Should Gene Editing Be Used to Develop Crops for Continuous-Living-Cover Agriculture? A Multi-Sector Stakeholder Assessment Using a Cooperative Governance Approach.

Continuous-living-cover (CLC) agriculture integrates multiple crops to create diversified agroecosystems in which soils are covered by living plants across time and space continuously. CLC agriculture can greatly improve production of many different ecosystem services from agroecosystems, including climate adaptation and mitigation. To go to scale, CLC agriculture requires crops that not only provide continuous living cover but are viable in economic and social terms. At present, lack of such viable crops is strongly limiting the scaling of CLC agriculture. Gene editing (GE) might provide a powerful tool for developing the crops needed to expand CLC agriculture to scale. To assess this possibility, a broad multi-sector deliberative group considered the merits of GE-relative to alternative plant-breeding methods-as means for improving crops for CLC agriculture. The group included many of the sectors whose support is necessary to scaling agricultural innovations, including actors involved in markets, finance, policy, and R&D. In this article, we report findings from interviews and deliberative workshops. Many in the group were enthusiastic about prospects for applications of GE to develop crops for CLC agriculture, relative to alternative plant-breeding options. However, the group noted many issues, risks, and contingencies, all of which are likely to require responsive and adaptive management. Conversely, if these issues, risks, and contingencies cannot be managed, it appears unlikely that a strong multi-sector base of support can be sustained for such applications, limiting their scaling. Emerging methods for responsible innovation and scaling have potential to manage these issues, risks, and contingencies; we propose that outcomes from GE crops for CLC agriculture are likely to be much improved if these emerging methods are used to govern such projects. However, both GE of CLC crops and responsible innovation and scaling are unrefined innovations. Therefore, we suggest that the best pathway for exploring GE of CLC crops is to intentionally couple implementation and refinement of both kinds of innovations. More broadly, we argue that such pilot projects are urgently needed to navigate intensifying grand challenges around food and agriculture, which are likely to create intense pressures to develop genetically-engineered agricultural products and equally intense social conflict.

Using cultural-historical activity theory to analyze social service practices evolving from the Norwegian HUSK projects.

The HUSK projects catalyzed innovation in the practices of providing social services that could yield useful insights both within and outside of Norway if analyzed in these two ways: (a) retrospective analysis of the development of individual HUSK projects in light of their cultural-historical contexts, and (b) comparative analysis of the efforts to advance multi-sector collaboration in some of the HUSK projects. Such analyses require a practice-based research approach that takes into account culture and history. In this article the author explains how cultural-historical activity theory provides such an approach, illustrated via several HUSK cases. The author suggests five questions for future analyses of the HUSK projects and argues that insights gleaned from such analyses could contribute significantly to research on-and the provision of-social services.