Governing Biosecurity in a Neoliberal World: Comparative Perspectives from Australia and the United Kingdom

Damian Maye, Jacqui Dibden, Vaughan Higgins and Clive Potter
Additional contact information
Damian Maye: Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of the West of England, Oxstalls Lane, Longlevens, Gloucester GL2 9HW, England
Jacqui Dibden: School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
Vaughan Higgins: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2650, Australia
Clive Potter: Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, England

Environment and Planning A, 2012, vol. 44, issue 1, 150-168

Abstract: International trade poses a serious and growing threat to biosecurity through the introduction of invasive pests and disease: these have adverse impacts on plant and animal health and public goods such as biodiversity, as well as food production capacity. While international governmental bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognise such threats, and permit governments to protect human, animal, and plant life or health, such measures must not be applied in a way that is restrictive to trade. This raises a fundamental (but little-examined) tension between effective biosecurity governance and the neoliberal priorities of international trade. In this paper we examine how such tensions play out in the different political and geographical contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom. A comparative approach enables close scrutiny of how trade liberalisation and biosecurity are coconstituted as compatible objectives as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in making these domains a single governable problem. The comparative analysis draws attention to the policy challenges facing Australia and the UK in governing national biosecurity in a neoliberal world. These challenges reveal a complex geopolitics in the ways in which biosecurity is practised, institutionalised, and debated in each country, with implications for which pests and diseases are defined as threats and, therefore, which commodities are permitted to move across national borders. Despite efforts by the WTO to govern biosecurity as a technical matter of risk assessment and management, and to harmonise national practices, we contend that actual biosecurity practices continue to diverge between states depending on perceptions of risk and hazard, both to agricultural production and to rural environments as a whole, as well as unresolved tensions between internationalised neoliberalism and domestic concerns.

Keywords: plant and animal health; biosecurity; neoliberalism; trade liberalisation; Australia; the UK (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a4426 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:44:y:2012:i:1:p:150-168

DOI: 10.1068/a4426

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().