzing the role and the interplay of the identified factors in the political decision-making process (e.g., Ladu, 2020;Töller & Böcher, 2018;Vogelpohl et al, 2021). However, in these studies, methodological questions that might come up when applying PIDA in case studies, that is, how causal relations can be established, have not yet been given much consideration.…”