Public Consultation on Proposed Revisions to Norway’s Gene Technology Act: An Analysis of the Consultation Framing, Stakeholder Concerns, and the Integration of Non-Safety Considerations

Sigfrid Kjeldaas, Trine Antonsen, Sarah Hartley and Anne Ingeborg Myhr
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Sigfrid Kjeldaas: GenØk Centre for Biosafety, NO-9294 Tromsø, Norway
Trine Antonsen: GenØk Centre for Biosafety, NO-9294 Tromsø, Norway
Sarah Hartley: Department of Science, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4PU, UK
Anne Ingeborg Myhr: GenØk Centre for Biosafety, NO-9294 Tromsø, Norway

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-25

Abstract: In Norway, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are regulated through the Gene Technology Act of 1993, which has received international attention for its inclusion of non-safety considerations. In 2017, the Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board triggered a process to revise the Act that included a public consultation and resulted in the “Proposal for relaxation.” Using poststructuralist discourse analysis, we critically analyze the premises and processes through which the proposal for relaxation was developed—including the public consultation—to understand the range of stakeholder concerns and how these concerns shaped the final proposal. We find that the proposal does not include all concerns equally. The Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board’s privileging of technological matters and its preference for tier-based regulation skewed the proposal in a way that reduced broader societal concerns to technological definitions and marginalized discussion of the social, cultural, and ethical issues raised by new gene technologies. To prevent such narrowing of stakeholder concerns in the future, we propose Latour’s model for political economy as a tool to gauge the openness of consultations for biotechnology regulation.

Keywords: GMO regulation; non-safety considerations; consultation; perplexity; sustainability; ethics; GMOs; genome editing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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