The technocratic fallacy: how many ways to make the same error?

Nearly ten years after the new GMO regulation regime was established, on 2 March 2010 the Commission adopted its very first decision to authorize the cultivation of a new GMO variety throughout the whole Union. Upon its... [ view full abstract ]

Nearly ten years after the new GMO regulation regime was established, on 2 March 2010 the Commission adopted its very first decision to authorize the cultivation of a new GMO variety throughout the whole Union. Upon its announcement, the Commission also promised that it would “quickly” introduce an amendment to the existing regulation to allow to member states to introduce national bans on GMOs that are authorized at European level. The apparent contradiction between these actions does not seem to disturb the Commissioners and as soon as they were adopted – five years later! – they proposed to allow for national bans also on use of authorized GMOs. Yet in view of the Commission, the existing regime of science-based regulation, should remain ‘intact.’ Something must have gone seriously wrong in Berlaymont.
The proposed paper will argue that the problem is one of inappropriately drawn boundaries. The existing regime relies on a rigid distinction between risk assessment and risk management, where the former is the domain of science and the latter of politics. Initially, both were to be conducted on European level exclusively. The introduction of national opt-outs relies on containment of the ‘politics’ on national level, while the exclusive competence of the centralized expert authority with regard to ‘science’ remains intact. I shall argue that this cannot work either and the amended system is bound to run into the same old difficulties. While the Commission justifies the change with the subsidiarity principle, I will show that the centralization of expertise subverts this principle too. After the critical part, I shall demonstrate that the border between politics and expertise is quite porous, so we should not be asking where to allocate each of them while keeping them separate, but how to make the communication between the political and expert authorities more robust.