Collaborative Research: Responsible Innovation with Genetically Modified American Chestnut Trees

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This collaborative proposal focuses on the Genetically Modified American Chestnut tree (GMAC). Unlike other emerging biotechnologies, such as gene drives, the GMAC has already been subjected to multiple years of field testing; it is on the verge of entering the regulatory review process for full environmental release. Two research teams will engage with four core stakeholder groups: biotechnologists, indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, and policy makers. The research team at North Carolina State University will engage in interviews and laboratory ethnographies with biotechnologists, and the team will conduct a workshop that will include significant interaction and dialogue among university researchers, non-governmental organizations, and associated scientists in the public and private sectors. It will also conduct a narrative policy framework analysis to reveal the ways in which non-governmental organizations and other political actors use narratives to govern the development and deployment of the GMAC. The stakeholder workshop will lay groundwork for a highly collaborative future effort to engage the public on an emerging technology; it will focus on the ways in which public audiences might be meaningfully engaged to decide if and how the GMAC should be released into shared environments. The research team at the collaborating institution, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry's Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, will conduct linguistic analysis and host a workshop in Haudenosaunee territory to understand the ways in which the GMAC might intersect with the history and sovereignty of indigenous communities. The collaboration will create multiple engagements between university researchers and underrepresented communities often excluded from decision-making processes. Project personnel will produce research reports for stakeholders, presentations for interdisciplinary academic conferences, and at least eight manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Technical Summary By focusing on a common set of themes across four core stakeholder groups, the proposed research aims to advance scholarship on expertise, anticipatory governance, responsible innovation, and environmental justice. Interviews of tree biotechnologists explore the anticipations, which is related to governance in the broadest sense, of innovative technologies and their regulatory environments. The collaboration with the State University of New York researchers will co-produce knowledge addressing a public that is often excluded, to incorporate perceptions of genetically modified trees and provide insight into relationships among responsible innovation, indigenous expertise, and environmental justice. The narrative policy framework analysis promises more nuanced understandings of the activities of non-governmental organizations beyond their positive and negative stances concerning genetically modified organisms. The stakeholder workshop confronts experts with social science research to test how their own perceptions change and to what degree they re-imagine their own roles in engaging with the public about genetically modified trees and other biotechnologies.