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Abstract :
[en] Increasingly, science and technology (S&T) are used as key strategic resources to address the social and economic challenges of our time (Tyfield 2012). This paper is part of my broader research program, which takes S&T as sites of struggle, where (geo)political and socio-economic issues interact, and studies them in three new political economies: bioeconomy, new manufacturing economy and smart security economy. It identifies two global dynamics that are at stake in the strategic construction and use of S&T: (1) proliferating varieties of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005, Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) and (2) shifting asymmetric dependency relations (Vernengo 2006, Metcalfe and Ramlogan 2008). My main goal is to analyze and understand developments in S&T domains as co-evolving with these two key global dynamics. For this paper, I will focus on one S&T site of struggles, biotechnologies/bioeconomy in Argentina, which will allow me to look at the reconfiguring of center-periphery relations and neoliberal enactments. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted with actors from public, private and associative sectors, I explore the expansion of genetically modified soy in Argentina and I aim to figure out how the neoliberal “globalized privatization regime” (Mirowski and Sent 2008) unfolded in a peripheral location. My case points at two inherent contradictions with such a regime’s main tenets, namely that it needs a weak antitrust policy and a hyper-restrictive system of intellectual property. I conclude that it is not enough to postulate that the neoliberal globalized privatization regime will just expand to the South as it did in Northern countries. Rather, combined with the commercialization of science, peripherality creates protest, activism and local regulation. Lastly, further implications for the theorization and circulation of bioeconomy (Birch and Tyfield 2013) beyond the “charmed circle” of OECD countries (Delvenne and Thoreau 2012) will be drawn.
