Beyond Policy Networks: Policy Framing and the Politics of Expertise in the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis

Wilkinson, Katy; Lowe, Philip; Donaldson, Andrew

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9299.2010.01831.x

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Food hazards like salmonella (Smith, 1991), foot and mouth disease (FMD) (Taylor, 2003;Wilkinson et al, 2010) or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) (Dressel, 2002;Hagenhoff, 2003) are regularly accompanied by intense media coverage. In the risk society, media not only serve as an important source of information, they are also a key arena where responsibilities, here with regard to food system governance, are negotiated.…”

Section: Framing Responsibility In the Media: Conceptual Reflectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The BSE Crisis in German Newspapers: Reframing Responsibility

Feindt

Kleinschmit²

2011

Science as Culture

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The 2000/2001 German BSE crisis unfolded as a public drama where awkward crisis management and political attacks on industrial agriculture sparked intense, prolonged media coverage. Mediatisation and politicisation of BSE went hand in hand. In the process, responsibilities for problems and solutions were socially constructed. A high level of press coverage and a policy turnabout (Agrarwende) became mutually reinforcing, according to our analysis of more than 5,000 articles from five national German quality newspapers. Politicians had a prominent standing but did not dominate the BSE discourse; speakers from civil society, the private sector and the media had a relatively good 'standing'. Before the policy change, consumers appeared as the main victims in the media, while afterwards it was agriculture. Throughout the crisis, politicians were mostly blamed as problem causers and to a far lesser degree business and agriculture. Politicians were also overwhelmingly framed as problem solvers, far more than science, agriculture, business and consumers. As the new policy unfolded, more issue frames were articulated, suggesting that the debate shifted from BSE to the general direction of agriculture policy and the distribution of subsidies, but also to the relation between nature and technology and to a lesser degree the relation between food and consumers. Localisation and globalisation of food and international issues played minor roles. In the context of wider research on mass media and public opinion, the case study shows how media coverage tends to politicise food hazards. Food scares offer high news values and attract wide audiences. While industrial agriculture received much blame, major responsibility was attributed to the political system.

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Section: Framing Responsibility In the Media: Conceptual Reflectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The BSE Crisis in German Newspapers: Reframing Responsibility

Feindt

Kleinschmit²

2011

Science as Culture

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“…Wilkinson et al . () argue that policy framing is heavily influenced by existing alliances, networks and normative understandings of social issues, and further argue that ‘once policy is embedded, it can be shored up by specific forms of expertise’ (p. 345). Again, this is not to present a static view of the policy environment.…”

Section: The Uk Civil Servicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar to Wilkinson et al . 's () comments about the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, and the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, the Division had no precedents. There were no previous rural policy units to learn from, no parallel procedures or rules to guide activities.…”

Section: The Case Study: Rural Policy In Northern Irelandmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Using Evidence in Policy: The Importance of Mediating Beliefs and Practices

Shortall

2013

Sociologia Ruralis

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This article argues that to understand the use of evidence in policy, we need to examine how meanings and practices in the civil service shape what is accepted as knowledge, and how differences between the beliefs and values of the academy and the polity can impede the flow and transfer of knowledge. It considers the importance of social context and shared meanings in legitimating knowledge. Who counts as legitimate knowledge providers has expanded and here the role of stakeholder groups and experiential knowledge is of particular interest. How hierarchy, anonymity, and generalist knowledge within the civil service mediate the use of evidence in policy is examined. The difference in values and ideology of the civil service and the academy has implications for how academic research is interpreted and used to formulate policy and for its position in knowledge power struggles. There are particular issues about the social science nature of evidence to inform rural policy being mediated in a government department more used to dealing with natural science knowledge. This article is based on participant observation carried out in a UK Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

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“…Schlesinger and Lau, 2000), the article seeks to present a complementary analytical perspective to the body of work that analyses the recent institutional developments in the realm of food safety from the perspective of enhancing institutional legitimacy (Ansell and Vogel, 2006), in terms of crisis management (Donaldson et al, 2002;Marsden et al, 2009) or in terms of reframing and institutional reflexivity (Wilkingson et al, 2010;Spaargaren et al, forthcoming) in the face of the series of food scares and agricultural mishaps that plagued Europe in the final decades of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the discursive 'reforging' of the food chain metaphor implied a managerial solution to the institutional ambiguity in food risk control that occurred notably in the process of making sense of BSE.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Food Chain Reforged: Novel Food Risk Arrangements and the Metamorphosis of a Metaphor

Loeber

2011

Science as Culture

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In the past decade, an entirely new regulatory framework for food safety control has emerged in Europe. Characteristic of the new institutional arrangements is the 'farm-to-fork' managerial perspective as a basis for risk management. The latter perspective is a genuine institutional innovation, cutting across long-standing borders between the traditionally separate regulatory domains of agriculture and public health. How can we understand the design of this new institutional setting? Answers formulated from a realist perspective that focus on assumed ontologically novel characteristics of 'new' risks fall short of explaining why and how the framework developed in the final decade of the twentieth century. A perspective that builds on the idiom of co-production sheds a light on the co-evolving processes of meaning-making over food risks, in particular regarding BSE, and food risk control. The eventual design can be understood as efforts to gain control of food risks under conditions of institutional ambiguity through a discursive reforging of the food chain metaphor. It was reshaped into a horizontally defined chain which runs from 'farm to fork'. In the resulting framework, food risks can be defined at the level of the production chain in addition to the individual product, which broadens the range of potential strategies for dealing with the newly framed food risks.

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Beyond Policy Networks: Policy Framing and the Politics of Expertise in the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Crisis

Cited by 33 publications

References 25 publications

The BSE Crisis in German Newspapers: Reframing Responsibility

The BSE Crisis in German Newspapers: Reframing Responsibility

Using Evidence in Policy: The Importance of Mediating Beliefs and Practices

The Food Chain Reforged: Novel Food Risk Arrangements and the Metamorphosis of a Metaphor

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