In a recent open-access publication, Klara Fischer and colleagues investigate how the narrow focus on citizens as consumers unfolds in research on agricultural biotechnologies and discusses what it means for public engagement in questions about the role of technology in society. Here, Klara explains more about the research.

In research and policy, there is a common view that agricultural biotechnologies can help solve global problems, and that consumer scepticism is a major barrier to greater uptake.

This view, that dominated science and policy during the GMO era, is now being revived as we see new agricultural biotechnologies, such as genome editing with CRISPR, emerge on markets and in the public debate. As a result of the focus on consumer scepticism as a key problem to solve, much effort goes into understanding and changing consumer opinions. But is this effort moving us forward? 

I wanted to write this article because I was frustrated with that so much research on public opinion of GMOs focus only on consumer attitudes to supermarket products. In my mind, people are so much more than just consumers. Also, it was clear to me that scepticism to GMOs often concerns other issues than whether or not an individual consumer is comfortable buying and eating a specific product. The narrow attention to consumers, in my mind, excludes issues that are central for understanding public scepticism.

In fact, long before my colleagues and I wrote our paper on citizens as consumers, I had noted and been frustrated with this tendency of conflating technological development with social progress, and of framing opinions on GMOs only in terms of market behaviour. Initially, it was not the consumer focus that caught my attention but rather a similar tendency in the research on farmer adoption of GMOs.

When I was a PhD student, investigating the role of genetically modified (GM) maize for South African smallholders, I noted that almost all papers on how farmers perceive and use GM crops assumed the technology to be beneficial and focused narrowly on investigating the factors that made it more likely for the farmer to adopt it. There was also an inherent assumption driving much of this research that economic factors such as yield levels are of key importance for adoption. Rarely was there any genuine curiosity about what kinds of agricultural problems that farmers sought solutions for.

As a result, this body of research, which was dominated by economics, often failed to contribute understanding about non-economic issues to why a certain GMO might or might not be seen as beneficial by a particular group of farmers. I find this particularly problematic as it has limited a serious discussion about when GMOs are an appropriate solution and what kinds of GMOs would actually contribute to solving problems that farmers struggle with. I have shown in my research that, by understanding history, culture and context we can get a much more nuanced understanding of if and how GM crops might be of benefit to smallholders.

Power vs perception

As I moved on to study perspectives on sustainability in the food system, I noticed the same general tendency in debates about sustainability as I had seen in the GMO adoption literature, of conflating technology with social progress and of centring economic (rather than social and political) factors in ideas of how to achieve sustainability. I also noted that, both in debates on agricultural sustainability generally, and when discussing new agricultural biotechnologies in particular, consumers frequently were framed as the key power holders in agrarian change. What is it, I wondered, that makes so many policy makers and scientists assume that consumers have such power to change our food system, in a situation where less than a handful of agrochemical companies currently dominate the agricultural input market globally, and where a small number of supermarkets equally exert significant control over what farmers produce. As an example,  in my native Sweden, three food retailers hold 90% of the market executing significant power over both what farmers produce and what consumers purchase.

In our paper, published earlier this year, my colleagues and I attempted to reach a deeper understanding as to why and how this narrow focus on consumers in driving agrarian change has come about. We also wanted to show what kinds of limitations it places around the understanding of public opinion as it applies to both old-style GMOs and newer gene edited organisms – as well on public participation in societal discussions on technology futures.

Economists’ preoccupation with consumers

Our work identifies some key trends in research and policy that since at least the 1950s have contributed to shaping dominant ideas of public opinion about technology. We specifically identify the combined influence of the development of public opinion surveys and the priority given to experts in shaping the role of technology in society, as well as the overarching influence of economics on both survey development and ideas about technology in society.

