The wide diffusion of ideas and focus of funders around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals released by the UN, suggest that the era of predominance of economic growth as the main driver of welfare is over. The notion that we should first grow and then worry about poverty reduction, education, health, inequality and the environment, is no longer convincing. We now know that these goals should be pursued simultaneously and with attention to the synergies that can be built in doing so. But this is a complex task. To what extent is science adapting to the new challenge?
In Latin America science was, until recently, accused of being driven only by curiosity and being self-serving, with intensifying pressure to respond to societal demand, but with limited resources overall and very little private sector support in particular. Can this now serve demands associated with the multiple development goals?
A number of studies have started to explore how science systems – by which we mean the way in which all stakeholders interact, including governments, researchers and practitioners – are beginning to respond to these shifting demands, as well as to the ways in which they can more rapidly adapt to do so. As we outline in this blog, new ideas about how to transform scientific practices, processes and methods are now starting to emerge.
It is now well recognised that if scientific systems are to help to create more just and equal societies, that respect diversity and promote freedom and autonomy; then processes of new knowledge creation and application have to be more open and participative. Ideas about open science, co-creation and other forms of democratising science seem to be perfect for this job and have started to be supported. Diverse groups of users should be part of processes of knowledge generation, so that their demands are directly addressed, and also used by the system that will be in this way enriched.
At the same time, different forms of knowledge – whether formal or informal – have to be respected and incorporated. Evaluation systems have also to adapt, and value the work done by scientists and practitioners who work with diverse partnerships and transdisciplinary approaches that aim to have a real impact on the life of people and the environment; producing outputs and impacts which are still little recognised in traditional evaluation criteria. But these necessary changes can only happen if funders are willing to radically change their approaches.
In a recent project, funded by the International Development Research Centre, we utilised novel national science system characterisation and participatory foresight approaches based on small-scale areas of innovation, which we termed seeds of change. These examples provided ‘weak signals’ or ‘pockets of the future in the present’ which enabled us to explore how science systems can evolve.
The research showed some clear trends about what should change in science systems, to move to a situation which has greater space for concepts such as justice, freedom, democracy, autonomy, and diversity. The traditional models whereby funders commission scientific research, which is then pushed out to society, or that respond to a limited number of demands, will need to change. Rather, funders will need to find innovative ways to support open and distributed science, and inclusive, democratic and participative processes; and to ensure that these are contextually adapted to multiple geographically and socially diverse realities.
Critically the work also highlighted the need to look beyond adding requirements to already stretched scientific initiatives. Instead, transformation of science systems needs to come through a more ambitious reimagining of how science systems can respond to societal needs, and more critical reflections of the appropriate capabilities, capacities, governance and evaluation frameworks. Our work in multiple contexts in Africa and Latin America (involving stakeholders such as policy makers, researchers, and representatives of the seeds of change) pointed also to a need to focus on critical Tensions in order to underpin change processes.
Each of the proposed changes outlined above involve multiple tensions, which need to be revealed, accepted, understood and addressed if a real and profound transformation is to be pursued.
Tensions between development goals: negotiating allocation of funds within countries
First, development goals cannot be piled up, and new practices just added to the old ones to create more options. Low- and middle-income economies are still struggling to make their systems respond to demands from the private sector, which was considered crucial until very recently to support economic growth. But the links are not working effectively, and economic growth is still very unstable in many countries. The need to respond to an increasing set of goals emerges as an additional challenge. In many cases this introduces serious pressures and tensions to their already fragile systems and decision-making processes. This is where the ideas of collectively focussing on key leverage points and cross-sector alliances which can mobilise the synergistic delivery of multiple development goals is so essential, recognising and engaging with key tensions along the way.
Issues of power and vested interests, and in particular the uneven distribution of risks and benefits from changes in the science system adds additional tension. In many Latin American countries, which are mostly nationally funded, local interest groups exercise pressures to shape the system in directions that favour them, making it difficult to attend to the needs of diverse actors in less powerful positions. In countries which are more dependent on international sources, as some in Africa, the pressure to follow a foreign agenda is felt strongly, potentially limiting appropriate context relevant changes. If these tensions are not understood and addressed by the science system in itself, then whatever change to come will be only too little and too late.
Tensions between stakeholder perspectives: empowering different forms of knowledge
Second, power tensions within projects need also to be considered. Ideas about knowledge sharing do not capture indeed the complex issues involved in the participatory/open work of new knowledge generation and diffusion involving multiple stakeholders, from academia and from outside academia. Often there are hierarchies of knowledges and actors that represent them, when participatory/open processes are implemented, the hierarchies and asymmetries that they involve become very relevant. Without addressing them, projects will stay at the stage of open in the design but not in the results. It is not an issue of who is at the table, but on what terms. Whose knowledge counts, when different forms of knowledge provide different responses to the same problems? These tensions have been identified before, but what our project made clear is that new research needs to be supported to understand more precisely how to handle them. If different forms of knowledge need to be integrated then we need to understand better how to manage the tensions that this integration will bring.
Tensions across scales: learning together about mobilising change
Finally, we identified a number of seeds of change which are delivering in the regions studied. They are experimenting with new forms of participation, opening processes of knowledge, addressing gender and other kinds of imbalances and inequalities, and serious environmental problems. These include: Bioleft.org; rede.infoamazonia.org; kabakoo.africa; mawazoinstitute.org; knowledgepele.com.
When we look at these projects individually their results are excellent. However, they are usually still isolated within national systems which are still mostly oriented to support growth, and with support from international funders which is still small, very competitive, and erratic. Unfortunately, there is a lack of experimentation spaces that favour ongoing collaborative reflexive learning with funding organisations – national and international – about what alliances, processes and forms of support are most effective, and about how short term funded programmes will deliver on more than a sum of their parts in mobilising transformative potential in science systems at various scales. Key decisions about funding are still very concentrated within countries and between countries.
If we are serious about the transformations and their urgency, we have reached the point when funding decision processes, and not only funding mechanisms and instruments need to change. These processes need to be democratised so that not only are less powerful actors empowered within research projects and programmes, but also that their views and interests are represented in discussions about changes in the systems and about funding programmes.
In other words, we should move from democratising knowledge generation processes, or research projects (through open science) to democratising funding decisions, funding processes, between countries and within countries. From open science to open funding.
Up to now, attempts to democratise science have tended to put the burden directly onto researchers and their delivery partners, who now face pressures to open up processes, and demonstrate new, extended and deeper impacts. But if democratisation reaches all the areas of the system, including funding decisions, the results might be substantially improved.
