Transformative regulation of chemical pesticide-based agricultural systems

In 2011, new European regulatory legislation proposed criteria aimed at phasing out many chemical pesticides and substituting them for non-chemical techniques of pest and weed control.

The aim of this project is to understand the ideational and knowledge politics entangled in efforts to develop and implement those transformative regulatory ambitions.

It will research the ways in which the purposes of the new legislation, the problems it is designed to resolve, its objects of attention, and its anticipated interventions and solutions have been imagined, contested and interpreted by different networks of state and non-state actors, and how efforts have been made by those networks to institutionalize their preferred meanings in legislative measures, and subsequently in policy and practice, including scientific practice.

It will focus on experience of legislative development and its revision at European level, at implementation in the UK and Denmark, and on European debate about the methods for performing comparative hazard assessment and environmental risk assessment.

An analytical framework drawing on sociotechnical transitions theory, ‘discourse analysis’ from political science and ‘deconstruction’ from science and technology studies will be used to illuminate how actors seek to influence policy-makers and others’ understandings of what is at stake in this area of technological practice, and how these become embedded in legislation, policy interventions and scientific standards.

The project seeks to support the implementation of the EC’s Farm to Fork Strategy, a key component of the European Green Deal, and its ambitions to be a frontrunner in implementing the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.