Abstract
The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project.
Introduction
Around the turn of the millennium, governments across the world produced biotechnology strategies. A decade later, these had largely been replaced by the promotion of something called “the bioeconomy.” While initially the bioeconomy was roughly equated with the production of allegedly more environmentally sustainable fuels and manufactured goods, it quickly acquired much greater ambitions.
These shifts can be seen clearly in policy documents produced in the European Union (EU) and the United States over the past decade. The European Commission (EC) in 2002 released a biotechnology strategy that characterized the life sciences and biotechnology as “probably the most promising of the frontier technologies” able to “provide a major contribution to achieving the European Community’s Lisbon Summit’s objective of becoming a leading knowledge-based economy” (EC 2002, 8). “Biotechnology” was soon displaced by “knowledge-based bioeconomy” (EC 2004). In the 2007 report, “En route to the knowledge-based bioeconomy,” the bioeconomy is described as “transforming life sciences knowledge into new, sustainable, eco-efficient and competitive products” and is presented as the only feasible solution to a range of European and global problems: for example, “Future conflicts resulting from limited arable land for food versus non-food production need to be solved by innovation, i.e. by high tech crops” (EU Presidency 2007, 1, 4). More recently, the European Commission released “Innovating for Sustainable Growth: A Bioeconomy for Europe,” in which the bioeconomy is described as “a unique opportunity to comprehensively address inter-connected societal challenges such as food security, natural resource scarcity, fossil resource dependence and climate change, while achieving sustainable economic growth” (EC 2012, 3). This bioeconomy concept also features prominently in Horizon 2020, the current EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation. 1
The bioeconomy concept underwent a similar shift in the United States. During the final days of the Clinton administration, a strategy document entitled “Fostering a Bioeconomic Revolution” was released; it advocated stimulating the use of biomass as an alternative to fossil fuels (Biomass Research and Development Board 2001). In contrast, the 2012 National Bioeconomy Blueprint attributed to the bioeconomy the ability to “allow Americans to live longer, healthier lives, reduce our dependence on oil, address key environmental challenges, transform manufacturing processes, and increase the productivity and scope of the agricultural sector while growing new jobs and industries” (The White House 2012, 1).
In this article, we argue that “the bioeconomy” should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. To elucidate the nature of this project, we focus on the work of a key actor in the transnational policy process, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has played an influential role in the shift from biotechnology to bioeconomy. Godin (2006, 23) characterizes the OECD as “a research think-tank that feeds policy-makers.” The OECD, which lacks the power to create and enforce obligations that are binding on nation-states, focuses instead on “influencing the direction of policy, in ways that may in the future become binding on states, but not necessarily through the OECD itself ” (Mahon and McBride 2009, 84). It does this by defining important trends and urgent problems; organizing committees, working groups, and conferences that bring together selected academic, governmental, corporate, and civil–society actors; developing quantitative metrics and indicators to substantiate and measure a purported entity (such as the bioeconomy) and assembling international “scoreboards” from them; publishing documents in which these trends and problems are framed and contextualized and particular policies are advocated; and generating attention-grabbing and “rhetorically stirring” conceptual frameworks for policy makers (Fougner 2008; Godin 2004, 2006; Jessop 2008; Mahon and McBride 2009). In these ways, the OECD creates a market for its own epistemological and “futurological” services (Parry 2007). At the same time, these activities help to construct what they often claim only to forecast or describe (Hilgartner 2007; Jessop 2008).
In 2006, the OECD International Futures Program launched The Bioeconomy to 2030 project “to design a bioeconomy policy agenda for governments” (OECD 2006a). The program of work incorporated the range of epistemic and policy activities described previously, that is, working groups and conferences, metrics and indicators, policy documents and frameworks. Following the final report of the project (OECD 2009), the concept has been incorporated into OECD work more generally and has also been adopted by a variety of national governments (Staffas, Gustavsson, and McCormick 2013). The OECD itself claims that since 2009, “the term ‘bioeconomy’ has become firmly entrenched in the lexicon of most OECD countries” (OECD 2013, 54). The term has also proliferated within the academic literature during this period (Staffas, Gustavsson, and McCormick 2013).
The 2006 Bioeconomy to 2030 Scoping Document defined the bioeconomy as “the aggregate set of economic operations in a society that use the latent value incumbent in biological products and processes to capture new growth and welfare benefits for citizens and nations” (OECD 2006b, 3). In the final report, The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda, 2 the bioeconomy is defined as “a world where biotechnology contributes to a significant share of economic output” and as “involv[ing] three elements: biotechnological knowledge, renewable biomass, and integration across applications” (OECD 2009, 22). 3 While it is suggestive that the bioeconomy has evolved in these documents from a “set of economic operations” to a “world,” the definitions are largely beside the point and, indeed, are rarely referred to. The bioeconomy has less to do with these rather dry definitions and more to do with the promise of solutions to “global challenges” and the prescription of policies allegedly needed to allow this to happen. In this respect, the bioeconomy is indeed a “world”: an imagined world in which human and environmental disasters are averted because a particular political–institutional configuration facilitated the development of profitable technological solutions.
The Bioeconomy to 2030 assumes the necessity of rethinking a broad range of national policy frameworks in order to achieve “a ‘no regrets’ form of policy making”: that is, policy making “that allow[s] the opportunities offered through biotechnology, genetics, genomics and the biosciences more generally to be delivered” (OECD 2006b, 5). The OECD 4 takes as fundamental that (1) current policy and regulatory frameworks are a problem, (2) the problem consists of their obstruction of the potential of the bioeconomy, (3) the potential of the bioeconomy merits the redesign of policy making, and (4) the “regrets” to be avoided through this redesign are those resulting from insufficient facilitation of the bioeconomy (OECD 2006a, 2006b, 2009, chap. 8 and passim). The recent European and American documents cited previously have also adopted the view that the prospective bioeconomy requires and merits significant policy change. While definitions of the bioeconomy vary both across and within jurisdictions, the policy recommendations contained in the EU and US documents closely parallel those of the OECD.
