The Too‐Narrow Policy Debate: Lessons from Agricultural Biotechnology for Digital Technology

Manjari Mahajan

Global Policy, 2021, vol. 12, issue S6, 80-84

Abstract: The COVID pandemic has brought a spectacular prominence to the role of digital technologies in public health. However, the policy discourse about digital technology has been for the most part strikingly narrow. Even as there is a discussion of the impact of particular digital tools, there is relatively little deliberation on the broader issues of how these technologies are reconstituting core aspects of health systems and polities. How did we get to a narrow debate on a vast topic? One way to understand this irony is by turning to the history of an older technology, namely agricultural biotechnology. This article focuses on two dominant framings that significantly narrowed the debates on agricultural biotechnology: first, a narrative that had a relentless focus on agricultural biotechnology as a neatly delineated field that produced stable products, and second, the ascent of a language of ethics that elided structural explanations and addressed only downstream impacts. The brief foray into the early years of agricultural biotechnology is useful in understanding contemporary politics of digital technology.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12999

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:glopol:v:12:y:2021:i:s6:p:80-84

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1758-5880

Access Statistics for this article

Global Policy is currently edited by David Held, Patrick Dunleavy and Eva-Maria Nag

More articles in Global Policy from London School of Economics and Political Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().