From risk assessment to in-context trajectory evaluation - GMOs and their social implications

Applying frame analysis to Syngenta's recent campaign 'Bring plant potential to life', we first de-construct the technosocial imaginaries driving GMOs innovation, showing how the latter endorses the technological fix of socioeconomic problems whilst reinforcing the neoliberal sociopolitical paradigm. Applying context analysis to biopharming in New Zealand, we then explore local practices and knowledge, showing that particularities of context typically omitted from risk assessment processes play a key role in determining both the risks and the potential benefits of a technology. Finally, drawing from the Italian case, we outline through ecosocial analysis how the lack of long-term studies, further aggravated by current methodological deficiencies, prevent risk assessment from considering not only how GMOs affect the environmental context but also, and most importantly, the way people live in, and interact with, this context.Incorporating frame analysis, context analysis and ecosocial analysis, in the form of in-context trajectory evaluation, into the assessment of GMOs can improve the social compatibility, political accountability and ecological sustainability of its outcomes.Over the past 30 years, modern biotechnologies have raised enormous expectations as well as passionate political controversies, leading to a strong polarization in European societies, to permanent tensions with the USA about commercialization under World Trade Organization agreements and to an ongoing debate over risk assessment and risk management procedures. Mainstream risk assessment approaches conventionally understand risk assessment as 'a factually grounded, objective and value free analytic exercise' [1]. Consistent with this understanding, new technologies are typically assessed in terms of their potential risk of negatively affecting human health and in terms of their environmental risks [2].Risk assessment procedures, however, have not driven out all concerns about genetically modified