Safety assessment of genetically modified plants with deliberately altered composition

The development and marketing of ‘novel’ genetically modified (GM) crops in which composition has been deliberately altered poses a challenge to the European Union (EU)'s risk assessment processes, which are based on the concept of substantial equivalence with a non‐GM comparator. This article gives some examples of these novel GM crops and summarizes the conclusions of a report that was commissioned by the European Food Safety Authority on how the EU's risk assessment processes could be adapted to enable their safety to be assessed.     

A model‐based quantitative assessment of the carbon benefits of introducing iLUC factors in the European Renewable Energy Directive

The European Commission has a mandate from the EU's Renewable Energy and Fuel Quality Directives to propose a methodology, consistent with the best available science, to address indirect land use change (iLUC). One proposed solution to the iLUC problem is the application of iLUC factors in European fuels policy – it is widely expected that should the EU adopt such iLUC factors, they would be based on iLUC modelling using the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) MIRAGE model. Taking the iLUC factors from IFPRI MIRAGE as our central estimate, we use Monte Carlo analysis on a simple model of potential biofuel pathways for Europe to assess the likely average carbon saving from three possible European biofuel policy scenarios: no action on iLUC; raised GHG thresholds for direct emissions savings; and the introduction of iLUC factors. We find that without iLUC factors (or some other effective iLUC minimization approach) European biofuel mandates are unlikely to deliver significant GHG emissions benefits in 2020, and have a substantial probability of increasing net GHG emissions. In contrast, the implementation of iLUC factors is likely to significantly increase the carbon savings from EU biofuel policy. With iLUC factors, it is likely that most permitted pathways would conform to the Renewable Energy Directive requirement for a minimum 50% GHG reduction compared to fossil fuels.     

‘Cats give funerals to rats’: making the dead modern with lament

This article compares funeral laments in a Tibeto‐Burman‐speaking community in Yunnan, China, from two periods: the early 1990s, after ritual revitalization was thoroughly underway, and 2011, after this community had come into more intimate contact with the modernity‐obsessed cultures of urban and semi‐urban China. Laments fashion grief in a public setting by conceptualizing the dead and their relations with the living in vivid poetic language. Laments from the early 1990s described these relations as a circuit of suffering, in which children returned a debt of suffering they owed their parents after the latter's deaths. By 2011, innovative lamenters had reorientated their understanding of suffering to be personal, internal, and intimate. The dead became more ‘modern’, allowing the living, defined largely by their relations with the dead, to participate in ‘modernized’ forms of authentic, sincere emotional expression.     

“Working the System”—British American Tobacco's Influence on the European Union Treaty and Its Implications for Policy: An Analysis of Internal Tobacco Industry Documents

Background

Impact assessment (IA) of all major European Union (EU) policies is now mandatory. The form of IA used has been criticised for favouring corporate interests by overemphasising economic impacts and failing to adequately assess health impacts. Our study sought to assess how, why, and in what ways corporations, and particularly the tobacco industry, influenced the EU''s approach to IA.

Methods and Findings

In order to identify whether industry played a role in promoting this system of IA within the EU, we analysed internal documents from British American Tobacco (BAT) that were disclosed following a series of litigation cases in the United States. We combined this analysis with one of related literature and interviews with key informants. Our analysis demonstrates that from 1995 onwards BAT actively worked with other corporate actors to successfully promote a business-oriented form of IA that favoured large corporations. It appears that BAT favoured this form of IA because it could advance the company''s European interests by establishing ground rules for policymaking that would: (i) provide an economic framework for evaluating all policy decisions, implicitly prioritising costs to businesses; (ii) secure early corporate involvement in policy discussions; (iii) bestow the corporate sector with a long-term advantage over other actors by increasing policymakers'' dependence on information they supplied; and (iv) provide businesses with a persuasive means of challenging potential and existing legislation. The data reveal that an ensuing lobbying campaign, largely driven by BAT, helped secure binding changes to the EU Treaty via the Treaty of Amsterdam that required EU policymakers to minimise legislative burdens on businesses. Efforts subsequently focused on ensuring that these Treaty changes were translated into the application of a business orientated form of IA (cost–benefit analysis [CBA]) within EU policymaking procedures. Both the tobacco and chemical industries have since employed IA in apparent attempts to undermine key aspects of European policies designed to protect public health.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that BAT and its corporate allies have fundamentally altered the way in which all EU policy is made by making a business-oriented form of IA mandatory. This increases the likelihood that the EU will produce policies that advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health, rather than in the interests of its citizens. Given that the public health community, focusing on health IA, has largely welcomed the increasing policy interest in IA, this suggests that urgent consideration is required of the ways in which IA can be employed to undermine, as well as support, effective public health policies. Please see later in the article for the Editors'' Summary     

