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Paper short abstract

We propose “societal guardrails” for plant synthetic genomics based on public focus groups. While research frames resilience at the level of plants, publics emphasise societal resilience and question agri-food systems and narrow plant-centred solutions.

Paper long abstract

New interest in developing ‘synthetic plants’ by the public UK funder ARIA is justified by narratives of growing uncertainty regarding food security and crop resilience in the wake of climate change. Research focuses on enabling plants to respond through traits such as drought resistance.

Through focus groups with UK publics, we develop a framework of societal guardrails for synthetic plants. Guardrails is a concept in AI development that provides rules to keep AI ‘safe’ and ‘on track’. First, we borrow this concept to explore how publics might keep synthetic plants ‘on track’ for society. Societal guardrails may help leverage technological benefits while mitigating potential harms, by shaping the key decisions that determine particular technology trajectories upstream in the development process. Second, we examine what requires resilience. While ARIA focuses on plant resilience as a response to climate change, focus group participants focus on societal resilience, critically questioning global agri-food systems and the sole focus on plants without consideration of broader ecology.

Societal guardrails may help guard societal needs while not expecting continued publics’ resilience in the wake of damaging and unjust global agriculture. We explore the possibility of “bouncing forward” (Manyena et al., 2011) with plant synthetic genomics to challenge hegemonic ideas of resilience. We argue for the need to keep synthetic plants research to be guided by societal knowledge, values, and interest, demanding resilience from science and the agricultural economy, instead of stabilising harmful agricultural systems by focusing solely on the deficiency of plants.