Different ways of problematising biotechnology – and what it means for technology governance

Abstract

To understand controversies over technologies better, we propose the concept of ‘problematisation’. Drawing on Foucault’s idea of problematisation and on the concept of frames in media research, we identify characteristic forms of problematising biotechnology in pertaining controversies, typically emphasising ethical, risk or economic aspects. They provide a common basis for disputes and allow participants to argue effectively. The different forms are important for how controversies are negotiated, which experts get involved, what role public engagement plays and how political decisions are legitimised – in short, for technology governance. We develop a heuristic for analysing the link between forms of problematisation and different options for technology governance. Applied to synthetic biology, we discuss different problematisations of this technology and the implications for governance.

Keywords

bioethics biotechnology framing risk governance of science and technology public participation studies of science and technology

1. Introduction

Whenever a new technology appears on the radar screen of society, a number of questions arise: What is it good for? Is it safe? Can it be misused? Is it ethically acceptable? And who benefits from it? Biotechnology especially produces a continuous stream of developments that trigger far-reaching expectations while creating new bones of contention.

Biotechnology has been subject to controversies typically focusing on risk, ethical concerns or economic prospects. In other words, it became problematised from various perspectives, which did not solely reflect biotechnology’s intrinsic or ‘objective’ properties; rather, they resulted from a tacit agreement on what was considered problematic and relevant.

To settle controversies, stakeholders often demanded public debate and regulatory action. However, neither debate nor regulation fully resolved the issues at stake. Pressing questions remained: How can the identified problems be adequately addressed? Who has to be involved in discussing them? Which expertise is relevant? How can political decisions be legitimised?

We suggest that governance options are deeply connected to the way a technology gets problematised: A certain way renders some governance options feasible and restricts others. Vice versa, particular governance options may stabilise or destabilise the predominant way a technology is debated. We identify different forms of problematising biotechnology and how they are linked to governance options. From this we develop a heuristic for comparatively analysing past and present controversies over technologies with a similar profile.¹ We use empirical insights gained over more than a decade from international and national projects on public perceptions of and regulatory approaches to various biotechnologies.²

In the following section, we describe different perspectives from which biotechnology has been problematised. In the third section, the notion of problematisation is developed, drawing on Michel Foucault (1983) and on the concept of frames in media research. In the fourth section, we describe three prominent forms of problematising biotechnology. In the fifth section, we analyse how a form of problematisation relates to governance options on expertise, public participation and political legitimisation. In the final section, we apply our findings to synthetic biology, a new and potentially controversial field of research.

2. Technology and its critique

Can a technology constitute a problem? After all, technologies (including biotechnology) are created to solve problems, at least to promote innovation and economic benefit. For the most part, new technologies appear under an innovation rationale: science and technology is considered a major factor for economic prosperity and social welfare (Habermas, 1970). From this perspective, politics has the task of supporting research and ensuring safety.

However, in the wake of catastrophes such as the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and on-going expert dissent over risk, the promise of safety turned out to be at odds with the unfettered promotion of new technologies, and public accountability became an issue. Opponents took up the latent suspicion of risk from new technologies to drive forward their critique (Beck, 1992). Consequently, political debates over technology implementation centred on risk even if there were other concerns. This preoccupation gave rise to elaborated risk research and regulation, with scientific expertise taking centre stage and becoming pivotal to political decision-making.

Apart from risk, moral problems were put forward with particular forms of biotechnology, calling for bioethical expertise. During the 1970s, bioethics became institutionalised on the initiative of the scientific and medical communities to address moral dilemmas over technological innovations. Professionals realised that diversified moral perceptions and new medical technologies such as organ transplantation, in vitro fertilisation or recombinant DNA technology entailed difficult decisions over life and death, over the possible versus the appropriate (Engelhardt, 1996). Rather than discussing abstract models, bioethics engaged in everyday medical practice early on. This ‘casuistic turn’ suggested that rational considerations and moral questions could be reconciled for political decision-making (Toulmin, 1982). Big research institutes such as the Hastings Center or the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University were founded. Another source for the rise of bioethics was the awareness of human rights violations by medical research under the Nazi regime. The 1964 World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki was the first international document to set out ethical guidelines for medical research on human subjects. Research ethics committees were established first in the United States and the United Kingdom (Lindsey et al., 2001). From the 1990s, ethics became increasingly relevant for public policy, too. National ethics councils were institutionalised in most European countries (Galloux et al., 2002) and transnationally. With controversies over cloning, stem cell research or genetic diagnosis, these ethics councils obtained a voice in political decision-making (Bogner and Menz, 2010).