Some use—Little influence? On the roles of indicators in European sustainable transport policy

The paper focuses on the use and influence of indicators in European sustainable transport policy from a ‘knowledge utilization’ research point of view. The starting point is the contrast between the widely held idea that indicators are important tools for sustainable transport policy making, versus ‘knowledge utilization’ oriented research, which has often demonstrated that formal technical knowledge is used much less, or at least differently, than expected in policy and decision making.The paper looks at two cases of indicators applied for strategic policy making within the sustainable transport agenda. The first case concerns indicators tracking the fulfillment of national transport policy objectives in Sweden. The case explores the use and influence of an annual monitoring and evaluation report produced for this purpose, within a general ‘Management-by-Objectives’ regime. The second case deals with indicators applied for the Mid-Term Review of the European Commission's transport policy White Paper ‘Time to Decide’ (issued in 2001). The focus in this case is on a particular indicator based study conducted in 2005 by a group of consultants in close collaboration with European Commission staff.It is found that several indicators in both cases are actually used in policy processes, with evidence of use found in documents as well as interviews. However, ‘use’ does not automatically mean ‘influence’ on policies or processes in more than a superficial manner. Indicators seem to play a very limited direct instrumental role, while some signs of symbolic, conceptual and process roles are found. In the EU case we identify what is called a rationalization role of indicators, meaning that indicators inform and help to rationalize a change in the position towards key objectives. Several factors that characterize the indicators, the users, and policy context are found to contribute to understand the type of use and influence observed in both cases.     

Third‐way neoliberalism and conditional cash transfers: The paradoxes of empowerment,participation and self‐help among poor Uruguayan women

The Latin American literature on Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) welfare programs has typically involved the quantitative evaluation of social and economic impact, with fewer studies addressing the qualitative and gendered impacts of CCTs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in poor squatter settlement communities in Uruguay, this article explores the everyday social realities of poor single mothers who have been disconnected from their kinship networks and must rely on CCT payments for survival. I locate these women's experiences within the third‐way neoliberal discourses of ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’ and ‘self‐help’ espoused by the state, and the various structural conditions, including crime, violence and unequal gender relations, that impact negatively on women's abilities to comply with their social and civic duties. I argue that rather than producing responsible and empowered subjects, Uruguay's recent CCT welfare program has paradoxically limited some women's participation in civic and public life and reproduced their dependent relations with men.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

Towards a new politics of migration?

This paper reconsiders Stephen Castle’s classic paper Why Migration Policies Fail. Beginning with the so-called migration crisis of 2015 it considers the role of numbers is assessing success or failure. It argues that in the UK public debates about immigration changed with European Union (EU) Enlargement in 2004, when the emphasis shifted from concerns about asylum to concerns about EU mobility. Concerns were exacerbated by the government’s failure to meet its promise to reduce net migration. This policy is hampered by the general problem of definition of “migrant” and the gap between statistical measures and popular usage in which “migration” signifies problematic mobility. In fact, concern about migration has become a placeholder for concerns about globalization and democratic accountability. A new politics of migration must make connections between migrants and citizens, but also between migration and other global processes, particularly outsourcing and the exploitation of labour and resources in the global south.     

The loss of biodiversity conservation in EU research programmes: Thematic shifts in biodiversity wording in the environment themes of EU research programmes FP7 and Horizon 2020

Society has been seeking ways to express biodiversity's value to stimulate its protection. Economic valuation of ecosystem services has had limited success to motivate biodiversity protection and reaching the EU 2020 biodiversity strategy targets is in danger of failure. The expression of biodiversity's value in policy documents thus becomes a topic of discussion, because it greatly influences the ways policy makers think about environmental problems. We present an analysis of the word use related to biodiversity conservation versus ecosystem services in the environment themes of the FP7 and Horizon 2020 research work programs of the European Commission in the period of 2007–2014, and the projects accepted under these themes. We conclude first that biodiversity was lost as a topic in the transition from FP7 to Horizon 2020, accompanied by a three-quarters loss of biodiversity topics in the projects accepted under these research work programs. Moreover, the use of ‘ecosystem services’ was 1.5 times higher at the end of that period compared to the beginning in the research work programs, to the detriment of the use of ‘sustainability’ and ‘conservation’ which halved during that same period. In the light of international commitments to biodiversity conservation, the focus toward ecosystem services and away from conservation is of great concern.     

