Rethinking regulation: seeds and drugs in China & Argentina

Project concept note (pdf 200kb)

Rethinking regulation

The project compares the regulation of two technologies - transgenic cotton seeds and antibiotics - with the way those technologies are experienced amongst poorer communities in rural Argentina and rural China.

We will use the findings from these case studies to explore the implementation challenges facing regulators; and to understand the kinds of inclusive regulatory designs that can incorporate issues relevant to poorer communities. As such, we wish to understand how to improve regulatory capacity, and identify fruitful ways of rethinking regulation. We intend this project to provide insights of help to policy-makers and other stakeholders involved in regulatory capacity-building efforts.

Addressing specific cases in the agricultural and health domains in specific settings in Argentina and China, this project will address the gap between current assumptions about regulation - based often on the norms of OECD countries - and the more complex realities in diverse, dynamic contexts.

In a context of economic globalisation, new pharmaceutical, agricultural and water technologies are, today, often being supplied through trans-national as well as national research and development chains. Yet global, harmonised regulations and regimes often do not map neatly onto diverse localities in rapidly changing economies, giving rise to many unintended consequences. This project will trace the relationships between global and local forms of governance and regulation, asking how, for specific issues and settings, global and national regulatory regimes actually work, or fail to work, in practice.

We will explore the interactions between formal and informal regulation that may emerge to fill the vacuum, whether based on citizen action and social networks, everyday means of getting-by, or semi-legal activities. Exploring who gains and who loses from these interactions, and their implications for emergent ecological dynamics - for instance as poorly-regulated drugs threaten to provoke new and devastating resistances - this project will work towards identifying alternative regulatory pathways that work for Sustainability.

Research update - spring 2008

The first stage of fieldwork is underway, which is trying to understand how seeds andantibiotics are accessed and used in poorer communities. We also wish to understand the issues of concern in those communities, especially those relating to the regulation of these artifacts. This knowledge will inform the second stage of the fieldwork, to be completed over the summer, which is to interview the regulators at local through to international levels responsible for controlling these artifacts.

STEPS members working on this project

STEPS partners on this project

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