The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and Shifts in the Discourse of Precaution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precautionary principle is increasingly recognized as an important tool in multilateral environmental policy making, even as its practical implications remain the subject of intense debate. Drawing on Foucault's reading of discursive politics, this paper traces the emergence and effects of a specific framing of a precautionary response to new technologies found in the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity. This international treaty enables states to restrict imports of specific classes of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), even if the extent of the harm they may cause remains uncertain. This particular framing of precaution in an environmental treaty is novel for its application to technologies yet to be demonstrated as harmful, and can only be understood in the context of the contentiousness of controversies over GMOs, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and hormone-injected beef in the 1990s. At the same time, what might be termed the “Cartagena discourse of precaution” has already had productive effects on a variety of other policy fields including the regulation of persistent organic pollutants and pesticides.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".