Apart from risk and ethical considerations, critics also pointed at other perceived problems from new biotechnologies such as job losses, non-equitable distribution of benefits and burdens, market monopolisation, undue intervention into living organisms and so on. However, risk and ethics remained the prominent perspectives, also in the regulatory discourse, as Kastenhofer (2009) showed: For medical biotechnologies, regulatory dissent centred on the ontological status of objects and thus on the ethical acceptability of technological interventions (see Braun et al., 2010). By contrast, debates on agricultural biotechnology in regulatory agencies focussed on risk and safety and therefore on evidence and uncertainty (Levidow and Carr, 2010). The regulatory discourse on either risk or ethics strongly influenced the governance approach for the respective biotechnology.

A regulatory discourse prepares and legitimises political decisions (Edelman, 1988). It usually coincides with public debate and consists of discussions in parliaments and government agencies, expert advice and bureaucratic practices, stakeholder reports, official documents, research programmes or surveys commissioned by political bodies (Jasanoff, 1995). Thus, different actors conceive and define a technology as a policy issue. They highlight problems and arguments deemed relevant, propose institutions considered able to process them and identify measures deemed adequate to address problems, defining the parameters of political legitimation.

Obviously, there is a link between how a technology becomes problematised and options for its governance. To understand this link better, we will develop a concept to systematically analyse forms of problematisation and their implications. To this end, we refer to two influential theoretical traditions.

3. Problematisation and media frames

We draw on two approaches to clarify our notion of problematisation: First, on the late works of Michel Foucault (1983, 1985) where he introduced the term, and second, on the media frames literature.

The concept of problematisation

The problem perspectives dominant in discussing biotechnologies represent an implicit agreement over what is at stake; they confine the problems to be noted, provide basic terms for the debate and select arguments deemed relevant and legitimate. They determine how a technology gets endorsed or rejected and which expertise is considered relevant.

We call such a perspective a form of problematisation. It introduces a basic distinction (e.g. morally acceptable or unacceptable, risky or safe) along which, for example, assessments can be carried out and controversies negotiated.³ Once established, a form of problematisation forces actors to constructively refer to it even if they favour another perspective. It guides understanding and reinforces the identity of the issue at stake, and establishes powerful rules for the organisation of conflict communication.

Problematisation is a process by which something becomes a phenomenon previously not perceived as coherent and definite, which can now be addressed explicitly. This process is fuelled by practices arising from habits and conventions and is conveyed by institutions, rules and authoritative texts. In the end, when a particular term is assigned to a phenomenon (e.g. by modern science), it can be addressed as such in discourse and might therefore become relevant for the interpretation of human behaviour and our understanding of the self.

Foucault (1985) introduced the term with explicit reference to the history of sexuality, wherein different forms of morally charged ‘techniques of the self’ shape the underlying idea of sexuality. Although the term did not appear until the beginning of the 19th century, the idea of sexuality was already born long before the modern scientific discourse. In line with this idea, individuals were urged to recognise themselves as moral agents of their pleasures and desires. Following Foucault, sexuality is the product of a moral problematisation of the body.

It is important to keep in mind that Foucault considered problematisation from the point of practices and discourses rather than from ideas and ideologies. Problematisation does not presuppose that powerful actors define or enforce particular views on a problem. In fact, problematisation is a contingent result of many independent practices, discourses and institutions changing over time. Earlier works by Foucault illustrate this approach as applied to other issues, such as the problematisation of madness arising out of social and medical doctors’ practices resulting in a sharp distinction between abnormality and normalcy.

Science, technology and society (STS) scholars have used the term problematisation in a different way. Callon (1986) introduced it in an early version of Actor Network Theory (ANT). In his landmark study on the domestication of the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay, he argued that institutionalising a research issue (here: finding a scientifically based strategy to prevent the decline of the scallop population) is tantamount to successfully implementing a problem description, which simultaneously ascribes certain identities, interests and functions to human and non-human actors. Problematisation, in Callon’s words, describes ‘a system of alliances, or associations, between entities, thereby defining the identity and what they “want”’ (Callon, 1986: 203). From this perspective, problematisation means to intentionally introduce a specific problem configuration.