The Bioeconomy to 2030 is clearly an act of imagination, one whose ambition is to become a collectively shared imaginary. This bioeconomy imaginary is typical of technosocial imaginaries more generally in that it envisions a future in which current social problems and conflicts have been superseded through technoscientific innovation. 5 In other ways, it resembles economic imaginaries as defined by Jessop (2008). These originate in efforts by groups of influential economic, political, and intellectual actors to identify certain activities “as subjects, sites, and stakes of competition and/or as objects of regulation” and to articulate “strategies, projects and visions oriented to these imagined economies” (Jessop 2008, 17). As much scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) has argued, future-oriented imaginaries associated with technoscience, and the expectations they generate, often act on the world in the present; they are constitutive and performative (Borup et al. 2006; Brown 2003; Brown and Michael 2003; Fujimura 2005; Hanson 2011; Macnaghten, Kearnes, and Wynne 2005). Similarly, Jessop (2008, 28) argues that successful (or dominant) economic imaginaries not only construe, they also construct the actually existing (political) economy. An important part of this process involves reconstructing the boundary between the economic and the noneconomic: more particularly, in recent decades, economic imaginaries have reconstructed the boundary between what is to be subordinated to the goal of “competitiveness” and what can be safely left to other governing principles. The policy frameworks successively promoted by the OECD over the past four decades have expanded the former category and shrunk the latter (Jessop 2008, 30). Jessop’s conceptualization not only calls attention to the role of particular agents in the genesis of imaginaries, it also highlights an important function of economic imaginaries in a capitalist context, namely, their contribution to regularizing and stabilizing the course of capital accumulation, including the “facilitation of the displacement and/or deferral of associated contradictions, conflicts, and crisis tendencies elsewhere and/or into the future” (Jessop 2008, 27).
In some ways, particularly in its treatment of knowledge, the OECD’s bioeconomy conceptual framework is an elaboration upon its “knowledge-based economy” conceptual framework launched a decade earlier (OECD 1996). What distinguishes the bioeconomy concept is its attempt to incorporate and capitalize the ecological and, to a lesser degree, social crises generated by neoliberal capitalism itself. Parry has noted (and we concur) that The Bioeconomy to 2030 promotes “a neoliberal approach to the utilization of biological material and information”; key to understanding the resonance of the bioeconomy as an economic imaginary, however, lies in what it promises to achieve (as well as in how it promises to achieve it). Like the knowledge economy, the bioeconomy is said to be essential to preserving and enhancing the “competitiveness” of OECD economies. Well beyond that, however, the bioeconomy is said to be the answer to the most serious of “global challenges”—hunger, ill-health, and, especially, ecological crisis. 6
Given that the OECD seeks to influence the policies of national governments (Godin 2004, 2006; Mahon and McBride 2009), in which directions does The Bioeconomy to 2030 seek to influence them? What does its bioeconomic imaginary accomplish? To what does it draw attention and what does it occlude? How does it redefine the boundary between that which is governed by the competitiveness imperative and that which is not? What are its implicit assumptions and values? In sum, what kind of political project is The Bioeconomy to 2030? We argue that The Bioeconomy to 2030 should be understood as a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime. This response would protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action.
To demonstrate this, we use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi but inflected by scholarship in STS and on neoliberalism. Polanyian concepts provide a useful lens through which to view the role of promissory science (Hedgecoe 2003, 2004) in The Bioeconomy to 2030 and the prescribed role for the state in the bioeconomy. They also shed light on the crises that, in Jessop’s terms, a successful bioeconomic imaginary would displace, the strategies for displacing them, and the resistance to those strategies. In weaving together Polanyian concepts with scholarship on neoliberalism and from STS, we extend the usefulness of those concepts while also developing much-needed links between the study of neoliberal political economy and STS (Birch 2013; Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls 2010). 7 We hope this will encourage analysts of neoliberalism to take greater account of science and technology in their analyses, and STS scholars to attend more closely to neoliberalism and political economy.
A number of scholars have traced the mutual constitution of biotechnology and neoliberal capitalism and identified novel processes or entities, such as “biovalue” or “biocapital,” through which “life itself ” has become a key site of capital accumulation (Cooper 2008; Helmreich 2008; Rajan 2006; Rose 2007; Waldby and Mitchell 2006). This has been contested by others (Birch and Tyfield 2013), who argue that such “bio-concepts” are unnecessary and misleading as characterizations of the bioeconomy, which consists primarily of rents from monopolized knowledge assets and which has been shaped more by a discourse of neoliberal competitiveness than any intrinsic qualities of the new genetics. Here, our focus is not on characterizing a set of economic activities that may or may not be usefully prefixed with “bio.” Rather, we interrogate the bioeconomy as a policy framework and imaginary in order to make explicit the values and assumptions embedded in it and their implications.
Other studies of bioeconomy strategy and policy documents have been informed by different aims and perspectives. Staffas, Gustavsson, and McCormick (2013) review and compare national and regional bioeconomy (and “bio-based economy”) strategy documents, concluding that sustainability issues are underplayed in the strategies, that they lack ways of measuring progress toward their stipulated goals, and that they pay inadequate attention to resource scarcity. McCormick and Kautto (2013) focus on bioeconomy strategies and policies in Europe, and particularly on bioenergy within those, concluding that a focus on sustainability should be added to the current economic focus, and that some form of “participatory governance” is advisable in order to gain social acceptance for the bioeconomy. In both cases, the authors largely take the OECD framing of a bioeconomy and claims about its potential at face value; deficiencies in the current approach are portrayed as rectifiable through addition of another goal (sustainability) and focus (resource scarcity), more adequate metrics, and more public engagement.
Much more similar to our approach here is that of Delvenne and Hendrickx (2013, 75), who view the bioeconomy as a “master narrative” that “conflat[es] technological advance with societal progress.” They advocate research that recognizes such narratives as constitutive of power relations and that analyzes the bioeconomy as a site of struggle between social groups as well as between countries. While we agree with Delvenne and Hendrickx (2013) that research that attends to how this struggle plays out on the ground in relatively neglected non-OECD is very much needed, our goal here is to clarify the politics and power relations embedded in that master narrative.
