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Gunningham, Neil --- "Regulating Biotechnology: Lessons from Environmental Policy" [2007] ELECD 114; in Somsen, Han (ed), "The Regulatory Challenge of Biotechnology" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007)

Book Title: The Regulatory Challenge of Biotechnology

Editor(s): Somsen, Han

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845424893

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Regulating Biotechnology: Lessons from Environmental Policy

Author(s): Gunningham, Neil

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

1. Regulating biotechnology: lessons
from environmental policy
Neil Gunningham

In developing principles for the regulation of biotechnology, what can we
learn from environmental policy? In particular, are the frameworks, per-
spectives and insights that have enriched environmental regulation also
helpful in curbing the food safety and environmental risks posed by
biotechnology?1
This chapter examines four different frameworks, each of which offers
very different policy prescriptions and asks to what extent each of them
might be useful in the context of regulating biotechnology. It does so in
three parts. First, it locates the various frameworks within the context of
wide-reaching political and economic changes of the last two decades.
Second, it examines smart regulation, meta-regulation, civil regulation and
the `license perspective', and the insights that each might provide to the
regulation of biotechnology as it relates to food safety and environmental
protection. Finally, and briefly, it draws some broader but provisional
conclusions.


1 RECONFIGURING REGULATION: A CONTEXT

The 1980s and 90s saw a resurgence of free-market ideology, which, assisted
by the economic and political collapse of the former Soviet Union, enabled
neo-liberalism to triumph almost unchallenged for most of that period and
beyond. And while public opposition precluded the sort of wholesale
deregulation that occurred in some other areas of social regulation, envir-
onmental regulatory budgets were substantially cut in almost all jurisdic-
tions. This trend shows little sign of changing under the lower taxation
regimes that now characterize the large majority of economically advanced
states, ...