Page 51 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

Seed Regulation in the US

emerged have both shaped regulatory governance as well as challenged the

expectation that the seed sector would self-organize under regulatory pressure.

2.2 Materials and methods

The case study of organic seed regulation in the US is based on interviews with

individuals and organizations deined as ‘stakeholders,’ the review of policy

documentation, and on participant observation at key policy meetings related

to the organic seed regulation over the study period.

2.2.1 Stakeholder identiication

The case material was initiated by a typological analysis of stakeholders and

categorisation by the principal researcher, following analytical procedures

described in Reed et al. (2009) for the main public and private actors in the sector

in 2007, in terms of their stakes, and their interests afected directly and indirectly

by the evolving organic seed regulation. This procedure was informed by the

principal researcher’s long experience of working in the US organic seed sector

and knowledge of the stakeholders. The stakeholder identiication process used

in our research yielded seven stakeholder categories: organic certiiers, small-

scale organic growers, large-scale organic growers, organic food buyers, formal

sector seed companies, non-proit organisations, and policy and legislative

bodies. The preliminary analysis was further reined by sorting each stakeholder

category by their inluence on the organic seed sector (following Jiggins and

Collins, 2003): (1) Primary: those who are directly afected, either positively or

negatively, by organic seed regulations (2) Intermediate: the intermediaries in

the delivery or execution of research, resource lows and activities, (3) Key: those

with the power to inluence or ‘kill’ activity, and their level of inluence (low,

intermediate, high) on the development of the US organic seed regulation.

2.2.2 Stakeholder analysis

Subsequently, semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted to

explore stakeholders’ perceptions of organic seed regulation in light of their

respective roles in the process and of the opportunities or barriers to regulatory

development, as well as to identify the actions they were taking to guide the

course of regulatory development and enforcement. Twenty preliminary semi-

33