Shortly after the launch of The Bioeconomy to 2030, Hilgartner (2007, 385) noted that “the efforts of the OECD to define the bioeconomy, build it into data-gathering practices and institutionalize it in the machinery of policymaking are far from apolitical” and for that reason warrant “ongoing, reflexive examination.” With this article, we intend to contribute to that process of examination. We begin with a brief summary of our conceptual apparatus: Polanyi’s analysis of the market system, the concept of neoliberalism, and parallels between the bioeconomy in the twenty-first century and the market system in the nineteenth century. This is followed by a Polanyian analysis of The Bioeconomy to 2030, highlighting the nature and effects of (1) its promissory “creed,” (2) its requirements of the state, and (3) its response to resistance. We conclude with some implications for STS.
Polanyi and Neoliberalism
Karl Polanyi’s work The Great Transformation chronicles the making of the market economy. He historicizes and de-naturalizes the market economy: that is, he shows that gain as the primary motivating principle and the market as society’s organizing institution—far from natural manifestations of universal human nature as claimed by the “liberal creed”—are recent developments, which had to be forcibly imposed. Polanyi argues that the imposition of the market system required the disembedding of the economy from existing social relations and the consequent subordination of society to the needs of the economy. 8 The market system, therefore, could not arise spontaneously but rather required a great deal of state intervention.
Polanyi argued that while markets had historically existed in a wide variety of societies, the construction of an economic system “controlled, regulated, and directed by markets alone,” together with its assumption that “human beings behave in such a way as to achieve maximum money gains,” was unprecedented (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 68). If “order in the production and distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism” (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 68), then all factors of production—including labor, land, and money—must be incorporated into markets and priced by markets alone (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 69). Polanyi described labor (human beings), land (nature), and money as “fictitious commodities”: that is, as entities that were not produced for sale but are treated as if they were, with destructive consequences. In a market system, this means that the noncommodity aspects of human beings, nature, and money are subordinated to their role as commodities (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 72); their essential character (or use value) is fundamentally threatened or destroyed in the process (Burawoy 2010, 310). Thus, an essential role of the state in the construction and reproduction of this market system was to dismantle existing arrangements that restricted or buffered fictitious commodities’ exposure to market forces and to prevent new protections from arising. The consequences were dire for people individually and as communities, for nature in itself and as an enabler of human and community life, and even for the economy, as money’s commodity role interfered with its ability to function as a medium of exchange. The existential threat posed by fictitious commodification triggered a diverse resistance that translated into a political struggle over the role of the state.
Polanyi believed that the liberal creed of the self-regulating market had been not only discredited but permanently defeated following the economic and political crises of the first half of the twentieth Century. He saw the shift in the role of the state, toward regulation of the market, and the shielding of humans, nature, and the productive economy from (some of) its effects as a decisive and irreversible move toward resubordinating the economy to society. The rise of neoliberalism has shown how mistaken he was on this point. As Burawoy (2003, 2010) argues, in his rejection of orthodox Marxism and his focus on the market and “industrial civilization,” Polanyi lost sight of capitalism, particularly its drive toward new sources of profit and higher rates of return to capital. State regulation of the market did not disempower capitalists as a class, nor did it render the state unresponsive to that class. Thus, despite its earlier discrediting, the ideology of the self-regulating market has since the 1970s been resurrected and successfully deployed by capital in alliance with states and transnational agencies not only to undo many of the decommodifying gains made by labor but also to drive the commodification of nature and money to new extremes (Fraser 2012). The rise of an effective countermovement is far from guaranteed; ecological catastrophe may be at least as likely (Burawoy 2010). It is our argument that the bioeconomy should be seen in this neoliberal context, as a strategy to protect and facilitate capital accumulation in the face of a growing recognition of the threat of ecological catastrophe.
Neoliberalism has been called a “rascal concept,” that is, “promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested” (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010b, 182). In order to move away from static conceptions centering on a doctrinal set of policies, Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (2009) have emphasized neoliberalization as a process (or processes) characterized by path-dependent interactions between projects of market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring and particular, local institutional settings. While they emphasize the uneven and hybrid nature of the outcomes produced by this interaction, the impetus of the neoliberal project is toward restructuring both state and society so as increasingly to subject them to the disciplinary powers of market or quasi-market mechanisms (Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2009, 49; Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010a, 330). Like these theorists and others (e.g., Harvey 2005; Mirowski 2009), we do not associate neoliberalism with a noninterventionist state but rather with a shift in the style and goals of intervention (cf. Berman 2014). 9 For the neoliberal project to succeed, it is democratic control rather than the state that must be strictly limited. Thus, among the key features of neoliberalism is a shift toward technomanagerial governance (Hewitt de Alcántara 1998; Mirowski 2009, 436). While an appreciation of path dependency is important to understanding outcomes, it is also important to remember that neoliberal approaches have typically worked to increase capital’s share of the economic product, in part by undoing the Polanyian resubordination of economy to society in favor of the intensification and expansion of commodification. From this perspective, neoliberalism represents the reassertion through the political sphere of the interests of capital (Harvey 2005; Burawoy 2010). This core commitment of key actors to generating new sources, rising levels, and intensified concentrations of profit helps to explain the continued drive to further neoliberalization even in the face of the neoliberalization-induced global financial crisis (GFC).
Such agency is sometimes implied but not explicitly examined: for example, Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010b, 219, emphasis added) note that one potential outcome of the GFC is “the further reconstitution of globalized neoliberalization as dominant forces seize opportunities to lock in austerity regimes, for institutional retrenchment and for the intensification of market discipline.” Who are these dominant forces? Peck (2010, 108-9), commenting on the meaning of the GFC for neoliberalism, notes that “[t]he social interests that the neoliberal project was cobbled together to serve—corporate capital, financial elites, the shareholding classes, transnational investors— … have been reasserting their privileged interests with breathtaking audacity.” Thus, while the path dependency of neoliberalization leads to diverse outcomes, neoliberal projects are marked by particular tendencies, and not least among these is the deployment of an actively “marketizing” state as part of a particularly aggressive approach to maximizing returns to capital. An appreciation of this is important for understanding not only the post-GFC persistence with seemingly failed policies but also the significance of The Bioeconomy to 2030, as we explain subsequently.