However, demonstrating that this has happened is often difficult. This is one reason why Foucault’s notion of problematisation offers advantages for the analysis of technology controversies. In addition, he reminds us that there is no such thing as an intrinsic problem with a technology. Problematising does not mean deciphering a problem that exists ex ante; in fact, it is a way of giving technology a meaning that is not random. The specific perspective under which a technology is problematised refers to past controversies, to existing policies of regulation, to relevant institutions and public bodies, and so on. Moreover, following Foucault, problematisation should not be understood as an ideological project of the power elite (or of citizen movements or civil society organisations) implemented top-down. Instead, we should understand problematisation as an unintentional, uncontrolled effect of a diverse network of social practices, discourses and institutions.

From a Foucauldian perspective, we can identify an ‘archaeological’ dimension of analysis focusing on different forms of problematisation, and a ‘genealogical’ dimension focusing on the formation and development of problematisations. Here, we follow the ‘archaeological’ line since we aim to provide a snapshot of current technology controversies rather than a historical analysis of how they developed. We want to show that different forms of problematisation go along with different governance options in technology controversies.

Following Foucault, to determine empirically which form of problematisation is most influential or visible would demand analysing practices, institutions, and discourses in detail. In practice, this is often unfeasible; however, there is a shortcut provided by the analysis of media discourse. In a Foucauldian perspective, media discourse is an important element in constituting problematisation because media logic demands the sharpening of a problem perspective when mirroring it. Therefore, to learn more about problematisation, we may look at media frames as an entry point for our investigation. However, we must be aware of conceptual differences between problematisation and media frames, which we address below.

Media frames

In media research, the perspectives from which an issue is portrayed in an article are called frames; their analysis has been subject to numerous empirical studies⁴ forming a well-established interdisciplinary research field delivering insight into the logics of media discourses.

Following Goffman (1974), frame analysis aims to reveal the rules for how meaning is assigned to a situation. Accordingly, frames are interpretive schemes that help the reader to come to terms with complex issues ‘by lending greater weight to certain considerations and arguments over others’ (Nisbet, 2010: 44). Frames are tools for the presentation of complex issues in a way that makes them accessible to a broader public (Scheufele and Tweksbury, 2007). By focusing on certain aspects of an issue, omitting others, frames offer an idea of organisation, which suggests what the controversy is about (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). That said, frames are heuristic devices; they are never ‘pure’ but indicate the priority of a particular perspective without precluding other aspects.

Frames pertain to specific arguments, objectives and narratives in a discourse; they indicate causal relations, convey values and propose ways to proceed (Entman, 1993). Once a frame has been established as dominant, it is hard for policy-makers or interest groups to shift the image of the issue (Schön and Rein, 1994). Thus, dramatic events or crises are required to change influential frames or to introduce new perspectives.⁵

For biotechnology, several typologies – mostly referring to Gamson and Modigliani (1989) – were developed, identifying a number of media frames and their influence on attributions and beliefs (e.g. Bauer et al., 2001). Some frames proved highly relevant in describing the biotechnology controversy but their prominence varied over time and across countries (Nisbet and Lewenstein, 2002). The most prominent coincide with several ‘basic frames’ Dahinden (2006) identified in a secondary meta-analysis (Table 1).

Table 1.

Basic frames in the media reporting on biotechnology.

Economic prospect	Emphasising the economic potential of a technology
Ethics	Problematising a technology in terms of ethics
Scientific progress	Celebrating scientific breakthroughs
Conflict	Describing the issue from the perspective of interest groups and their power relations
Personalisation	Describing the issue from an individual’s perspective

The typology provides a useful systematisation; however, two points must be emphasised. First, frames are context specific; for issues other than established forms of biotechnology and places other than Europe (or North America) different frames might be relevant.⁶ Second, biotechnology gets ‘dramatized’ in the media to attract public attention (Bauer et al., 2001). This implies that frames follow the media logic, that is, they mirror the attraction of attention while conveying a message.

In other words, frames come in two conceptually different guises: first, as formal descriptions of how an issue is depicted (such as ‘personalisation’ or ‘conflict’), strictly mirroring the media logic. They present the issue from an actor’s perspective, taking actor configuration or personal fate into account, and rarely lend themselves to legitimisation; they are therefore of little relevance in a regulatory discourse. The other form entails a certain problem definition (such as ‘economic prospect’ or ‘ethics’). These frames do not follow the media logic alone but also mirror or sharpen problem perspectives conveyed by actors such as interest groups or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They suggest a problem definition or interpretation of the issue at stake considered relevant for regulatory decision-making.

