Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

European Commission policy has promoted agbiotech in the name of ‘sustainable agriculture’, based on the industry’s claims for ecoefficiency improvements. The Commission has aimed to facilitate approval and commercialisation of GM products, as a means ‘to complete the internal market’; this project became linked with neoliberal globalisation, whereby the objective imperatives of economic competitiveness force Europe to adopt agbiotech. This linkage provided a vulnerable target for political protest against agbiotech as a symbol of neoliberal policies. Societal conflict was eventually translated into regulatory disputes over the appropriate safety standards for GM products. These disputes, combined with a retailers’ boycott of GM grain, largely blocked the European commercial development of agbiotech.

Those EU conflicts provide a case study for evaluating the explanatory utility of ecological modernisation (EM) as a social theory. Some EM perspectives can help to explain how ecoefficiency claims framed agbiotech innovations, gained wider policy support and provoked demands for more stringent regulation. However, those EM perspectives have limited capacity for explaining the societal conflicts and their outcomes. These limitations derive from normative standpoints: attributing environmental degradation to market failure, understanding ‘ecoefficiency’ as an input-output efficiency of resource usage, understanding pollution in narrowly biophysical terms, and modelling civil society as supporters of such efficiency improvements.

Going beyond those limitations, some EM perspectives have already been linked with wider ones: state failure, cultural-discursive frames, rival political economies and reflexive policymaking. These perspectives too have normative standpoints, which enhance the analytical utility for explaining the EU societal conflict over agbiotech. Normative differences among theories cast a new light upon the task of linking EM with other analytical perspectives.