As the neoliberal resurgence recalls the Polanyian analysis of the imposition of the self-regulating market, current instances of resistance to neoliberalization can be, and have been, framed as a manifestation of the double movement, a political struggle over fictitious commodification (e.g., Evans 2008; Gill 1995; Kohl 2006; Peck 2008; but see also Burawoy 2010). However, whereas liberalism, in Polanyi’s analysis, saw the separation of economy and politics into distinct and—eventually—conflicting spheres, neoliberalism has been marked by attempts to subsume the political itself under market logic, as market forms of rule have been deployed in and over the state. So-called New Public Management and cognate approaches discipline the public sphere with private sector devices of contractualism and competition (Kettl 1997). Together with what Gill (2002) calls the “new constitutionalism” and Brenner, Peck, and Theodore (2010a) call “transnational rule-regimes,” this has effected a transformation of the state’s capacity and underlying rationality toward a focus on international economic competitiveness (Cerny 1997), a goal that is always urgent and never finally achieved. “[I]nternational competitiveness has been constituted both as a (if not the) central objective in relation to which more or less all state policies should be considered, and as a (if not the) central means to the resolution of more or less all other problems that the state is confronted with” (Fougner 2006, 165; emphasis in original). State intervention is aimed “not only at adjusting to, but also sustaining, promoting, and expanding an open global economy in order to capture its perceived benefits” (Evans and Lunt 2010, 1). This makes the state an increasingly unlikely vehicle for, in Polanyian terms, resubordinating the economy to the needs of society.
Agencies of the competition state facilitate and directly support private capital accumulation through “supply-side measures to enhance innovation and competitiveness” (Benner and Löfgren 2007, 83). Key to attaining benefits in this setting is successfully competing with other states to sell one’s attractions to private transnational capital. To a certain extent, in Polanyian terms, this can be seen as the fictitious commodification of the nation-state itself, which is treated as if its purpose were to sell itself (to global capital); in so doing, it relinquishes a range of options and capacities. Moreover, technomanagerial governance is increasingly deployed not only at the national and subnational levels but also supranationally to discipline states and constrain the democratic processes within them (Donnelly 2007; Fougner 2008; Mahon and McBride 2009). These developments shrink the menu of options available to a potentially democratically accountable political sphere, making it increasingly difficult to use the state for anything other than further neoliberalization (Gill 2002).
Despite these differences, a Polanyian lens can usefully illuminate both the ways in which the Bioeconomy Project works as a political project and its relation to neoliberalism. Polanyi directs our attention to the role of utopian visions, arguing that such visions of a society based on individual freedom alone were needed to justify the implications of fictitious commodification; we explore here the nature and role of The Bioeconomy to 2030’s utopian vision. Building on Polanyi’s analysis, we argue that, just as a market system is distinguishable from markets, the bioeconomy is more than just a repackaging of biotechnologies or a rebranding of biotechnology strategies. Whereas markets can be found in societies characterized by a variety of economic systems, so—in principle, at least—biotechnologies could be developed for and from within a wide range of political–economic institutional settings (see, e.g., Dávila 2006). But just as the market system required state action to eliminate alternative modes of meeting needs and organizing the economy, so the bioeconomy aims to embed biotechnology, and science in general, in a neoliberal logic that eliminates alternative scientific and political–economic pathways, including alternative ways of (defining and) meeting needs with the help of the biosciences.
The Bioeconomy Project
A Contingent Capitalist Utopia
Polanyi argued that the dangers inherent in subordinating society to the needs of the market system were countered by a “liberal creed” that married utopian visions of freedom with grim but ineluctable laws of (human) nature. Given its association with the extension of commodification into new domains, and the dangers that are arguably inherent in that and in other aspects of biotechnological intervention, we might expect something similar from The Bioeconomy to 2030. With regard to utopian visions, the OECD (2009, 26-27) presents itself as taking a “cautious” position, refraining from promising, for example, cures for cancer and a ready supply of safe organs for transplant, because indications are that these will not be realized by 2030. However, the OECD’s “cautious” position is nonetheless utopian, as it envisions overcoming environmental, social, and economic challenges through biotechnological progress alone. The Bioeconomy to 2030 argues that governments should implement the prescribed policy changes in order to facilitate the development of biotechnologies, because only biotechnologies, and biotechnologies alone, can provide “solutions for many of the health and resource-based problems facing the world” (OECD 2009, 15). The role of ineluctable laws of nature is here played by population growth. Global population growth is portrayed as the cause of many of the problems that biotechnologies will solve, while a projected rise in per capital income is both a problem (increasing demand) and a solution (incentivizing market-based solutions). The political–technological package of the bioeconomy promises to overcome current and future problems of unsustainable use of the earth’s resources brought about by a growing population, and to do so while protecting the current regime of capital accumulation (OECD 2009, 20, and passim).
Implicit and explicit in The Bioeconomy to 2030 are dystopian alternatives should such policies fail to materialize. The first is a globally shared dystopia characterized by the problems that biotechnologies allegedly would solve but will go unsolved if the bioeconomy is not developed. The second alternative is not globally shared but rather features competition among nations. Here, the threat is that others will develop the bioeconomy, while “we” will be left behind. An early project document warns: “the bioeconomy is growing faster in China, India and Singapore than in many OECD countries and the lead position occupied by OECD countries in most fields is being challenged” (OECD 2006a, 1-2).