Communalities and differences

Similar to media frames, ‘pure’ problematisations can never be observed. For example, risk issues often appear tainted by ethical problems or may even camouflage them (e.g. by ‘politically’ calculating the risk of anthropogenic climate change, see Beck, 1992). As a result, different forms of problematisation often appear intermingled, but to recognise this, we must first differentiate them, despite rarely meeting them in ‘pure’ form in practice.

Media frames and forms of problematisation differ. First, media frames have often been investigated with regard to their effects on public attitudes. Science communication studies focused on how interest groups struggle to influence frame-building processes (Callaghan and Schnell, 2001). Accordingly, powerful actors choose among frames reflectively and consciously to promote their interests (Chong and Druckman, 2007). By contrast, a form of problematisation is the result of the complex interplay between promoter and protest groups, elites’ attempts to calm protests, escape strategies by protesters, government actions and political rhetoric to confine the issue (Rucht et al., 1998).

Second, frames mirror media logic to attract attention. By contrast, a form of problematisation also relates to political legitimation of decisions. They are related since, from a Foucauldian perspective, media discourse is part of the formation process of problematisation. Media mirror forms of problematisation; they sharpen and develop but rarely invent them as they report interests and world views already present in the public and political domain. Eventually, they modulate their salience and help to convey them to the regulatory system. If they succeed to create enough resonance, they may contribute to undermine another influential problematisation (Torgersen and Hampel, 2012).

Finally, we should emphasise that a form of problematisation does not favour a particular standpoint for or against an issue. Ways of problematising a technology provide umbrellas under which arguments both for and against the technology can be brought forward and negotiated. Under the umbrella, other considerations may be raised provided they take a compliant shape. By contrast, media frames appear opposed to each other: a risk frame most often opposes a benefit frame; a frame of ethical concerns is juxtaposed with one addressing scientific breakthroughs; and so on. A form of problematisation may thus be compared with a ‘two-sided’ frame (Sniderman and Theriault, 2004). It provides the rails on which the trains of discourse run. Only cars of the right track fit, even if they carry containers that usually go on cars of another track.

4. Three ways to problematise biotechnology

With a view to media research, we identified three forms of problematising biotechnology along risk, ethics and economic aspects. Below, we will explain this further, providing examples.

Ethics

Ethics is the dominant way of problematising embryo-related medical biotechnology (Evans, 2002; Herrmann, 2009). With prenatal testing, genetic dispositions can be detected and the embryo aborted in case of a genetic disease. With stem cell research, cells from early human embryos are used in experiments entailing the embryos’ destruction. In both fields, ethical concerns were raised: While prenatal testing could lead to segregating human life into worthy and unworthy life with the consequence of abortion, stem cell usage rendered early human life subject to utility considerations rather than constituting a value in itself. These concerns promoted interest in bioethics and resulted in a wealth of literature (Reich, 1995).

Yet, the predominance of an ethical problematisation is not a priori intrinsic to the issue. For example, stem cell treatments carry risks for the patient (such as failure or cancer as a side effect). However, in the public and regulatory debate, health risks were sidelined in favour of the question whether producing stem cells from embryonic tissue could be ethically legitimised. The assessment whether, from an ethics perspective, stem cell research should be considered acceptable was open – it was possible to argue, in ethical terms, both for or against it (for a list of arguments see President’s Council on Bioethics, 2004).

The firm positioning of embryo-related medical biotechnology as an ethical problem has several sources. Contextually, a tight link to the long-standing conflict over the legalisation of abortion is most obvious. With regard to practice, it is considered a medical therapy and, similar to other delicate issues of life and death in medicine, assigned to ethics committees. Vice versa, over time, the salience of the issue contributed to the foundation of such committees in multiple contexts. Today, national or even transnational ethics councils give policy advice on a regular basis, providing a good example for the institutional manifestation of a particular form of problematisation.

Risk

From its very beginning, risk has been a main issue in the biotechnology debate, and later especially within agricultural biotechnology.⁷ Opponents claim that procedures and genes introduced into crop plants might entail unexpected ecological or health risks; proponents cannot see significantly increased risks compared with the original organisms.

Although genetically modified (GM) crops may also raise ethical and economic questions such as the impact on food security and global distributional justice, the focus on environmental and health risks has long been the dominant perspective in the media and in policy disputes (Gottweis, 1998; Joly, 2007). Opponents demand to halt the technology by referring to uncertain risks, while proponents point to known risks from pesticides in conventional agriculture that could be avoided with GM crops. Therefore, both pro and contra arguments may be raised when problematising the technology in terms of risk. A risk to human health from eating Bt-maize (which kills certain pest insects) has been claimed repeatedly, claims disputed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).⁸ However, with its efforts to scientifically assess the risks of GM crops, the EFSA inadvertently contributed to establish risk as the dominant form of problematisation.

