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Publicado en Review of International Organization, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2007. Diciembre 2006. ; Whilst there is an ever-growing literature on the economic and political aspects of "globalization", at present there are few studies analyzing how intergovernmental organizataions have reacted to this phenomenon. This article aims to fill this gap by analizing the response to globalization of UNESCO, one of the least studied organization of the UN constellation. ; Peer reviewed

Published in: Revista administración y ciudadanía, vol 2, número 1, 2007. Abril 2007 ; In 2003, Adele Clarke argued that the Western world was facing an increasingly pervasive social, cultural and political phenomenon named biomedicalisation, which was transforming the concept of 'health' into an individual responsibility to be fulfilled through improved access to knowledge, self surveillance and the consumption of self help biomedical goods and services. More recently, Petersen has detected a parallel genetisation of health, reproduction and identity, which is allegedly encouraging the diffusion of genetic reductionism. The combined interaction of biomedicalisation and genetisation is promoting the emergence of new health care policies based on the idea of individual free choice and anchored to a controversial 'right to be free from diseases'. In fact, the interactions of these factors may give rise to new forms of genetic discrimination, whose ultimate risk is the endorsement of so called 'weak eugenics' selection processes. In spite of the clear social and political dimensions, the present approaches to the regulation of medical biotechnologies are generally based either on bioethical considerations, usually confined to normative issues and individual rights discourse, or on technical discussions, usually focused on the delivery of professional guidelines to secure international high quality standards of the biomedical products. This article, in contrast, suggests that it is urgent and necessary to broaden the normative approach of the bioethical committees so as to include new insights from empirical studies on the social and political impact of a large-scale implementation of the new biomedical technologies. ; Peer reviewed

When we come across the word 'eugenics' it is impossible to avoid thinking of Hitler's eugenics and racial project. The latter, however, is hardly representative of eugenics. According to the definition provided by the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eugenics is 'a scientific attempt to improve the human gene pool', which includes not only genetic engineering technologies but also the practice of husbandry, which some scientific utopias proposed to extend to human reproduction already in the seventeenth century. This is the historical background inspiring the most important theories of eugenics of the twentieth century. In the paper, I will first outline and compare Huxley's centrally planned eugenics to the liberal type of eugenics recently proposed by Nicholas Agar. In Huxley's view, eugenics was a social science with a genetic background, which required both public coordination of genetic enhancement and social planning. In contrast, Agar argues that, as long as it is entirely left to market regulation, not only eugenics is compatible with the liberal ideology but it actually constitutes the ultimate fulfilment of liberal society. In spite of remarkable differences, Huxley's and Agar's eugenics share the same utopian dream of physical and social perfection, which arguably finds its origins in the philosophical shift that led Puritan medicine to switch from treating human diseases but to improving the performances of the human body. This conception later found different expressions, depending on the dominant political ideology of the time. As a result, Huxley proposed eugenics in a context of social planning and collective internationalism whilst Agar has recently reformulated eugenics in a context of liberalism, individualism and market economy. Yet, whether through social planning or radical liberalisation, eugenics keeps being a crucial issue in the contemporary political agenda, never ceasing to be an inspiring dream as well as a tragic nightmare.

Aceptado como ponencia a la conferencia del ECPR en Helsinki (7-12 mayo 2007). Abril 2007. ; Focusing on the issue of genetic diagnostic testing and drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with genetists, epidemiologists and clinicians in Spain, this paper highlights the limits of an individualistic approach to biomedicine, embedded in a larger process of biomedicalization of the health care system and geneticization of the medical research. In contrast to the current approaches on biomedical regulation, generally based either on bioethical considerations or on technical expertise, the present work suggests the necessity of integrating the decision making process with new approaches studying the social and political consequences of the massive implementation of biomedical technologies. Through the restoration of the centrality of the political discourse, new and effective systems of governance may allow the fertile participation of all the actors involved in the production, promotion, regulation and consumption of the new biotechnological treatments whilst, at the same time, reconcile high participation with decisional efficacy.

Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Editors and Contributors -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- The Bioeconomy as a Biotechnological-Innovation Economy -- The Bioeconomy as a Biomass Economy -- The Bioeconomy as a Novel Form of Capitalism -- Value in the Bioeconomy -- Life Itself -- Labor -- Speculation -- Enclosure and Assets -- Subjectivities and the Bioeconomy -- References -- Part I Promissory and Performative: Remaking Institutions for the Bioeconomy -- Chapter 2 The "Entrepreneurial State" and the Leveraging of Life in the Field of Regenerative Medicine -- Introduction: The Entrepreneurial State and Translational Medicine -- Methods -- Regenerative Medicine and the Leveraging of Life -- The Commercialisation Imperative: The Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult -- The Promotion of Interdisciplinarity -- Reconfiguring Governance Mechanisms: Accelerating Access to Regenerative Medicines -- Reframing the Healthcare System as an Innovation Asset -- Discussion and Conclusions -- References -- Chapter 3 Technologies of Governance: Science, State and Citizen in Visions of the Bioeconomy -- Introduction -- Theorizing the Bioeconomy -- Potential and Urgency -- Building a Better Fish -- Ordering Institutions -- Failing the Future -- Spawning the Bioeconomy -- Governing Future Consumers -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4 "Having a Structuring Effect on Europe": The Innovative Medicines Initiative and the Construction of the European Health Bioeconomy -- Introduction -- Analytic Perspective and Methodology -- Discursive Genealogies of European Construction -- From the Lisbon Agenda to the Health Bioeconomy -- The Origins of IMI in the European Technology Platforms (ETPs) and Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs) -- The "Strategic Research Agenda" and the Translational Goals of IMI

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiative, The Bioeconomy to 2030. We argue that this initiative is a response to some of the most acute challenges facing the current neoliberal-capitalist accumulation regime, which seeks to protect and extend that regime, through both what it occludes and what it promotes. Rather than taking the bioeconomy as a description of some subset of economic activity, we regard it as a promissory construct that is meant to induce and facilitate some actions while deterring others; most explicitly, it is meant to bring about a particular set of political–institutional changes that will shape the parameters of possible future action. The bioeconomy concept highlights the potential dangers of failing to situate ethnographic examinations of horizontal micro-relations within a political–economic macro-context that enables and constrains. Scholarly work in science and technology studies and elsewhere that does not recognize the wider politics of the bioeconomy risks unintentionally contributing to the legitimation of this political project.

In the last decade, preimplantation genetic testing (preimplantation genetic diagnosis [PGD] and preimplantation genetic screening [PGS]) have become widely used and in 2005 constituted 5 percent of all in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles performed in Europe. Their diffusion, however, is not homogenous; while in some countries they are prohibited and in others hardly implemented, Spain performs 33 percent of all the PGD/PGS. While policy guidelines and mainstream bioethics address PGD from a patient choice perspective, disability studies insist on PGD's potentiality for discrimination. Alternatively, other authors have explored PGD/PGS from the perspective of geneticization but little work has been done on how PGD/PGS are framed by the members of national regulatory bodies. Combining the analysis of juridical documents with semistructured interviews with members of the Spanish National Assisted Reproduction Committee (CNRHA), this study suggests that the remarkable diffusion of PGD/PGS in Spain may be largely due to the interaction between the growing momentum enjoyed by embryonic stem cell research and a vibrant expansion of IVF business along the Mediterranean coast. In this process, genetic issues per se seem to play a minor role, although the prevention of genetic diseases now constitutes the master narrative underpinning the extension of PGD from monogenic, early onset, diseases to polygenic, late-onset, ones.

The ability of metrics to represent complex information about research in an accessible format has previously been overlooked in preference to debate about their shortcomings as research evaluation tools. Here, we argue that bibliometrics have the potential to widen scientific participation by allowing non-academic stakeholders to access scientific decision making, thereby increasing the democratisation of science. Government policies from 3 countries (UK, Australia and Spain) are reviewed. Each country outlines a commitment to the democratisation of science for one set of policies whilst ignoring this commitment when developing parallel research evaluation policies. We propose a change in dialogue from whether bibliometrics should be used to how they should be used in future evaluations. Future research policies should take advantage of bibliometrics to foster greater democratisation of research to create more socially-reflexive evaluation systems. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. ; Peer Reviewed

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of "global fertility chains." The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women's waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain. ; The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: For Sigrid Vertommen, this work was supported by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research: (FWO, grant no. 1207320N) at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (grant no. 704261) at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London; Wellcome Trust (grant no. 100606) at the Department of Sociology in Cambridge University. For Vincenzo Pavone, this work has been supported by the National Research Project: Bioarreme (2011-2015), grant no. CSO2011-26019, financed by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. For Michal Nahman, this work was supported by the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol. ; Peer reviewed

This article explores the merits of foregrounding the dichotomy of politicization vs de-politicization for our understanding of bio-objects in order to study their production,circulation, and governance in European societies.By asking how bio-objects are configured in science, policy, public,and media discourses and practices,we focus on the role ofsocio-technical configurations in generating political relations. The bio-object thereby serves as an entry point to approach and conceptualize>the political>in an innovative way.Drawing from our previous work, which uses the concepts of de-politicization and (re-)politicization, this paper puts forward a research agenda for studying the political relations generated by specific socio-technical configurations of bio-objects. ; Peer Reviewed