As Hilgartner (2007, 382) has noted, the OECD devotes considerable effort to fashioning and promoting the bioeconomy concept. While this conceptual work reflects the OECD’s need to grab policy makers’ attention (Godin 2004, 2006), it is also directly linked to the goal of bringing about and legitimating particular policy changes. The OECD labors to distinguish its concept of the bioeconomy from narrower notions, emphasizing that the bioeconomy is cross-sectoral, extends to the medium and long term, and has policy implications well beyond what is currently understood as biotechnology policy. The bioeconomy, it claims (rather unconvincingly; see Parry 2007), is “different from other innovation cycles;” these differences mean that governments must proactively “adjust policy agendas to reap the benefits of the bioeconomy” (OECD 2006a, 7).
Such promissory practices have been a feature of the biosciences for some time. Claims that biotechnology will have “revolutionary” impacts across a range of domains have featured for four decades, while actual delivery of the revolution is continually postponed (Hopkins et al. 2007). Scholars of the sociology of expectations argue that such promises and the expectations they generate are performative: they act to build consensus around a technological project; mobilize investment; enroll scientific, social, and economic actors; and construct a case for facilitative and supportive legislation (see, e.g., Borup et al. 2006; Brown 2003; Hedgecoe and Martin 2007; van Lente 1993). These promissory or predictive claims are thus not merely statements about the future; they generate change in the present, regardless of whether or not they are ever fulfilled. The point of The Bioeconomy to 2030 is to bring about wide-ranging changes to government policies and to the views of publics. The utopian bioeconomic vision works to overcome resistance to the invasion of the most basic needs of biological and social life by commercial logic. With so much allegedly at stake in whether the needs of the bioeconomy are met, allowing concerns about, for example, distributional effects or offended moral sensibilities to interfere with the unfolding of the bioeconomy can itself be—and has been—framed as unethical (Hamilton 2008; OECD 2009, 236; Thompson 2012).
Promissory practices should also be seen in relation to broader contexts and effects. A considerable literature has explored the relations between current promissory practices and the political–economic context of technoscience (e.g., Cooper 2008; Fortun 2008; Hedgecoe 2004; Martin, Brown, and Turner 2008; Rajan 2006; Waldby and Mitchell 2006). The wider effects of these practices also deserve greater scrutiny: not only their impacts on rival technologies but also their ability to suppress or displace efforts to address underlying sociopolitical causes of the problems they purport to solve (Pavone, Goven, and Guarino 2011). Directly and through enacting and strengthening dominant technosocial imaginaries (Macnaghten, Kearnes, and Wynne 2005), they can constrain and influence wider sociopolitical struggles, movements, and debates. With its focus on potential obstruction by governments and/or the public, The Bioeconomy to 2030 occludes the many other uncertainties that lie between the promises (of biotechnological solutions) and their realization. Linked to this occlusion of uncertainty is the absence of any informed discussion of the causes of the various problems—such as hunger, pollution, climate change, disease, and resource scarcity—that the bioeconomy promises to solve; instead, most problems are implicitly traced to “population growth.” In particular, income inequality as a problem in itself and as a cause of these “global challenges” is occluded; thus, alternative approaches that would involve addressing these challenges through the reduction of income inequality, or that prioritize ways of addressing them that would at least not increase income inequality, need not be discussed (or implemented).
For example, the OECD (2009, 21) notes that on current projections, “grain production would be sufficient to feed the world’s population in 2030, if equally distributed.” It is, however, currently very unequally distributed, with the population of developed countries consuming, in per capita terms, more than double the world average, largely as a result of their high levels of meat and dairy consumption. The OECD then calculates how much grain would be needed by 2030 if global per capita consumption were to approximate current developed countries’ consumption, though it acknowledges this will only be “potential demand” because “many people in the world will still lack the necessary income to increase their consumption of animal protein.” Nonetheless, it is the gap between currently projected production (2.8 billion tons), adequate if distributed equally, and the total production needed to satisfy “potential demand” (5.1 billion tons) that is construed as the problem needing to be solved. This gap is said to demonstrate “clearly” that “there will be an enormous demand for agricultural biotechnology” (2009, 21).
This problem configuration suppresses discussion of the wisdom of using large amounts of arable land to produce grain to feed meat and dairy animals, while the promise of biotechnological solutions—and of the sufficiency of biotechnological solutions alone—suppresses discussion of the causative role of the current global economic system in the range of problems biotechnology is said to solve, such as environmental degradation, climate change, and unsustainable consumption alongside poverty and malnutrition. Indeed, not only does The Bioeconomy to 2030 omit any such discussion; “success” for the bioeconomy means displacing alternative approaches. The Bioeconomy to 2030 sees the bioeconomy as being in competition with other ways of solving problems, and the success of the bioeconomy is said to depend on policies that would facilitate the bioeconomy at the expense of these alternatives. Competing technologies include not only, for example, environmentally destructive forms of meeting energy needs (e.g., through technologies producing cheaper fossil fuels) but also low-input, and environmentally and socially friendlier, technologies: [A]dvances in precision farming and water conservation techniques could compete with biotechnological solutions to environmental pressures. In health, competition with low-cost solutions to infectious disease, such as water purification, will continue. The toughest competition for biotechnology is likely to arise in industrial applications. Other renewable energies such as solar, geothermal and wind power could prove strong rivals to bioenergy, boasting fewer unintended side effects. (OECD 2009, 44)
The point, then, is not actually to solve these problems but to address them in particular ways—ways that are more likely to increase returns to capital than to benefit the poor or the environment.
The State and the Bioeconomy
The “liberal creed” of laissez-faire argued that the market system would naturally emerge and reproduce itself were it not for the interference of the state, while in fact “[t]he road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism” (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 140). Analysts of neoliberalism have noted a similar deployment of laissez-faire or “shrink the state” rhetoric alongside a reshaped and reoriented state activism. Mirowski (2009, 434) argues that neoliberalism can be distinguished from liberalism by its key proponents’ (publicly veiled) acceptance that the conditions for the existence of their vision of market society “must be constructed and will not come about ‘naturally’ in the absence of concerted political effort and organization.” As the shape and functions of the state are redefined, some forms of state intervention are dismantled, while new forms are developed, and others are more widely or intensely deployed (Mirowski 2009; Tickell and Peck 2003).
