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policy has moved towards less-intensive production and is
more cautious of biotechnology. The United States, on the
other hand, has seen a drive by companies to expand highproductivity
agriculture.
In the BSE case, UK consumers could choose whether
to purchase British beef based on the information available
to them. However, trust in scientific and government
institutions was severely impacted by the failure to inform
people of the risks at an early stage. In the case of GM
crops, confidence in the scientific understanding of the risks
and distrust in the profit motives of the seed companies at
the expense of the environment has similarly had a strong
impact on acceptance. The similarities of public response
to BSE and GM emphasize the need to understand linkages
between responses to unrelated risks — indeed, responses
can be predicted between risks.
There has long been awareness and concern about the
different cultural definitions of ‘hazard’ and ‘risk’ that playout
through regulatory regimes. This is particularly evident
across European member states, and it also varies between
sectors such as pharmaceuticals and food (where risk
assessment is the dominant approach) and environmental
regulation (where hazard identification and assessment is
prioritized) 23 . The GM case study in Chapter 11 highlights
how the European Union’s regulatory approval process for
the commercial release of a GM trait — which is based
on the presumption of hazard — is prohibitively expensive
compared with the United States.
Political and regulatory differences in focus between
hazard and risk have been attributed to strategic gameplaying
by stakeholders who are well-aware of the semantic
difference between the terms. So, it is argued, risk responses
have as much, if not more, to do with political interests and
strategic positioning as the objective assessment of the risk,
with all of its uncertainties 24 . Such institutional variability
is one important factor influencing public mistrust in
management and control regimes.
Context and Responsibility
Personal agency and institutional trust are deeply rooted
and connected factors that determine how people respond
to risk 25 . Trust and agency interact at different spatial and
temporal scales, and we often see the most powerful
responses at the local level.
Studies of the responses to natural hazards (flooding, sea
level rise and radon) in different locations in the United
Kingdom 26 , on air quality 27 , and on thresholds of response
to climate change 28 , have determined that even when
people appear to understand the hazards and the risks to
themselves and have the personal resources and capacity
to respond, they may choose not to if they consider that
the responsibility to reduce the risk lies elsewhere. The
same has been evident in responses to flood risk in other
countries. In high-risk areas where people take responsibility
and acquire clean-up experience, risk awareness tends to
remain high compared to those who have chosen to deny
their vulnerability and responsibility 29 . Active investment
of personal resources, even if no more than time, tends to
Choice and responsibility
are sources of stress for
people when information
about risks appears
confused and conflicted.
support ongoing responsibility.
Choice and responsibility are sources of stress for
people when information about risks appears confused
and conflicted. The initial response to the MMR (measles,
mumps and rubella) vaccination in Britain in the late 1990s
provides one example of this. A preliminary study of a
small group of children — which could prove no causal link
between the vaccination and autism, but which left open the
possibility — generated media coverage that sparked a huge
controversy. The immediate response focused on, indeed
proactively played upon, the parental fear of autism; this led
to a dramatic drop in the uptake of MMR, with some areas
of the country falling below the health protection target
(see case study for details). As communications from the
government’s Department of Health did not specifically
negate the relevance of the study, the wide-scale response
— which was fed through parental networks — was able to
have damaging impact.
Socio-economic differences were strongly evident in the
responses. Higher socio-economic groups that were better
able to access a wider range of information sources, or
could choose to pay for the alternative single vaccinations,
were more likely to avoid MMR. It became evident that
embedded social responsibility — through a long process
of normalization of childhood vaccination — was very
much secondary to individual maternal responsibility in
relation to a child’s health, when mothers in particular were
faced with uncertainty and disruption to acquired trust in
immunization 30 .
Responsible Innovation, Context and Engagement
The notion of responsibility in innovation has grown in
importance over the past decade and notably in European
policy circles. The possibilities and opportunities of emerging
technologies are of course accompanied by uncertainty and
indeed sheer ignorance. These uncertainties are not purely
around the possible harms, but also in the kind of futures
societies wish for. Innovation takes place over multiple scales
(increasingly global) and the range of actors (from individuals
to corporations to states) are often acting in different
cultural and economic contexts, which impact directly on
notions of what is the ‘right’ and ‘responsible’ thing to do.
Governance of responsible innovation is being discussed
in terms of a new adaptive framework, implying a move away
from top-down, risk-based regulation to a system in which
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