Economy

Economic benefit is a prominent media frame in biotechnology coverage. ‘Economy’ is also a way of problematising a technology as it is possible to argue for and against it. Similar to a risk or ethics perspective not automatically entailing opposition, an economic perspective does not invariably support technology implementation. Differing economic interests may trigger conflicts, for example, over open-source (or the so-called farmers’ privilege to use home-grown seed) versus patenting in intellectual property management. Arguments against GM crops containing the notion that, in the future, farmers could become dependent on big companies or organic farming products might encounter problems on the market because of contaminating traces of GM ingredients, are clearly economic, even if they are usually less salient compared with risk arguments.

Under an innovation rationale, economic benefit is so self-evident that it becomes the default projection for any new technology, only to be put into perspective by obvious risks and/or strong ethical concerns. Today, the default economic perspective becomes visible in counter arguments against technology criticism: accordingly, highlighting ethical or risk issues jeopardises competitiveness. Empirically justified or not, ethics or risk arguments are therefore considered to be mostly raised by technology critics while economic arguments are those of the proponents, companies and state institutions promoting competitiveness (see President’s Council on Competitiveness, 1991).

All in all, the three forms of problematisation differ (see Table 2):

Table 2.

Problematising technology in terms of risk, ethics and economy.

	Risk	Ethics	Economy
Subject of dispute	Scientific evidence	Moral imperative	Socio-economic benefit
Key questions	Are there negative consequences of an intervention into natural processes? How big is the risk?	Where are the limits to science and technology? What societal future do we want?	Does it contribute to economic growth? What would be lost if not implemented? Who benefits or loses?
Basic difference	True – false	Good – bad	Useful – futile
Examples	GM crops/food, (nuclear energy, mobile phones, nanotechnology)	Cloning, genetic diagnosis, stem cell research (human enhancement)	Industrial biotech, bioceuticals (fusion research, space exploration)

The assessment of risks to human health or the environment describes possible hazards and their likelihood (Jaeger et al., 2001). Relevant questions are as follows: What is the case? Is a statement true or false? Which knowledge is more reliable? Which party can command better data to support their stance? The knowledge required is scientific; debates over risk claims mobilise scientific arguments.

With ethics as the dominant perspective, scientific data are merely inputs in a deliberation process. The focus on ethics demands answers to questions like the following: What can be ethically defended? Which value arguments should be supported? Who can mobilise moral hegemony? Relevant expertise clearly differs from expertise in risk debates.

Under a dominant economic perspective, arguments pertain to economic benefits, their distribution and consequences. Relevant knowledge is economic, derived from assessments of individual or collective gains or losses, the distribution of benefits and the contribution to growth and prosperity.

Which perspective ultimately emerges as dominant often depends on references made to previous technology debates (Michael and Brown, 2004). Although not entirely open to choice, several rhetorical comparators may exist. For example, GM crops could be looked upon as agricultural varieties or as agro-chemicals; stem cells could be held akin to medical devices or links could be drawn to embryo experimentation. Over time, though, a particular focus prevails.

As already emphasised, we do not claim that there are always (or only) three forms of problematising a technology, or that the ones described are always dominant. Rather, we take the three characteristic forms of biotechnology problematisation over recent years as an illustration for the phenomenon itself. Next, we will illustrate the relation to governance options.

5. The link to technology governance

A key element of biotechnology governance – as opposed to simpler top-down regulation – is the incorporation of actors and stakeholders such as environmental groups, consumer organisations or patient initiatives in addition to commissioned scientific expert panels or ethics committees. Deliberation and co-operation render political decision-making more complex. Consequently, new instruments have been created such as participatory and public dialogue procedures (Rowe and Frewer, 2005). With the move from top-down regulation to governance, one form of problematisation may acquire greater influence. Even if the knowledge necessary for a decision is lacking, it becomes clear whether this knowledge would have to be scientific, ethical or economic.⁹ We argue that the way a technology becomes problematised in one of the three forms identified (risk, ethics and economy) is important for the way controversies are negotiated, which experts get involved and how political decisions are legitimised.

Focussing on three forms of problematisation only is of course a gross simplification; however, we aim to show how a certain perspective affects the available options for biotechnology governance.¹⁰ We discuss three related fields where the form of problematisation plays a role: policy advice, public participation and decision legitimisation.