Both laissez-faire and interventionist moments can be found in The Bioeconomy to 2030. On one hand, there is a strong element of technological determinism in the OECD vision; this implies the need for a laissez-faire state. Biotechnology would solve our problems if policy obstacles were not in the way. Biotechnology and the biosciences more generally have the potential to generate significant economic, social, health and environmental benefits [ … ] However, the policy and regulatory frameworks that currently govern bio-science based activities are often unsuited to the economic, social and ethical issues now emerging. (OECD, 2006b, 5)
In particular, regulatory hurdles that obstruct bioinnovation should be removed. Regulation that effectively prohibits the use of a generic technology is said to be particularly damaging to the bioeconomy. European regulation of genetically modified (GM) crops comes in for particular criticism here, as do other attempts, such as Australian state moratoria, to restrict use of the technology (OECD 2009, 148). In health, regulatory controls around the access, use, and linkability of individual genetic information and patient records are argued to obstruct the health benefits promised by predictive and preventive medicine (OECD 2009, 110, 272). This constitutes what we call the project’s laissez-faire moment.
Such laissez-faire technological determinism is, however, in tension with what we call the bioeconomy project’s interventionist moment. Realizing the utopian vision requires “attentive and active support from governments and the public at large” (OECD 2009, 3, and passim). There is, in fact, a striking consistency in how the so-called requirements of the bioeconomy (for government and public support) are portrayed across OECD, US, and EU bioeconomy documents: (a) increased public investment in science and its infrastructure, and in such a way that its commercialization is encouraged; (b) public support for private commercial actors, including a heavy emphasis on public–private partnerships; (c) ensuring regulation meets the needs of innovators and commercializers; (d) the development of new environmental management metrics and encouragement of private environmental regulation, especially through consumer purchasing choices; (e) government intervention in markets, particularly the creation of markets for new bioproducts; and (f) active government cultivation of public acceptance of bioeconomic activities (see EC 2012, 14-21; OECD 2009, 235-94; The White House 2012, 17-41). Together, they form a package for addressing “global challenges” by propping up private sector profits through sharply increased public subsidies and more extensive socializing of private investor costs and risks.
In the health sector, for example, a major focus is the alleged need to improve “the ratio of drug development costs to future earnings” of pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies’ costs can be lowered through increased public investment in biomedical research, more intensified processes of transferring public research discoveries to private firms, and producing biopharmaceuticals in GM plants and animals (OECD 2009, 251). Earnings can be raised by “reduc[ing] the level of evidence required to establish safety or efficacy before market approval is granted” and “shifting some of the late stage clinical trials for safety or efficacy to the post approval stage” (OECD, 2009, 150 and 252). This would not reduce costs (at least if the companies were responsible for funding these trials; there are also suggestions that some of these costs should be shifted on to the public; see p. 152), but it would increase the patent life of the drug and therefore increase earnings. It would also come “at a potential cost in terms of greater safety risk,” so its prospects depend on “the degree to which higher risks of adverse effects will be accepted for drugs that target non-fatal disease” (p. 252). 10
The Bioeconomy and the Double Movement
The diverse opposition sparked by the introduction of the market system was not simply, Polanyi argues, “the usual defensive behaviour of a society faced with change”; rather, it was a socially and politically variegated set of responses to a deep existential threat (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 130). 11 This threat stemmed from fictitious commodification: treating land and labor as commodities was “tantamount to annihilating them” (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 131), and the viability of the real economy was threatened by treating money, a medium of exchange, as a commodity (Polanyi [1944] 1957, 130). 12 Over the first half of the twentieth Century, the states about which Polanyi wrote eventually implemented a range of protective measures, including the regulation of wages and conditions of labor, public health and education, unemployment support and public pensions, environmental protections, rejection of the gold standard, and national control of currencies and exchange rates. 13
The rise of neoliberalism has meant a resurgence of fictitious commodification, deconstructing or weakening previous protections (where they existed) as well as producing new forms and combinations of the commodification of humans, nature, and money (Burawoy 2010). In addition to the increasingly baroque commodifications of currency and credit that were spawned by financial deregulation and precipitated the current GFC, intensified and “innovative” commodifications of human beings (as labor and as “life”) and of nature have been chronicled and analyzed by a growing literature (e.g., on labor: Harvey 2005; Overbeek 2002; on life: Waldby and Cooper 2010; Waldby and Mitchell 2006; on nature: Arsel and Büscher 2012; Castree 2008a, 2008b; Hayden 2003; McCarthy and Prudham 2004). We have also seen the aggressive commodification and financialization of knowledge, arguably creating an additional Polanyian fictitious commodity (Burawoy 2010; Jessop 2007b). 14 Commodifications of knowledge and nature are often closely intertwined, as demonstrated, for example, by the practice of bioprospecting/biopiracy (Hamilton 2008; Shiva 2007) and by the spread and intensification of patenting and other intellectual property (IP) practices in the life sciences over the past three decades.
The resurgence of fictitious commodification has triggered societal opposition too extensive and diverse to be canvassed here. Indeed, some (e.g., Goven 2006a; McAfee 2003) have argued that the new commodifications of nature and knowledge in particular have catalyzed resistance to neoliberalism more generally. Like the social-protectionist efforts described by Polanyi, the opposition to this fictitious commodification encompasses socially disparate groups. For example, broad-based and diverse resistance has arisen in response to the privatization of water (Hall, Lobina, and de la Motte 2005; Kohl 2006; García Linera 2006; Swyngedouw 2005) and to the aggressive extension of intellectual property rights (IPR; in relation to the World Trade Organization agreement on so-called trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights [TRIPS] and essential medicines, see Klug 2008; for the broader Access to Knowledge movement, see Krikorian and Kapczynski 2010; in relation to bioprospecting/biopiracy, see Hayden 2003; Shiva 2001). 15 Such broad-based oppositional movements are also growing around the increasingly obvious impacts of climate change and other profit- and inequality-driven environmental depredations.
