About the Project

The Project on Global and Comparative Knowledges was established in August 2006 in response to a growing need for critical evaluation and assessment of the knowledge systems supporting decisions of global significance. In the past two decades, a growing array of complex, transnational challenges —- terrorism, nuclear proliferation, infectious diseases, climate change, currency crises, natural disasters, and more —- have dramatically increased the significance of global policy decisions and of the knowledge that underpins those decisions. Recent events, such as failures to anticipate and respond appropriately to market crises in East Asia or the impacts of natural disasters (e.g., the tsunami in South Asia and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans), further heighten awareness of the need to better understand the links between knowledge and decision-making across a range of scales and jurisdictions, as well as the specter of what could happen if knowledge systems fail to adequately prepare policy officials and institutions to address emerging global problems.

Together, these challenges highlight:

• The need for robust, credible knowledge to inform and legitimate global policy choices;

• The deep-seated consequences of policy failures associated with failures of knowledge; and

• Mounting global conflicts over the processes for producing, validating, and using knowledge claims in international politics.

In response, we have established at ASU a major research effort to understand knowledge systems in global governance and to train researchers and practitioners in techniques for critical analysis and enhancement of these systems and their application to global policy decisions. We believe this Project serves several key elements of ASU President Michael Crow's vision for the New American University: global engagement, intellectual fusion, knowledge entrepreneurship, social transformation, and use-inspired research.

While individual scholars at other universities are pursuing related research, no other university is moving forward with a concerted effort in this area. We believe we are positioned not only to establish ASU as the leading center for research on the construction and application of knowledge and expertise in global governance but also to build outward from ASU to establish a global network of scholars and practitioners engaged in relevant work. In addition, we see this project as catalyzing the work of other units at ASU and at other universities to produce new innovations in global knowledge and to applying that knowledge to critical policy decisions.
 
The Project’s principle objectives are four-fold:

• To develop an extensive body of scholarship examining how global knowledge systems function, their use in policy decisionmaking, and potential strategies for enhancing their operation and application to policy problems;

• To create a vibrant community of researchers at ASU and around the globe who have the knowledge and skills necessary to analyze global knowledge systems and their application to global policy problems, to identify and assess needs for new global knowledge systems or for reform of existing ones, and to develop appropriate designs;

• To train future policy specialists who will work in and with global knowledge systems to enhance their effectiveness; and

• To engage scientists and policy officials in efforts to strengthen and improve the production, validation, and use of global knowledge system in international governance, including identifying mechanisms for integrating the roles and inter-relationships of local, national, and global knowledge systems and governance institutions.