Equivocal locations: being ‘red’ in ‘Red Bologna’

This article addresses a classic ethnographic problem in the study of Italy: how is it that people can subscribe simultaneously to seemingly contradictory ideologies, such as Catholicism and Communism? It does so by describing examples from Italy's ‘showcase city’ of the left, ‘Red Bologna’, in which to be ‘red’ is ubiquitous but each person's ‘red’ is a different thing: being ‘red’ (differently) is the idiom in which real political distinctions are expressed over issues like religion or immigration. In parallel, I discuss the relationship between the ‘field’ as a location and the ‘field’ as a conceptual topic. My account replicates internal ethnographic differences at the analytical level by highlighting the differences between being left‐wing in Bologna and its meaning as a concept in anthropology. Hence the ‘equivocal location’: a field‐site that is productively different, from what an inexperienced ethnographer expected from it, from conceptual discussions in anthropology, and from itself.     

BALANCING LIBERATION AND PROTECTION: A MODERATE APPROACH TO ADOLESCENT HEALTH CARE DECISION‐MAKING

In this paper I examine the debate between ‘protectionists’ and ‘liberationists’ concerning the appropriate role of minors in decision‐making about their health care, focusing particularly on disagreements between the two sides regarding adolescents. Protectionists advocate a more traditional, paternalistic approach in which minors have relatively little input into the healthcare decision‐making process, and decisions are made for them by parents or other adults, guided by a commitment to the patient's best interests. Liberationists, on the other hand, argue in favour of expanded participation by minors in treatment decisions, and decision‐making authority for at least some adolescents. My examination of the debate includes discussion of liberationist shifts that have taken place in the medical community as well as in legal policy and practice, and consideration of recent research on adolescent development. In the final section of the paper, I propose a moderate position that addresses both liberationist and protectionist concerns.     

New EU legislation for risk assessment of GM food: no scientific justification for mandatory animal feeding trials

This commentary focuses on the potential added value of and need for (sub)‐chronic testing of whole genetically modified (GM) foods in rodents to assess their safety. Such routine testing should not be required since, due to apparent weaknesses in the approach, it does not add to current risk assessment of GM foods. Moreover, the demand for routine testing using animals is in conflict with the European Union (EU) Commission's efforts to reduce animal experimentation. Regulating agencies in the EU are invited to respect the sound scientific principles applied to the risk assessment of foods derived from GM plants and not to interfere in the risk assessment by introducing extra requirements based on pseudo‐scientific or political considerations.     

Testing a novel agri‐environment scheme based on the ecology of the target species,Montagu's Harrier Circus pygargus

Farmland birds are in steep decline and agri‐environment schemes (AES) to counteract these biodiversity losses are expensive and inefficient. Here we test a novel AES, ‘Birdfields’, designed using detailed ecological knowledge of the target species, Montagu's Harrier Circus pygargus. Current AES, such as field margins, that aim to improve foraging conditions (i.e. vole densities) for harriers are inefficient, as prey are difficult to capture in tall set‐aside habitat. ‘Birdfields’ combines strips of set‐aside to boost vole numbers and strips of alfalfa, as voles are accessible after alfalfa has been harvested. We found that vole numbers were generally highest in set‐aside. Montagu's Harriers fitted with GPS‐loggers used ‘Birdfields’ intensively after mowing, preferring mown to unmown strips. Thus, prey availability appeared more important than prey abundance. Thus, ‘Birdfields’, as a targeted AES for Montagu's Harriers, is more effective than previous AES due to increased prey accessibility. An additional advantage of ‘Birdfields’ is that it is considerably cheaper, due to the harvest of alfalfa. We advocate that AES should always include monitoring and research activities, aiming at a more adaptive conservation approach.     