Without explicitly acknowledging it, The Bioeconomy to 2030 is a response to this opposition—in particular, to growing concerns about environmental sustainability and extreme inequality. It offers putative technological solutions to problems of environmental degradation, hunger, and lack of access to health care. In this sense, it attempts to internalize the double movement, by claiming that (only) these neoliberally embedded technological solutions can successfully address such ecological and social crises.
As we have seen, The Bioeconomy to 2030 claims that the bioeconomy, as described therein, will provide “solutions to the challenges posed by climate change, ecosystem degradation, poverty and global public health,” because “[b]iotechnology … can improve the supply and environmental sustainability of food, feed and fibre production, improve water quality, provide renewable energy, improve the health of animals and people, and help maintain biodiversity by detecting invasive species” (OECD 2009, 20). Importantly, this will come about largely through market forces: growing populations and rising income levels (for some) will increase demand for food, water, and energy; climate change will raise new obstacles to food production and place new pressures on water and energy supplies. The resulting high prices will induce private investors to develop biotechnological alternatives. “Frictions over access to resources” should be addressed through free-trade policies (OECD 2009, 271), while human misery resulting from shortages will induce nongovernmental organizations and governments to support the use of biotechnology in agriculture and environmental remediation. Meanwhile, ongoing intensification of agriculture (especially meat production) and other polluting activities will increase the demand for industrial biotechnologies for environmental remediation. Sustained rising prices for fossil fuels (together with government subsidies) will encourage private investment in bioenergy and energy-saving industrial biotechnology (OECD 2009, 33-41).
This strategy, however, hinges crucially on the further commodification of knowledge. The internalization of opposition to such commodification thus poses particular challenges. The OECD recognizes that “[i]ntellectual property, as it relates to biotechnology, is a particularly contentious issue” (OECD 2009, 268) and that there are “concerns” about it in some quarters. Nonetheless, IPR in general and patents in particular are “a key incentive for investment in innovation in most biotechnology applications,” and “[t]he main challenge is to facilitate the efficient dissemination of intellectual property to potential users and reduce R&D costs” (OECD 2009, 152, 267). It predicts (and recommends) the increasing use of “supplementary and complementary mechanisms” as a way “to avoid further concerns around concentration and potential adverse effects” of IPR (p. 152). Supplementary mechanisms include “research prizes, public sector grants for research, philanthropy, and policies to support markets” (p. 152). While it is unclear what is meant here by “policies to support markets” (perhaps it refers to “knowledge markets”; see below), the other mechanisms call for the investment of public (or private philanthropic) funds in key areas of concern that are ignored by profit-driven private actors, such as treatments for diseases suffered primarily by poor people and the improvement of crops grown by subsistence farmers, or even to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that address therapeutic needs rather than “me, too” drugs. This can be read as a strategy for domesticating concerns: some resistance-provoking effects of the IP regime are placed in publicly funded ring-fenced zones in which the usual rules of operation are (partially) suspended, thus shielding private profits and the IP regime itself.
Complementary mechanisms are “innovative uses of existing intellectual property systems to induce innovation and foster collaboration,” such as “open source and open science initiatives, patent pooling and patent clearing houses, licensing practices that encourage the development of knowledge markets, and licensing practices that enable freedom to operate for humanitarian reasons and for basic research in the public sector” (OECD 2009, 152, citing Herder and Gold 2008). The OECD is particularly enthused about “knowledge markets” (OECD 2008, 2009, 266-68). Knowledge markets “encompass a number of different mechanisms, or marketplaces, where buyers and sellers trade different knowledge intensive goods and services” (OECD 2008, 2). Through knowledge markets, existing IP owners could be persuaded to disseminate their proprietary knowledge more widely by the creation of new forums for matching buyers and sellers, such as “intellectual property exchanges and patent pools, consortia, networking, matching or brokering services, clearing houses, knowledge warehouses and auctions” (OECD 2008, 2). While knowledge markets are presented as a way of encouraging the (wider) use of locked-up and “underused” IP and thus “increase access to existing knowledge,” they are also intended to increase the kinds of knowledge that are appropriated and turned into “tradable assets.” Thus, in the health sector, “scientific data such as the outcome to clinical trials or toxicology data [or] experience from surgical cases” could be turned into such assets, while more generally such assets could include not only “data [and] information” but also “contacts and know-how” (OECD 2008, 2). Here, too, it attempts to internalize resistance: the solution to problems generated by knowledge commodification is further knowledge commodification.
Open source initiatives, also mentioned by the OECD, appear at first glance to move in the opposite direction, away from commodification. In fact, rather than challenging the IP regime, such initiatives often promote and extend it: “IPRs are needed to construct openness,” and open-source knowledge-sharing agreements create incentives for participants to identify and track less conventional IP, such as “scientific hypotheses, know-how, [and] how-not-to information” (Thornblad and Hedner 2012, 61, 70). “Open” forms of research, thus, often serve the interests of major commercial players by providing low-cost access to enabling technologies and knowledge out of which patented commercial products can then be developed (Rajan 2006, 52-56); they function to reduce research costs and mitigate the impacts of “patent thickets” (Hope 2008). These mechanisms internalize concerns among some involved in research that the current IP regime is dysfunctional in that it hinders research (and therefore innovation).
The Bioeconomy to 2030 effectively ignores social justice concerns about the impact of IPR (OECD 2009, 152-53, 266-71). Instead, it recommends that governments educate publics as to the virtues and necessity of IPR and the actors who pursue them, particularly in agriculture (OECD 2009, 248). As it has in connection with much regulatory policy (e.g., OECD 2009, 115, 243, 270), the OECD also recommends displacing control of IP policy to “harmonised” international rules (OECD 2009, 268), thereby insulating it from oppositional publics at the national level. 16
Conclusion
We have used a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of The Bioeconomy to 2030, which aims to secure a neoliberal regime of accumulation against major sociopolitical and ecological challenges. Like the “liberal creed,” the bioeconomic vision works to overcome resistance to fictitious commodification and to obstruct alternative approaches to defining and meeting needs. However, neoliberal reshapings of the state since Polanyi’s work was written have introduced new obstacles against those attempting to utilize the democratic trappings of the state to protect human communities and the environment against fictitious commodification. These reshapings include the application of market logic to the state itself; the removal of a range of public activities from potential democratic control; and the shifting of the focus, capacity, and rationality of the state toward international competitiveness. Dramatic increases in inequality and the concentration of wealth have further enhanced the political influence of those who benefit from fictitious commodification over those who seek protection from it. As we have argued previously, The Bioeconomy to 2030 works to entrench these developments both by promoting further fictitious commodification and by advocating further restrictions on the possibility of democratic use of the state to secure protection against this commodification.
