| A growing global concern for good governance and democracy has led to a focus on transparency, more deliberative democracy, and more public involvement in policy decisions. Public input is seen as a means of making better decisions, developing trust, improving representativeness, and increasing legitimacy of decisions. Particularly when issues are complex and uncertain, like biotechnology, there has been a focus on making decision making processes more open and democratizing scientific expertise. There has been an increased focus on decentralization as a way to achieve that.;This dissertation responds to the increased policy activity at the local level by analyzing subnational governments' actions, their causes, and effects, in the area of GMOs. It approaches these questions by giving a macro-level overview of GMO regulation in Europe and the United States, where GMO politics and policies have taken different tracks at higher levels, but have arisen in quite similar ways at the subnational level. The second part delves farther into the questions raised in the first part by comparing case studies from California, Italy, and the Network of European GMO-free Regions.;Subnational governments worldwide have made efforts to regulate GMOs to try to deal with a wide range of issues, depending on what they saw as potential impacts to their community---or the broader global community---that GMOs could cause. While many of their concerns are related to the more "scientific" issues of human and environmental risk, subnational governments have also acted because of concerns about agronomic effects, socio-economic impacts, and cultural or traditional issues. They have responded to controversies in ways national and supranational governments have been less willing or less able to do. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
