Regulatory Science: A Divergent Form of Internationalization?: The Evaluation of Biotechnology in the United States and Europe

This article seeks to highlight lasting differences in regulatory science on an international scale. Scientific knowledge is considered to be universal, and thanks to international trade liberalization, considerable efforts are devoted to the harmonization of technical rules, so why do such differences still persist? Drawing on a comparative and cross-national case study on the assessment of the risks associated with animal cloning for food the author examines coproduction of the context of regulatory science, and its substantive content. Two different ways of producing regulatory science are identified, each of which combines different ways of knowing (ways of reasoning, cognitive schemes, categories and concepts) and different ways of regulating (institutional architectures, regulatory resources, sources of authority). The analysis shows that the performance of regulatory science is strongly embedded in institutions which bear the hallmark of their national histories. This is a source of persistent divergence in the assessment of biotechnology.