The Bioeconomy to 2030 may also work to weaken the diverse “social-protectionist” coalitions forming in response to ecological threats and the intensified commodifications of nature and knowledge. One effect of ignoring the underlying causes of the problems for which The Bioeconomy to 2030 promises solutions is to isolate the problem of environmental sustainability from the (unacknowledged) problem of inequality, a move that a number of studies suggest may be effective in splitting coalitions of opposition (Arsel and Büscher 2012; Fletcher 2012; Holmes 2012; McAfee 2012; Richardson 2012; see also Reid 2012 on the use of “sustainable development” and “resilience” against the poor). Similarly, its focus on proposed fixes for the problems IPR have generated for scientists may split coalitions opposing “patents on life,” such as those who brought the legal challenge against Myriad’s BRCA patents in the United States. 17 These moves, unlike the liberal or social-democratic state’s concessions to the need for social protection described by Polanyi, are limited to those that can allegedly be delivered via new (profit-generating) technologies—not through, for example, redistributive taxation or public programs to collectivize risks to people (though they do advocate further collectivizing risks to capital).
The Bioeconomy to 2030 promises salvation through technology and markets, contingent on political discipline. Beyond “ordinary” promissory practices, The Bioeconomy to 2030 works through the securitization of promises; it is the package as a whole that has (political) value, beyond any economic or mobilizational value that the alleged promise of particular technologies may (or may not) have separately. This political value lies in the mobilization and legitimation of government commitments to establish or strengthen particular political–economic institutions and policy approaches. To the degree that this project succeeds, it would (1) enlist the state in locking in neoliberalization-furthering technological solutions and shutting out alternatives and (2) weaken oppositional movements. The extent to which this political project succeeds in fact is an empirical question deserving of ongoing research.
Our analysis suggests that in the current context, the bioeconomy concept is imbued with a politics that is often not recognized or acknowledged. Despite the fact that the launch of The Bioeconomy to 2030 sparked STS interrogation of the concept (Hilgartner 2007; Parry 2007), much work in social science and STS appears to accept the concept uncritically. There is a widespread taking-for-granted that “the bioeconomy” exists, at least in statu nascendi. 18 This in itself has political effects: the circulation of concepts like the bioeconomy between the OECD and the academic world enhances the influence of such concepts by conferring “scientific authority” upon them (Jessop 2008, 27).
For example, Wield et al. (2013, 17-18) adopt both the OECD’s definition of the bioeconomy and its problem-framing: thus, “layers of regulation that are stringent and lengthy” are “holding back the evolution of the biosciences and their applications,” which “promise solutions to the major global challenges of health and agriculture.” Just as it did in The Bioeconomy to 2030, this framing points to a need for more biotechnology-facilitative regulation and new forms of “governance” and collaboration, while simultaneously occluding the underlying sociopolitical–economic causes of the problems biotechnologies allegedly will address (in this case, food insecurity, the decline of effective innovation in health care, and the lack access to health care by the world’s poor). The focus of action has been successfully redefined: it is not the causes of the problems of concern, but rather the facilitation of the (profitable and otherwise) activities of those promising solutions through “the new biology.” Political–economic structure is largely invisible as, like many in STS, the authors envision relations among actors as networked rather than structured, outcomes as a product of “co-evolutionary” processes, and these relations and processes as always specific to particular contexts, each with its own “routines and traditions.”
A number of scholars have drawn attention to the neglect of political economy (e.g., Birch 2013; Goven 2006b; Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls 2010; Klein and Kleinman 2002; Mirowski 2011; Tyfield 2012) and political institutions (e.g., Jasanoff and Kim 2009; Nowotny 2014) within STS. Tyfield (2012, 160) has called STS “almost constitutionally allergic to issues of political economy” and Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 120) observe that “[e]ven in highly political environments, STS research tends to be drawn to scientific and technological innovation as an end in itself, in preference to more complex relationships among knowledge, its applications, and power.” It cannot be said that STS ignores power, but rather that it defines power (typically, as an effect of more or less ad hoc networks or assemblages) in such a way as to render political institutions and political economy invisible or largely irrelevant. This orientation is incompatible with the notion of semipermanent hierarchical structures of power. Similarly, politics in STS is often studied as micro-level relations within the process of producing scientific knowledge or technological artifacts, quite divorced from institutional or structural contexts. Thus, STS has been particularly blind to economic power and therefore to the implications of the concentration of that power and the associated increase in economic inequality we have witnessed over the past three decades. Foucault’s conceptualization of power, notably blind to political economy (Brown 2006, 77), underlies much STS thinking on the subject, uninflected by the growing and diverse body of work outside STS that brings together Foucauldian and political–economic analysis (e.g., Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006; Gill 1995; Jessop 2007a; Larner 2000; Larner and LeHeron 2002; Marsden 1999; Sum 2009; Sum and Jessop 2014).
The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a macro-context that enables and constrains, of dissociating the micro-how from the macro-why and macro-why-not. Without acknowledging this wider politics, talk of a present or future bioeconomy works to occlude its political-project dimensions and thereby risks unintentionally (for some, at least) contributing to the legitimation of the project. For, as STS scholars know well, technological innovation is much more than the production of new tools to solve particular problems: it is a framing of problems to suit particular technological responses in a process that coproduces (reshaping and preserving) social order.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors acknowledge support for research and writing from the Spanish National R&D Programme 2010-2013 (Grant CSO2011-2619), the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (Grant UOCX0221), and the Royal Society of New Zealand (COST Travel Grant).