The Framing of EU Biotechnology

Abstract

Over roughly two decades EU biotechnology policy turned from a regulatory nether land into one of the most volatile and bitterly contested policy conflicts in the European Union. How did this happen? Looking at the architecture of the policy conflict and the way in which the framing and reframing of the issues reconfigured the interests at stake sheds new light on the policy dynamics at play in the EU. Yet the analysis also raises some new questions. If policy framing was driving the developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s and allowed the Commission to outmanoeuvre political opposition, why did the reframing of biotechnology policy fail when the Commission tried to make the issues a part of its new economic policy agenda? How did policy initiatives that conformed to the original interests of member state governments and the biotechnology industries turn into almost the complete opposite of what the Commission set out to do? In addressing these questions, the analysis will focus on how the flow of the issues changed the structure of the conflict and affected policy dynamics that proved increasingly difficult to consolidate. After years of framing and counter-framing, the biotechnology conflict space was politically charged beyond the level of what the EU policy making system was designed to contain. In the end, the framing of the issues was transformed yet again and expanded the policy conflict to support a vast new alliance of interests.