In 1999, a truck dumped four tons of genetically modified soybeans on the doorstep of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Operated by Greenpeace UK, the truck carried a banner that read, “Tony, don't swallow Bill's seed.” The action occurred amidst a rising chorus of voices critical of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Ultimately, the public's wholesale rejection of GMOs prompted Britain's major food retailers to remove all GMO products from their shelves and forced the British government to restructure its food safety apparatus completely.

At precisely the same moment the controversy over GMOs erupted in Britain, American scientists were isolating human embryonic stem cells with the capacity to develop into any type of human cell, raising the hope for future therapies to treat diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's. Eager to build up its leadership in the life sciences, the Blair government entrusted the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the agency that regulates assisted reproductive technologies, with the responsibility for oversight of embryonic stem cell research. With little public controversy, the HFEA has approved several research protocols using stem cells. Today, the UK is a global leader in human embryonic stem cell research, attracting top scientists from around the world, including the United States.

What explains these divergent responses to biotechnology in the UK? The puzzle deepens when we consider that in the United States, GMOs have penetrated American markets with little public attention or outcry, but divergent opinions over embryonic stem cells have become a topic of presidential debate; several American states have created their own stem cell research programs in order to circumvent federal restrictions on funding. Nor can one reduce such differences to the facile view that “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” There is great diversity of opinion within Europe itself. In Germany, for example, there has been a vocal debate over the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem cell research, albeit for different reasons than in the United States. Meanwhile, German discussion of GMOs, though far from approving, has been relatively muted.

These are intriguing puzzles for students of comparative politics, and the two books under review here shed considerable light upon them. Sheila Jasanoff's Designs on Nature offers a compelling account of the divergent national experiences with biotechnology in the United States, Britain, and Germany. Jasanoff artfully renders an ethnography of science and democracy in each country, showing how the contested relationship among scientists, the public, and policymakers shaped, and was shaped by, a distinct political culture of science. She calls this political culture a “civic epistemology” that includes ideas about the kinds of knowledge—for example, expert or lay—deemed relevant for assessing scientific uncertainties and novel technologies. In each of the three countries Jasanoff studies, these ideas influenced debates around, and ultimately shaped the development of, biotechnology. In the United States, a technocratic approach to scientific risk assessment subsumed biotechnology under existing product regulations: The products of biotechnology were treated no differently than those produced by conventional means. In Britain, a tradition of empiricism and deference to expertise produced a novel set of rules for biotechnology alone: The distinct process of genetic modification defined the scope of policy action. In Germany, policymakers sensitive to the legacies of Nazi experimentation and prodded by a politically savvy Green Party crafted a state program of biotechnology that enshrined shared values around public deliberation and a respect for human dignity.

Cultural explanations of politics often paint with broad strokes, unable to account for the diversity within national experiences or over time. Jasanoff avoids this pitfall completely. Her book explores how the United States, Britain, and Germany approached issues such as genetically modified foods, assisted reproductive technologies, stem cell research, bioethics, intellectual property, and technology transfer in distinct ways. In doing so, she shows how cultural frames interacted with contingent events and past policies to produce different outcomes, both across and within countries. At the same time, these varied stories about product, process, and program capture a central, almost elemental quality about democratic politics in the three countries.

Gaps will undoubtedly remain in a book so ambitious. Jasanoff does devote a chapter to the role of the European Union, both as a venue for biotechnology policy and as an important influence on the domestic politics of Britain and Germany. However, Designs on Nature is mostly a book about national policy styles. Similarly, global forces do not come into play much either; only brief mention is given to the influence of World Trade Organization rules or the Codex Alimentarius on policies toward GMOs. Moreover, efforts to capture a national policy style toward biotechnology in the United States overlooks the emerging differences among states and the proliferation of individual state programs to circumvent federal bans on funding for embryonic stem cell research. Finally, some political scientists will find aspects of politics strangely absent from Jasanoff's account. Although the conflicts over authoritative knowledge described by the author certainly shape biotechnology policy, so does the push and pull of powerful interests, as well as the rules of the game that structure where authority resides for policy decisions and the resources available to actors who wish to challenge or support them.

Readers looking for answers to these questions will find many of them in the selection of essays edited by Christopher Ansell and David Vogel entitled What's the Beef? The chapters in this volume examine European struggles over food safety including GMOs, hormone-treated beef, the crisis over BSE or mad cow disease, and various food scares ranging from dioxin-laced chicken feed to tainted Coca-Cola. In an introductory chapter, Ansell and Vogel argue that European food safety is much more than a routine struggle over policy. Rather, it is an example of contested governance, “a more pervasive and fundamental form of conflict … [about] who should make decisions and where, how, and on what basis they should be made. Contested governance is associated with a pervasive sense of distrust that challenges the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements” (p. 10). As the various chapters show, food safety crises and concerns precipitated intense struggles within European nations, between European member states and the European Union, and between the EU and its trading partners before the WTO.

Indeed, this book offers wide-ranging insights that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Chapters on the creation of new food safety agencies in France (Borraz, Besançon, and Cleargeu), Britain (Rothstein), Germany (Steiner), and the EU (Buonanno), following the food safety scares of the 1990s, reveal both the opportunities and obstacles to institutional change. Discussion of the cultural dimension of food (van Waarden) and the distinctive policy style of the EU (Skogstad) demonstrate the important role that ideas play in the perception of risk and the approach to regulation. The dynamics of multilevel governance are evident in chapters about civil society mobilization against GMOs (Ansell, Maxwell, and Sicurelli) and the adoption by the European food industry of better safety practices (Bernauer and Caduff). The harmonization of national food safety standards charts the history of struggles to create a single European market (Alemanno) and helps explain why European standards often runs afoul of WTO rules (Young and Holmes).

In sum, What's the Beef? offers a fine-grained, detailed look inside the issue of food safety. At the same time, it reveals a great deal about the struggles over European integration and the multitude of forces pushing and pulling at this “polity under construction” (p. 219). Indeed, What's the Beef? is about much more than food safety, just as Designs on Nature is about much more than biotechnology. Together, both books convincingly show how contemporary issues of governance often entail more than questions of who gets what, when, and how. Increasingly, it seems, policy struggles are also about the process of decision making (technocratic or participatory), the locus of authority (state or market), and the burden of responsibility when things go wrong (government or individual). In revealing the essence of these contemporary struggles, it emerges that we have become more skeptical about scientific authority, even as we become more dependent on technical expertise to assess the risks of modern life.