DEVELOPMENT OF A ‘BIPOLAR’ R‐INDEX1

A new ‘bipolar’ R‐index analysis was proposed and evaluated. Eighteen judges evaluated red color in eight wine samples by comparing each sample with the control. Judges indicated whether the sample had ‘more’, the 'same’, or ‘less’ red color than the control, and whether they were sure or unsure of their decision. Three computational methods were used to examine the results: the ‘traditional’ R‐index, the ‘bipolar’ R‐index (R_more or R_less) and the ‘weighted‐bipolar’ R‐index. While all three methods provided consistent results, the ‘bipolar’ R‐indices reflected bidirectional differences among the samples thus providing more information. A refinement to the computation (‘weighted‐bipolar’ R‐index) was an approach for eliminating the bias associated with overestimation of the sample size and accordingly changed some of the significance levels. Further research is currently underway to expand the scope and application of this method.     

‘Signs of the times’: confession and the semiotic production of inner truth

How is it that confession – a highly ritualized, dialogically structured speech act – appears to transparently reflect and reveal the inner states of confessants? This article explores this question by closely engaging select post‐Vatican II defences of the Sacrament of Penance, which lay out the requirements of ‘modern’ confession in striking detail. A close reading of these theological texts demonstrates that felicitous confession is the product of three correlated (meta‐)semiotic processes: (1) the figuration of the pentinent memory as a storehouse for sin; (2) the management of ritual time into discrete stages of ‘private’ meaning‐making and ‘public’ pronouncement; and (3) the erasure of the social scenery of the confessional utterance. In concert, these processes render indexical signs as iconic ones and, in so doing, naturalize confession as the cathartic revelation of inner truths, already constituted as such.     

Self‐Euthanasia,the Dutch Experience: In Search for the Meaning of a Good Death or Eu Thanatos

My main purpose in this article is to establish the meaning of a ‘good death’ when death is self‐chosen. I will take as my point of departure the new notion of ‘self‐euthanasia’ and the corresponding practice that has evolved in the Netherlands in recent years. Both physician‐euthanasia and self‐euthanasia refer to an ideal process of a good death, the first being ultimately the physician's responsibility, while the second is definitely the responsibility of the individual choosing to die. However, if we also accept the existence of a fundamental moral difference between ending another person's life and ending your own life, and if we accept this moral difference to be also relevant to the normatively laden good death, then this difference represents a strong reason for preferring self‐euthanasia to physician‐euthanasia.     

The Nation‐State,Public Education,and the Logic of Migration: Chinese Students in Hungary

Public education remains the nation‐state's foremost instrument of forging citizens. But the emergence of ‘international education’, a system explicitly based on the ideology of globality and outside the purview of national curricula, provides a way to circumvent the citizen‐making machine. This article, based on fieldwork among Chinese secondary school students in Hungary, considers the interaction between ‘international education’ and transnational migrants in a nation‐state whose public education, as the state itself, has little interest in the ‘integration’ of non‐natives.     

The Social Life of Rights: ‘Gender Antagonism’, Modernity and Raet in Vanuatu

In the northern Vanuatu town of Luganville a small group of men have responded to social and legal changes engendered by women's rights activists by forming a male support group called ‘Violence Against Men’. Members of this ‘backlash’ movement argue that the insidious promotion of Western‐style ‘women's rights’ is leading to discrimination against men in divorce proceedings, child custody battles, and in domestic violence and rape cases. They directly oppose recent and ongoing legal changes aimed at protecting women from domestic violence, such as Domestic Violence Protection Court Orders, and the repeatedly tabled (but long‐delayed) ‘Family Protection Bill’. Such interventions, they argue, undermine Vanuatu's ‘natural’kastom and Christian patriarchal gender order and, in doing so, pose a serious threat to the socio‐economic productivity of the nation‐state. For other men, however, rather than opposing women's rights activism, such challenges have raised questions about how men might successfully negotiate their identities in ways that are sensitive to contemporary issues of gender equality without undermining existing paradigms. Thus, this paper addresses the value accorded to universalism and relativism in gender activism in Vanuatu, and especially in terms of the linked discourses of kastom, church and modernity. It therefore explores gender relations in terms of the contemporary entanglement of indigenous and exogenous epistemologies, and in doing so argues that the contextual analysis of ‘rights’ should consider the specific historical, political and socio‐cultural circumstances in which they are put to use.