Nissen, SylviaBuelow, Franca2025-01-262025-01-262024-11-202024https://hdl.handle.net/10182/17997‘Engagement’ is increasingly seen as critical to genetic technology governance. It is the most wide-spread principle in gene drive governance documents internationally and is widely included in relevant codes of ethical conduct and risk assessment processes. However, there are clear shortcomings in emerging practices of engagement for genetic technologies. It is therefore important and necessary to foreground critical perspectives on ‘engagement’: that is, to ask questions of whom is engaged and by whom, how and on what terms, and for whom or what those processes serve. This paper unpacks the concept’s normative expectations and empirical conditions in the context of gene drive developments for biological conservation. It demonstrates that despite the rise of rhetoric of engagement for genetic technologies, these efforts strongly lean towards superficial practices that reinforce knowledge hierarchies and existing power dynamics. This work is as part of a five-year interdisciplinary project that looks at gene-drive development in the context of wasp management.Conference Contribution - unpublished