Policy advice

Under a dominant risk perspective, science is in the driving seat. The prerogative in risk governance is assigned to scientific and technical expert panels commanding a certain type of knowledge (Jaeger et al., 2001: 217).¹¹ To be considered relevant, objections to technology implementation must be formulated as relating to risks in order to be assessed by an expert panel; other arguments are not considered legitimate as they pertain, accordingly, to irrelevant aspects. Policy advice is based on research to identify facts; it is measured against scientific reliability, validity and objectivity.

For example, in Europe, the marketing of a novel GM food requires official permission. After scientific risk assessment, the national competent authority, advised by a scientific committee, decides on the application. If different member states do not agree, they must formulate the reasons in scientific terms, pointing at faults in the assessment or at facts that have newly emerged, and the EFSA checks the evidence provided. Since numerous quarrels over the adequacy of the assessments arose between member countries, European institutions took a number of governance measures to accommodate or refuse protests (Baram and Bourrier, 2011). The dispute took the form of a knowledge conflict: Which evidence is better, who can present the more convincing experiments, whose interpretation is more consistent?

By contrast, under an ethics perspective the scientific robustness of an argument is less important. In policy advice, ethics expertise must be balanced rather than objective.¹² As arguments pertain to value judgements, many legitimate positions to each problem exist. The members of a national (or European¹³) ethics council should mirror the plurality of possible views. Councils are multidisciplinary, often including a variety of stakeholders. As a result, disagreement between council members is considered normal and implicitly deemed legitimate (Bogner, 2010).¹⁴ Policy advice takes the form of a deliberation-based balanced value judgement ideally reflecting pluralism in society.

Under an economic perspective, stakeholders bargain over the distribution of benefits and losses. Arguments are supposed to reflect respective interests. Expertise is expected to support a particular stance; hence, it is useful only if it strategically fits the respective line of argumentation. From policy advice, neither a balance of viewpoints nor scientific objectivity is necessarily expected while advice-giving institutions – openly or not – are often affiliated to stakeholders.

Table 3 compares differences in policy advice.

Table 3.

Policy advice and problematisation.

	Risk	Ethics	Economy
Relevant expertise	Natural sciences	Natural and social sciences, religion, humanities, lay knowledge	Economy, interest representation
Form of institutionalisation	Risk research, risk assessment panels/agencies	Ethics committees and councils	Interest groups, trade unions
Production of relevant outcomes through	Research	Deliberation	Bargaining
Expectation from expertise	Objectivity	Balance	Partisanship

Public participation

Past technology controversies resulted in calls for public participation giving rise to participatory exercises of different formats (Rowe and Frewer, 2005). They should bring into dialogue experts, policy-makers, stakeholders and the public. Apart from institutionalised statutory hearings of those involved, a methodological canon for participatory technology assessment was developed to involve persons not involved thus far (Joss and Bellucci, 2002) and to engage them ‘upstream’ early in technological innovation (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004).

In risk debates, participatory procedures are intended to bring alternative views into deadlocked conflicts. However, only rational expert opinion (‘sound science’) is considered relevant here; lay people lacking specialist knowledge are constitutively disadvantaged. For governance, lay participation is structurally incompatible with the dominant risk perspective and in reality often considered unfeasible. In practice, risk conflicts provoke other means of articulation such as ‘uninvited’ participation (Wynne, 2007b: 107): Many laypersons protest against, say, a GM crop release whether experts see a risk or not. Such protests often become politically relevant as they forcefully interfere with technology implementation as the political default programme. Considered an alternative, the 2003 UK large-scale project GM Nation? on GM crops – mostly framed as a risk issue – was attractive but analyses revealed problems with the choice of participants, the relevant arguments and the way the debate was held (Horlick-Jones et al., 2007). Implications for technology governance remained unclear.

Issues with an emphasis on ethics rarely lead to comparable mass demonstrations, even if there are cases where visible protest originated from conflicts over medical applications of stem cell technology.¹⁵ However, in general, ethical issues appear more suitable for lay deliberation just because their assessment demands value judgements – to which everybody may be entitled (having become familiar with the technicalities).¹⁶ In terms of governance, public participation seems an obvious way to deal with these issues (Joss and Bellucci, 2002). However, few members of the public are strongly interested in participating because practical applications are only expected in a distant future. Therefore, participation experiments often take the form of third-party funded projects designed by STS scholars (Bogner, 2012).

