STEPS Symposium at DSA 2007
STEPS programme
STEPS members led panel sessions throughout the DSA Conference, 18-20 September 2007, linking the STEPS Centre's work with the conference theme of connecting science, society and development - please see the panel session information below and read about what happened at each session on our blog, The Crossing
Additionally we hosted a drinks reception on the first night of the conference and STEPS advisory board members spoke at the key plenary sessions throughout the conference.
STEPS Panel sessions at DSA 2007
1) Pathways to sustainability: Linking technology, poverty reduction and social justice
Tues 18 Sept, 4pm-5.30pm
Convenor:
Melissa Leach - STEPS Centre director and IDS professorial fellow
Speakers:
Melissa Leach - STEPS Centre director and IDS professorial fellow
Ian Scoones - STEPS Centre co-director andIDS professorial fellow
Andy Stirling - STEPS Centre co-director and SPRU head of science and professorial fellow
Gerry Bloom - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
John Thompson - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Lyla Mehta - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Linking science and technology with the reduction of poverty and social injustice are crucial challenges, in a world which is highly complex, dynamic and replete with uncertainties and conflicting understandings amongst different people.
This session introduces the early thinking of the ESRC Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS) Centre around research to address these challenges, drawing perspectives in development studies together with science and technology studies and cross-disciplinary perspectives on knowledge and power.
Following a brief overview of the Centre's emerging 'pathways approach', three short presentations will discuss its relevance to current issues and debates in the health, agriculture and water domains. In discussion, we will address, inter alia, implications for current policy and aid initiatives that seek to make science and technology work for the poor. The session will also identify key connecting threads in the series of STEPS Symposium panels and relevant plenary sessions to follow during the next two days.
2) Peri-urban dynamics and sustainability challenges
Wed 19 Sept, 11.15am-12.45pm
Convenors:
Fiona Marshall - STEPS member and SPRU deputy director and senior lecturer
Lyla Mehta - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Speakers:
Cecilia Tacoli - International Institute of Environment and Development
Prof. Ian Douglas - University of Manchester (tbc)
Usha Ramanathan -International Environmental Law Research Centre, New Delhi
Linda Waldman - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Hayley McGregor - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Fiona Marshall - STEPS member and SPRU deputy director and senior lecturer
Lyla Mehta - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
The peri-urban situation, with its juxtaposition of urban and rural activities and institutions, poses great challenges, particularly for the health and livelihood security of the marginalised and poorest. These citizens are confronted by problems arising due to contradictory or absent regulatory frameworks, contradictory technology arrangements, poor service provision, loss of agricultural land and increasing pollution.
The peri-urban interface is a contested space which is valued by interest groups in many different ways. This session will explore diverse understandings of the role and function of the peri-urban interface. The speakers will draw on their own research studies in South Asia, Africa and Latin America to illustrate how these play out in terms of politics and management.
The panel will consider:
• Opportunities for opening up pathways for negotiation towards Sustainability that link environmental sustainability with poverty reduction and social justice in the peri-urban interface
• How a better understanding of socio-technical-ecological processes in the peri-urban interface could support pathways to sustainability.
3) Technologies spiralling out of control? Politics and ethics of risk and regulation of agro-biotechnology
Wed 19 Sept, 4pm-5.30pm
Convenors: Esha Shah (IDS), Adrian Smith (SPRU)
Speakers:
Adrian Ely - STEPS member and SPRU fellow
Esha Shah - STEPS Centre member and IDS fellow
Patrick van Zwanenberg - STEPS member and SPRU fellow
Prof. Rajeev Gowda - Indian Institute of Management, India
Suman Sahai - Gene Campaign, India
Contrary to the proverbial understanding of technologies as means of control over environment and society, technology is currently being debated as source of anxiety, uncertainty and risk. Contemporary debates on regulation of new technologies, including agro-biotechnology, however, hinge precariously on the accurate prediction of the perils.
Risk prediction or risk assessment has become a highly charged and contested arena not only because the conventional science of risk assessment is increasingly proving inadequate, but also because biotechnology has interacted with the social context in myriad of unpredictable ways.
Diverse groups of actors, each with their own framing of biotechnology’s environmental, social, and ethical implications, have contributed to shaping and re-shaping modes of regulation and governance at multiple levels. Any model or ideal socio-technical framework implicit in standard regulatory devices is thus shattered as a result of the multiplicity of social responses to agro-biotechnology.
This session will examine a variety of socio-technical frameworks of agro-biotechnology especially in India and Latin America, but also compare them with EU/US experience. We will also examine political and ethical implications of a variety of frameworks for the assessment of risk and regulatory processes. The session will specifically discuss questions such as how a variety of public, private, legal, and policy actors co-relate risk and ethics in a highly charged political field? What is considered risky, what is in need of regulation and control, underpinning what kind of ethical worldview, with what repercussions for regulatory processes?
4) Examining the ‘pro-poor consensus’ on agricultural biotechnology: a moveable boundary between public and private?
Thurs 20 Sept, 11.15am-12.45pm
Convenor: Sally Brooks - STEPS Centre research officer and DPhil student, IDS
Speakers:
Sally Brooks - STEPS Centre research officer and DPhil student, IDS
Dominic Glover - STEPS post-doctoral fellow and DPhil student, IDS
Rana Ghose - DPhil student, IDS
Development studies scholars and practitioners have elaborated a number of powerful critiques and deconstructions of cardinal myths about agricultural biotechnology – especially transgenic crops – as an indispensable technology for solving world hunger and poverty. But do these incremental, piecemeal critiques offer a substantial alternative vision?
In the absence of such a coherent alternative, what Scoones (2002) has termed an ‘emerging consensus on pro-poor biotechnology’ has now become substantially entrenched. Meanwhile, companies are racing ahead with commercialisation of crops and traits originally designed for Northern, industrial-scale, commercial farmers. To meet the needs of poor farmers and consumers, innovative “partnerships” between public and private sectors are proposed; but what do these models of harmonious, “win–win” public–private collaboration take for granted? What are the flaws in the implicit, formal vision of orderly biotech governance? What can we learn from exploring the formal resistances and informal subversions which exist in the real world?
This session will bring together three IDS researchers whose research challenges conventional boundaries – public and private; formal and informal – in an effort to build a more nuanced, coherent and robust critique of the transgenic crop ‘consensus’. They suggest that we need a new rubric for assessing the transgenic crop agenda and its likely impacts on poor farmers and consumers.
Related links:
IDS Events: DSA Annual Conference 2007
Development Studies Association (DSA)
ESRC
The Crossing blog
Useful material:
Download STEPS Symposium flyer (pdf 61kb)
For more information on the STEPS Centre Symposium at DSA 2007:
Geneal enquiries: Harriet Le Bris T: 01273 876808 | E: steps-centre@ids.ac.uk
Media enquiries: Julia Day T: 01273 876814 M:07974 209148 E: j.day@ids.ac.uk
