Biosocial Security: Social Science Transformations of Biosecurity

Biosecurity, the management of biological threats to humans, animals, and environments, is critical for health, economy, pandemic preparedness, and food security. In agricultural settings, it involves protecting livestock and workers from infectious diseases. The tendency is to take an engineering approach, aiming to minimise system breaches or failures. But this Biosecurity I approach is failing. Infection pressures are growing with climate and other environmental changes. Resulting livestock systems can make animals and landscapes less resilient and expose farms and workers to greater risks. Implementation costs are high, non-compliant farms can be excluded from markets, resulting in rural poverty and increased disease threat. Biosecurity I is ill-fitted to low income and sub-tropical settings and can generate socially unjust and neo-colonial outcomes. Radical new thinking is needed. The alternative is to learn from those who successfully manage biological threats under varying conditions. In this approach, safety involves more than minimising breaches. It requires that many matters or 'goods' are managed effectively. Biosecurity II, biosocial security, is the careful arrangement of people, animals, materials, and markets in ways that make life safe. Lessons need to be learned concerning how this is achieved and how things can be improved. This ground-breaking project reverses the usual top-down flow of biosecurity knowledge. It will work with farmers and policymakers in Bangladesh, South Africa, and the UK to understand how biosecurity works in practice. The project team will generate empirically and conceptually informed social science knowledge on those practices. The field knowledge will be used to exnovate future approaches to biosecurity, exploring alternative institutional and policy practices. Developing innovative methods and theory, the PI-led team will generate a step change in social science approaches to a key twenty-first century issue.