Giulia Claudia Leonelli (School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London) has posted The Perfect Storm: GMO Governance and the EU Technocratic Turn (Research Handbook on EU Environmental Law) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter endeavours to analyse GMO governance through the prism of evidence-based and socially acceptable risk approaches to the regulation of uncertain risks. Throughout the last decade, scholarly attention has mostly focused on the procedural arrangements enshrined in the GMO framework and the procedural aspects of the GMO deadlock; these include accounts of the GMO conundrum as analysed through the lenses of multi-level governance, experimentalist paradigms of governance and deliberative governance. This chapter takes a different perspective, re-framing the GMO dilemma in terms of a clash between – the EU institutions’ – narrow adherence to evidence-based risk regulation, and socially acceptable risk models. Section 2 provides a brief overview of evidence-based and socially acceptable risk approaches to the governance of uncertain risks. Sections 3 and 4 respectively turn to an analysis of GMO risk assessment and risk management. Section 5 draws the relevant conclusions, arguing that the Commission’s technocratic focus on sound science and trade in GM products has undermined the political and democratic legitimacy of GMO governance in the EU. By failing to acknowledge EU-wide aversion to GMOs, the Commission has thus ultimately created more problems than it solved.