With the spread of democracy came a need to understand voting behaviour. This was done primarily through surveys. As voting in many ways is an individual activity, questionnaires to individual citizens served this purpose quite well. With the emergence of consumerism, the method of surveying and tweaking opinion entered a new arena – the market. Like voting, choosing what to buy in the supermarket is, in many aspects, an individual activity- so questionnaire surveys came to be quite useful for understanding and influencing consumer behaviour. The success of the survey questionnaire in these fields contributed to its popularity.

As sociology – the academic discipline in which public opinion research initially developed – came to focus more on social groups than individuals, and on political and historical dimensions to opinion formation, it moved towards using other methods than questionnaires. Public opinion surveys, designed to focus on individuals, were taken over, and refined by economists. In this process, ‘public opinion’ remained to be understood as something formed by individuals, and because of economists’ interests in markets, these individuals were commonly framed as consumers.

In parallel with this development, the hierarchical relationship between experts and the general public in the sphere of technology development became more entrenched. The period after the second world war was signified by widespread techno-optimism. Scientists developing new technologies were framed as heroes. Despite the emergence of public consciousness of environmental pollution following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and power plant disasters and pollution scandals in the decades to come (notably the nuclear power plant disasters in Harrisburg and Chernobyl), the hierarchical relationship between scientists and citizens was preserved. The political discourse framed critical citizens as ignorant troublemakers obstructing social progress.

We show in our paper how these trends of surveying public opinions through questionnaires, the prioritisation of (certain) expert views of technology, and the dominance of economic perspectives continue to influence today’s dominant approaches to studying public opinion of agricultural biotechnologies.

Techno-optimism’s blind spot

In our study, we conclude that the popularity of the questionnaire, together with the prioritisation of expert views of technology leave no room for learning about issues that concern citizens but experts either cannot imagine, or have decided are irrelevant. The fixed survey design combined with the lack of interest in questioning the usefulness of the technology also leads to a lack of understanding about how technologies are co-produced by the world in which they exist. This leads to a lack of appreciation of how ecology, society and politics are key to the actual role of technologies.

As a result, issues that many citizens connect with GMOs – for example a highly concentrated agricultural input sector, monocultures, social justice concerns, and environmental uncertainties – are not investigated. This is problematic as, in fact, much of the scepticism to GMOs and newer gene editing technologies concern such issues. In fact, many people have refined understandings of how technologies shape and are shaped by wider societies and ecologies, and are worried about the uncertainties that come with this. Such relevant worries are not acknowledged, or often even disregarded as irrelevant or unnecessarily cautious, in public opinion discourse.

The techno-optimism that infuses the field of economics together with a built-in focus on markets, have led to a focus on how to make consumers more willing to buy new technology products. In addition, as public opinion is seen as something individualised, the field widely fails to capture the role of social factors. One important social factor, for example, is the fact that many people don’t just care about themselves, but also care about what happens to other humans and non-humans.

Citizen engagement in technology deliberation

The dominant, economics-inspired, style of reasoning about public opinion of agricultural biotechnologies is not neutral. It reduces people to consumers focused on buying new products, ignoring broader concerns like environmental degradation, social justice, and citizen roles in shaping technology futures. In doing so, it fails to capture real opinions that people have about new technologies, while at the same time minimising citizens’ role in shaping technology futures.

To break with this dominant style of reasoning and open up technology deliberations to a wider set of concerns we suggest that technology research and policy embrace the following changes:

  • Value perspectives beyond technology and economics, including social and environmental expertise.
  • Embrace a broader set of theories and methods that view people as social and political citizens, not just consumers.
  • Explore the reasons behind public skepticism rather than treating it solely as a problem.
  • Enhance public involvement in biotechnology discussions.

By shifting away from the narrow consumer-focused framing, researchers and policymakers would become better equipped to respond to the public as engaged citizens concerned with justice, sustainability, and governance within accountable democracies.

  • Klara Fischer is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She studies agricultural and environmental policies and technologies and their impacts for farmers and environments. 
  • Illustration courtesy Quist & Quist.