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The Research on Knowledge Systems (RoKS) initiative of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation awarded Dr. Bernadette Resurreccion , GDS Coordinator and Dr. Edsel Sajor , Assistant Prof., UEM Coordinator for their research proposal on "Understanding Policy Processes in Biotechnology and Biosafety Measures in Thailand and China."
RoKS is an exploratory effort launched by IDRC in June 2001. Its objectives are to explore, from a developing-country standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, communicated, and applied to development problems, and to investigate the policy and institutional frameworks that govern this process.
Research Themes Other Grant Awardees
RoKS AIT-CBIK
The chief aim of this research is to study how actors within a policy network have employed certain 'regimes of truth' to frame biotechnology policies and their bio-safety guidelines.
By exploring such processes, we hope to shed light on how certain types of knowledge and knowledge claims on the benefits and risks of biotechnology shape policy-making in industrial shrimp farming in Thailand and cultivating a new genetically modified rice strain in southwest China.
This research will combine an actor-network approach and policy-as-discourse approach in studying policy-making processes. The aggregate unit of analysis will be a policy network that involves studying group of individual actors, their discourses and interactions, as they have been actively involved in framing policy on biotechnology and biosafety guidelines in both countries.
The research in premised on the assumption that actors' behavior in a policy network are dynamically shaped by particular normative frameworks, knowledge, intentionality and stakes. However, these may alter or firm up as they exercise choice, engage in interactive bargaining, negotiations, consensus building, conflicts and debates. In these interactions, some actors are more powerful and deploy multiple resources thereby excluding other voices and other types of knowledge. Gender sensitivity in some bio-safety claims, epistemic privilege of male experts and gender-specific exclusion in public participation.
The study will employ a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study. |
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