Vincent Cardon
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Papers by Vincent Cardon
Avec A. Bernard de Raymond et F. Goulet
Introduction : 1. The use of pesticides is quite general and pervasive in agriculture and has been marked by a constant industrial development since the Second World War (Agrios, 2005). The literature reports very few exceptions - all very recent and circumscribed to small areas - to this global dynamic. Meanwhile, pesticides have been subject to substantial and strengthening regulations, both at the national and international levels, and raised a series of controversies, some of them deeply transforming their status, from miracle compounds to a necessary evil. Some molecules lost their good name to become notorious villains. The DDT ban is emblematic of this inversion.
2. Dichlorodiphényltrichloroéthane, aka DDT, is one of the most famous pesticides of all times. It used to be considered in the 1940s’ as the most efficient solution to eradicate crop parasites and insects responsible for vector-borne diseases. Most countries banned it for agricultural use between the early 1970s’ and mid 1980s’, though. The DDT ban punctuates a long process of industrial and innovation dynamics, environmental struggles, policy and regulatory measures. This case is particularly relevant to analyse discontinuation governance in socio-technical systems. It sheds light on how those system’s trajectories can change by gradually detaching from one or several of their core elements. Such a process involves external pressures and requires industry responses but also elements of political and technical reaction to destabilisation (Geels, 2013; Turnheim and Geels, 2013; Turnheim et al., 2015).
3. Using the DiscGo heuristics, we examine the DDT ban process between the 1940s’ and early 1980s’ to question the perpetual destabilisation-re-stabilisation momentum that shapes the pesticides’ trajectory. A set of empirical questions is central to our investigation: what is the specific temporality of the DDT ban? What made it an issue of governance? What were the effects of the ban on some key characteristics of the pesticides’ trajectory, namely: (i) regulation and (ii) innovation and industry dynamics? More analytically, can we estimate that the DDT ban changed the pesticides’ trajectory? Can discontinuation be interpreted as a regular and normal mode of re-stabilisation of the pesticides’ trajectory? To answer these questions, we propose an international comparative approach based on original empirical evidence on the DDT ban. The DiscGo heuristics draws on the literature on transitions of Socio-technical Regimes (Geels and Schot, 2007) and it assumes that governance of discontinuation is confronted to technical path-dependency, to techno-economic lock-in effects, and more generally to the interests and strategies of incumbents (Stegmaier and Kuhlmann, 2014). Hence, this heuristic leads to explore two related issues. First, how the misalignement of inter-related streams that constitute the trajectory (namely: policy-making stream, the social stream and the socio-economic and technical streams) can open a window where governance of discontinuation is possible. And second, how these conditions and the changes in governance can induce a change in the technological trajectory? In other words, what are the outcomes of the dialectics of de-re-stabilisation?
5. The ban of the DDT in the US is well known and it has been the object of many analyses. Two aspects of the DDT history have then been neglected, though: the endogenous dynamics of an innovation-based industry, and the variations between national regulation policies. Explaining those variations invites us to address carefully the political aspects of discontinuation processes, meaning to avoid the temptation to naturalize the DDT ban process as being governed by scientific evidence and technological progress. It also allows us to keep aware of the importance environmental movements in the US had, in that they shaped a powerful worldwide narrative. But that narrative, stressing the role of environmentalism and more specifically of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring conceals national configurations and national withdrawal processes, which have not been studied so far in other industrialised countries.
6. In this chapter, we first identify discontinuation patterns in three countries, USA, France, and UK (section 1). We then investigate institutional and industrial transnational dynamics to detect convergence between technical, political and socio-cultural streams and their consequences (section 2). Finally, we discuss our key findings in relation to discontinuation analysis and propose leads for further research on governance of discontinuation and on technology detachment processes (section 3).
We build upon an empirical material made of several sources (observation of OCR websites; statistical analysis of OCR websites; qualitative survey based on interviews with professionals in the tourism industry). The communication describes the main specifications of the OCR system. Starting from this general characterization, we observe the special features available on different platforms. These features are related to types of goods consumers try to valuate. We present a typology of OCR valuation devices.