Under an economic perspective, public participation in labour disputes over technology implementation mostly takes the form of organised collective action, sometimes spontaneously of local protest. Another way the public express preferences by economic means is through buying behaviour, either non-organised or via a consumer boycott (see Schurman and Munro, 2009). People are mobilised through the action of organisations such as trade unions or spontaneously. The issue, economic benefit or loss, is highly relevant to the individual and calls for participation by default.

Table 4 summarises the differences regarding public participation.

Table 4.

Public participation and forms of problematisation.

	Risk	Ethics	Economy
Typical form of articulation	Protest	Invited participation	Collective action
Mobilisation	Autonomous (bottom-up)	By participation experts (top-down)	By trade unions, consumer associations (top-down), autonomous (bottom-up)
Compatibility with the dominant perspective	Weak	Strong	Strong
Political impact	Considerable	Weak	High

Legitimation of political decision-making

For governance, under a risk perspective, terms of reference and relevant forms of expertise are quite special. Political decisions therefore must be legitimised differently than under other dominant perspectives. From a juridical point of view, risk arguments refer to the basic rights of bodily integrity and an intact environment not jeopardising health. This is uncontroversial, provided the existence of a substantial risk can be established. Therefore, risk assessments are highly salient for political decision-making. For example, in 2009, when the then German Minister of Agriculture prohibited the release of a GM maize variety, in an interview with a German newspaper she explicitly stated to have taken ‘a decision founded by scientific expertise and not a political one’.¹⁷ Although a sceptical public majority had admittedly impressed her, she exclusively highlighted that experiments had proven ‘gene maize’ could be detrimental to the environment.

Under an ethics perspective, the main source of legitimation is the individual conscience of experts, politicians or laypersons involved (Bogner and Menz, 2010). Ethical expertise is assigned to individual persons irrespective of profession or position. Ethical experts’ advice may easily be overturned because any decision is subject to the individual’s conscience and value preferences. This also applies to political decisions: If parliament votes on questions relevant to bioethics, faction whip is often lifted. This indicates that, under an ethics perspective, there is a shift from authority – with its system of control, evidence and objectification – to personal authenticity (Brown and Michael, 2002). However, not every kind of individual moral reasoning is considered legitimate. Instead, there is a canon of justifiable arguments and legitimate positions shaped by social practices and discourses such as parliamentary deliberations prior to political decisions, public dialogue events and the media: Positions taken up by individuals and justified with recourse to conscience often relate to an established moral order.¹⁸

Under an economic perspective, there is no quest for authenticity or objectivity. Instead, the bargaining results between parties representing antagonising economic interests legitimise political action. Ideally, every participant in this process can build on the same basic right to maximise individual benefit unless he or she would severely violate others’ basic rights. The aim is to find a balance among actors of unequal power with arguments of negotiable salience.

Table 5 shows consequences for decision legitimisation.

Table 5.

Legitimisation of decisions under different forms of problematisation.

	Risk	Ethics	Economy
Reference	Expert knowledge	Conscience	Interests
Basic rights	Bodily integrity, intact environment	Freedom of belief, rights subject to deliberation	Freedom to maximise individual benefit
Role of expertise	Determining facts	Advising on alternatives	Supporting different stances
Political decision-making	Bound by external expertise	Subject to individual conscience	Invokes bargaining results

6. Outlook: Problematising synthetic biology

We developed our heuristic on the basis of experiences with forms of biotechnology long in existence. Meanwhile, new areas such as synthetic biology (SB) have emerged for which a dominant problematisation has not yet developed (Torgersen and Schmidt, 2013). This provides an opportunity to apply the heuristic to a technology strongly influenced by information technology. The idea is not to simply search for the three forms of problematisation in another context but to look for a link between problematising and governing a technology. The heuristic, hence, is applied as a sensitising concept for the analysis of emerging technologies.

SB is ‘the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems, and the re-design of existing natural biological systems for useful purposes’,¹⁹ with a strong focus on engineering. A major aim is constructing metabolic pathways or whole genomes from standardised parts and, in the future, designing whole organisms.

Schmidt et al. (2009) identified four main concerns with SB: First, safety and security problems such as bioterrorism and/or accidents; second, ethical issues from blurring the boundary between living and non-living objects; third, economic questions such as access and intellectual property rights;²⁰ and fourth, who to involve in making decisions, which pertains to all issues above. As with more established biotechnologies, SB is seemingly problematised as a risk, ethical or economic issue. Nordmann and Schwarz (2009) have argued that past controversies, together with current visions, tend to shape the image of a new technology. STS scholars, politicians and civil society organisations often draw analogies between SB and agricultural biotechnology as the former is said to possibly meet similar rejection.²¹

If the form of problematisation relates to technology governance, public participation could play a more prominent role for SB governance should ethics take the lead. With risk, scientific evidence and expertise would be more important, restricting the role of participation. With economy as the dominant perspective, the focus on innovation and competitiveness would be most salient. So far, all three perspectives can be found empirically.

