From disagreements to dialogue: unpacking the Golden Rice debate

Sustainability Science, May 2018

Transgenic Golden Rice has been hailed as a practical solution to vitamin A deficiency, but has also been heavily criticized. To facilitate a balanced view on this polarized debate, we investigated existing arguments for and against Golden Rice from a sustainability science perspective. In a structured literature review of peer-reviewed publications on Golden Rice, we assessed to what extent 64 articles addressed 70 questions covering different aspects of sustainability. Using cluster analysis, we grouped the literature into two major branches, containing two clusters each. These clusters differed in the range and nature of the sustainability aspects addressed, disciplinary affiliation and overall evaluation of Golden Rice. The ‘biotechnological’ branch (clusters: ‘technical effectiveness’ and ‘advocacy’) was dominated by the natural sciences, focused on biophysical plant-consumer interactions, and evaluated Golden Rice positively. In contrast, the ‘socio-systemic’ branch (clusters: ‘economic efficiency’ and ‘equity and holism’) was primarily comprised of social sciences, addressed a wider variety of sustainability aspects including participation, equity, ethics and biodiversity, and more often pointed to the shortcomings of Golden Rice. There were little to no integration efforts between the two branches, and highly polarized positions arose in the clusters on ‘advocacy’ and ‘equity and holism’. To explore this divide, we investigated the influences of disciplinary affiliations and personal values on the respective problem framings. We conclude that to move beyond a polarized debate, it may be fruitful to ground the Golden Rice discourse in facets and methods of sustainability science, with an emphasis on participation and integration of diverging interests.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11625-018-0577-y.pdf

From disagreements to dialogue: unpacking the Golden Rice debate

From disagreements to dialogue: unpacking the Golden Rice debate Annika J. Kettenburg 0 1 2 Jan Hanspach 0 1 2 David J. Abson 0 1 2 Joern Fischer 0 1 2 0 Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), Lund University , Box 170, 22100 Lund , Sweden 1 Faculty of Sustainability, Leuphana University of Lüneburg , Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg , Germany 2 Handled by Osamu Saito, United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability , Japan 3 Annika J. Kettenburg Transgenic Golden Rice has been hailed as a practical solution to vitamin A deficiency, but has also been heavily criticized. To facilitate a balanced view on this polarized debate, we investigated existing arguments for and against Golden Rice from a sustainability science perspective. In a structured literature review of peer-reviewed publications on Golden Rice, we assessed to what extent 64 articles addressed 70 questions covering different aspects of sustainability. Using cluster analysis, we grouped the literature into two major branches, containing two clusters each. These clusters differed in the range and nature of the sustainability aspects addressed, disciplinary affiliation and overall evaluation of Golden Rice. The 'biotechnological' branch (clusters: 'technical effectiveness' and 'advocacy') was dominated by the natural sciences, focused on biophysical plant-consumer interactions, and evaluated Golden Rice positively. In contrast, the 'socio-systemic' branch (clusters: 'economic efficiency' and 'equity and holism') was primarily comprised of social sciences, addressed a wider variety of sustainability aspects including participation, equity, ethics and biodiversity, and more often pointed to the shortcomings of Golden Rice. There were little to no integration efforts between the two branches, and highly polarized positions arose in the clusters on 'advocacy' and 'equity and holism'. To explore this divide, we investigated the influences of disciplinary affiliations and personal values on the respective problem framings. We conclude that to move beyond a polarized debate, it may be fruitful to ground the Golden Rice discourse in facets and methods of sustainability science, with an emphasis on participation and integration of diverging interests. Cluster analysis; Disciplinary divide; Food security; Genetically modified crops; Problem framing; Sustainability science Introduction Sustainability is a contested and highly normative concept (Dobson 1999; Christen and Schmidt 2012) . The solutionoriented field of sustainability science (Miller et al. 2014) has to address both the normative goals of sustainability itself and the, often implicit, assumptions that underpin different scientific traditions (Schumpeter 1954; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Lélé and Norgaard 2005) . Such normativity, especially when not explicitly addressed, often leads to conflicting, even polarized, discourses regarding what represents an appropriate intervention for a given sustainability problem. For example, polarized narratives in research addressing the intersecting goals of food security and biodiversity conservation are driven by the underpinning conceptualization of the problem as either technical or socio-political (Loos et al. 2014; Glamann et al. 2015) . Similarly, the narrative explaining food insecurity as a result of insufficient production and population growth contrasts with explanations based on unequal distribution of social power as well as economic and physical resources (Sen 1981; Legwegoh and Fraser 2015) . In the agricultural biosciences, calls for gene patenting, corporate funding of public institutions and public–private partnerships conflict with arguments that seeds should be regarded as public goods (Scoones 2002; Stone 2015) . Such polarization presents serious challenges for sustainability science, not simply in terms of conflicting policy prescriptions, but also in the perceived legitimacy of the science itself (Bäckstrand 2003). In this paper we use the example of the scientific discourse around “Golden Rice”—itself a microcosm of the broader debate surrounding the role of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agricultural sustainability—as a particularly emotive example of a polarized discourse in sustainability science. Through a systematic, quantitative (cluster) analysis of the scientific literature, we classify and describe the polarized positions within the Golden Rice debate. By viewing this discourse through an explicit sustainability lens we seek to shed light on the role of problem framing in shaping the Golden Rice discourse, and suggest ways of shifting from such polarized debates towards more constructive dialogues. In particular, we highlight the importance of understanding and acknowledging the sources of such polarization, to move beyond ‘siloed’ disagreements towards shared understandings and meaningful solutions. The severity of conflicts around the use of G (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11625-018-0577-y.pdf

Annika J. Kettenburg, Jan Hanspach, David J. Abson, Joern Fischer. From disagreements to dialogue: unpacking the Golden Rice debate, Sustainability Science, 2018, pp. 1-14, DOI: 10.1007/s11625-018-0577-y