Overview of Regulatory Frameworks and Public Opinion

Abstract

This chapter lays the groundwork for a cultural-political analysis. The regulatory pathways described here seem to confirm the assumptions of historical path dependency in which initial political decisions decisively shape the interests of rational economic actors and structure the field of political possibilities (Pollack and Shaffer 2009). Such accounts are plausible, but they tend to underestimate other factors influencing the regulatory trajectory, especially the role of public opinion and of bureaucratic politics. In Europe, the latter shaped the early framing of biotechnology as an environmental question — to be supervised by the EU’s Environment Directorate-General (Patterson 2000). My main focus, however, is squarely on the public mood and the amount of political leeway it offers, particularly once public opinion became subject to regular surveys in the 1990s. While, in the EU, bureaucratic politics, industrial policy priorities, and major economic interests were drifting towards a US-style regulatory framework by the mid-1990s, this developmental path was thwarted by the anti-GMO mobilisation of citizens and consumers. The precautionary logic of the initial framework from 1990 has been preserved, even if greater centralisation at the European level implied a possible mechanism for modest regulatory softening and more technocratic policy-making.