However, the triad of risk, ethics and the economy is not set in stone and future dominant forms of problematisation may differ. For example, issues formerly attributed to risk or economic issues now go under a broad ‘ethics’ umbrella. Already during the 1990s, Sheila Jasanoff (2011: 633, 635) had identified a shift in the US regulatory debate on biotechnology from a focus on risk to ethical questions, subsuming risk under ethics. Significantly, when ethics councils in the United States and Europe took up SB, they investigated a range of issues including risk and economic prospects (European Group on Ethics (EGE), 2010; Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCSBI), 2010).

We may also encounter new forms of problematising SB in the context of its relation to information technology. For example, a ‘coolness’ factor novel to biotechnology has been postulated (Torgersen and Schmidt, 2013), emphasising the playfulness of experimentation for artists or young students as captured in the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.²² Similarly, SB has been considered a harbinger of an anti-bureaucracy shift in science towards more transparency and participation (Delfanti, 2013). An activist accent on constructing organisms and a hands-on approach relates SB strongly to the ‘biohacker’ movement influenced by the IT hacker ethic.

Following Delfanti (2013), biohacking is not only tinkering with information encoded in DNA; it aims to change the entire scientific culture shaped by formal education, bureaucracies, peer review and technical obstacles which prevent people from doing research. Biohacking understands itself as an antidote to the ‘biology-industry-system’ of big corporations, elite universities and government agencies and their money, patents and privileges. Inspired by an ethos of rebellion and anti-establishment critique, it promotes open science practices. Promoting equity, it implicitly aims at making SB more ‘moral’ and changing its image to that of a grassroots movement.

If SB were to be problematised mainly from a biohacker perspective, according to our heuristic, the subject of dispute might be the power of control and the basic difference might be access to knowledge. Expertise would be dispersed and participation a constitutive factor. The governance reaction to a ‘maverick’ science potentially jeopardising established structures could be to curtail official support or even to contain its spreading.

However, the movement’s critical impact remains unclear as its focus does not impinge on epistemology. In contrast to an ethics or risk perspective, biohacking does not problematise SB along alternative concepts of nature or the consequences of technology. Focusing on institutional and socio-economic aspects instead, it might become an alternative path towards professionalisation and access to the market. There are indications that established forms of problematisation may take the lead again and ‘colonise’ the biohacker perspective.²³ Rather than introducing a new form of problematisation, it may contribute to a subtler change of practice among established science communities together with growing peer-to-peer communication and the quest for open access (Van Noorden, 2013).

Therefore, we might experience surprises regarding future forms of problematising emerging technologies. Perspectives other than risk, ethics or economic arguments may emerge and influence governance options – and disappear. Once alerted, empirical research can derive useful information for reflexive governance from analysing different ways of problematising technology. The notion of problematisation as sketched out in this article might help to enrich empirical analyses focusing on technology governance; furthermore, it might discourage attempts to determine top-down the form a novel technology should be problematised.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We greatly acknowledge many helpful comments and suggestions from unknown reviewers.

Funding

This work resulted from a number of EU-funded projects, among others: ‘Biotechnology in the European Public’ (BEP, EU-FW 5), ‘Precautionary Expertise for GM Crops’ (PEG, EU-FW 5), ‘Safety and Ethical Aspects of Synthetic Biology’ (SYNBIOSAFE, EU-FW 6), ‘Sensitive Technologies and the European Public Ethics’ (STEPE, EU-FW 7) and several Austrian nationally funded projects such as ‘Communicating Synthetic Biology’ (COSY, GenAU/ELSA) and ‘Sociology of Ethics Expertise’ (APART grant to Alexander Bogner).

Notes

Author biographies

Alexander Bogner is a sociologist by training and presently a senior scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. His main research interest is in how science and technology change when the boundaries between science, politics and the public blur. Over the recent years, he especially focused on public engagement with science and technology. His empirical work has focused on biomedicine, agri-biotechnology and emerging technologies.

Helge Torgersen is a molecular biologist by training and presently a senior scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Main fields of interest are risk assessment, public perceptions and comparative policy of biotechnology, science studies and methods of participatory technology assessment. Current topics include societal aspects of nanotechnology, synthetic biology and cognitive enhancement.

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