Perspectives

Discussion on the Project on Global and Comparative Knowledges

By Daniel Barben

In this brief, Barben suggest that sustainability, globalization and democracy might be useful cornerstones of an analytical framework for the GCK Project. This framework will, in effect, link problem- and outcome-oriented thinking with fundamental  social science research questions relating to a number of issues salient both at present and in the future.

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Global Science and Global Governance: The Making of "Global"   Research Policy

 By Clark A. Miller

The United States should be investing efforts and funds to strengthen the health structures in countries around the world. If we were to help train experts in epidemiology and surveillance, strengthen laboratories in key regions and link them to the best labs in this country and around the world, and support WHO, we would help to create a true global health network. This investment would protect our country and every other against global epidemics, save millions of lives, and change the U.S. image from one of self-interest to one of human interest.(1)

 – Barry Bloom, Dean, Harvard School of Public Health

Bloom’s response to the SARS epidemic is illustrative of a growing demand for global scientific collaborations that can help address a new class of policy problems framed explicitly in planetary terms (see, e.g., Haas, 1990, 1992; Zehr, 1994; Litfin, 1995; Takacs, 1996; Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998; Miller and Edwards, 2001a, Long Martello 2001). Over the past two decades, scientists, regulatory officials, and citizens alike have increasingly come to see and attach importance to interconnections that tie together large parts of the globe (see, e.g., Jasanoff, 2001; Miller, forthcoming, b). In turn, significant resources have been put into efforts to develop new international expert collaborations, committees, institutions, and networks that can build scientific knowledge of global phenomena and link that science to the formulation and implementation of global policies to protect public health, the environment, financial stability, investor returns, and other perceived public goods (see, e.g., Miller, forthcoming, a). These efforts build on and significantly expand two previous generations of international scientific collaborations, during the boom of international intellectual exchange between 1871 and the 1920s (Iriye, 1997), during which many of the international scientific unions were formed, and in the period immediately following World War II, when nations created the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations (Burley, 1993; Miller, 2001a). Both historical and contemporary experience indicates, however, that constructing these new social arrangements among scientists and between scientists, diplomats, and publics is neither as simple nor as straightforward as Bloom suggests.

In this brief essay, I want to suggest that these trends have important consequences for the study of “reseach policy as an agent of change.” Emerging global scientific collaborations form an increasingly important and potentially powerful element of emerging constitutional frameworks for global governance (Reardon, 2001; Miller and Edwards, 2001b; Jasanoff, forthcoming; c.f. Winner, 1986; Latour, 1993 for discussions of the technical and technological constitution of modern society). Consequently, there is a need for:

• New analytic research on global science and research policy: It is important that scholars in STS, science policy, and related disciplines develop a much better understanding of how global scientific collaboration is happening, what form it is taking, who is involved (and who not), as well as what its implications are for policy and governance outcomes.

• New normative research on global science and research policy: Research in this area has important normative potential for informing the process of creating global scientific arrangements, both in terms of evaluating current programs and offering generalized, critical reflection on how future arrangements might improve upon current efforts (including asking such questions as what does improvement mean, to whom, according to what criteria, to what end, and so forth).

• New infrastructural support from NSF for global research: More pragmatically, in order to do justice to research on global-scale social and institutional processes, there is a need for researchers in this area to have access to a higher level and new modes of financial and infrastructural support for their work.

Background: In the late 19^th century, scientific characterizations of human psychology, behavior, cognitive capacity, organization, and social practices were codified and became closely tied to the growth and institutionalization of state power.  Those sciences profoundly influenced modern understandings of what it means to be human, and how social problems should be defined (Foucault, 1971, 1973, 1978, 1979).  Concurrently, they laid the basis for programs through which nation-states could ameliorate social problems and publicly justify their effectiveness and legitimacy (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1996; Porter, 1995; Wagner et al., 1991; Nowotny, 1990; Ezrahi, 1990; Hacking, 1990).  Terms like poverty, unemployment, criminality, violence, mental illness, gross national product, and welfare came into being, backed by new techniques of measuring and classifying groups, their status, and their behaviors in relation to these concepts—as well as new programs for collecting statistical data on social demographics, economic welfare, crime rates, and labor statistics, often managed by new government agencies. As these conceptual systems and practices evolved, so too did the indicators for characterizing the state’s performance in managing these novel social phenomena.(2).

Today, scientific characterizations in what might be termed “global sciences” are playing a comparable role with respect to the emergence and consolidation of new forms of global governance. One of the starkest examples is global change research. Since the 1940s, a steady stream of national and international scientific research programs have explored the dynamics of environmental systems and process—the atmosphere, the climate system, the ozone layer, biodiversity—as natural objects that could be understood, investigated, and managed on scales no smaller than the planet in its entirety (Miller and Edwards, 2001a). In the 1980s and 1990s, this research became the basis on which elaborate new international legal and institutional frameworks were constructed, that in turn promulgated global policies that promoted new areas of scientific research, established standards for scientific research protocols, and fostered new global observing networks.

Much as poverty and unemployment became classification systems for measuring social welfare and redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor in the policies of the welfare state, today, the sciences of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental vulnerability, and sustainability are becoming the systems for classifying humanity on a global basis and redistributing resources. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, assigns responsibility for actions to mitigate climate change on the basis of a scientific calculation of each country’s greenhouse gas emissions. It likewise allocates proceeds from its Clean Development Fund to those populations around the world that are deemed “most vulnerable” to climate change. The Protocol’s Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice is currently developing standard methods for assessing vulnerability as a basis for allocating disbursements from the fund. More generally, World Bank data indicate that unrestricted government-to-government aid is increasingly being replaced by environmental aid, as richer countries insist that their poorer counterparts adopt more sustainable policies in exchange for resource transfers. Here, too, policymakers at agencies like the Global Environment Fund rely on science to legitimate particular claims to sustainability. The Global Environment Facility, for example, is considering requiring countries to carry out a standardized, scientific assessment of ecosystem goods and services before disbursing funds for ecological protection.

One important result from preliminary studies focusing on the development of global scientific collaborations, networks, and institutions is the problematic character of their formation and operation. Studies adopting a co-productionist idiom (see Jasanoff, forthcoming) have shown that such collaborations must attend to and ultimately achieve stable scientific and political arrangements to succeed. Where they have, as in the UN Specialized Agencies or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists have become essential elements of broader socio-political orders (Takacs, 1996; Miller, 2001a, forthcoming, a, b). Where they haven’t, scientific projects have foundered, as in the case of the Human Genome Diversity Project (Reardon 2001). Another important aspect of international scientific advisory organizations are the diverse political cultures and traditions that such arrangements bring into dialogue. Comparative studies have long demonstrated the very different institutional arrangements, evidentiary standards, policy framings, notions of expertise, and so forth, found even across the advanced industrial democracies, all of which have important consequences for the credibility and legitimacy of science advice. To operate in global policy forums, international scientific advisory processes must find ways to overcome these differences in norms, rules, and practices else they risk being seen as biased or illegitimate (Jasanoff 1998; Miller 2001b, 2000). A third example, capacity building, inevitably raises the question: capacity building for what purpose? Should capacity building focus on strengthening local knowledge and expertise, building “international”-caliber research programs, creating new science-policy linkages, training government bureaucrats to follow the requirements of international law, or simply exposing local officials and scientists to the findings of global science institutions (Miller 1998)?

New Areas of Research: Drawing on this background, one can suggest a number of important questions about “research policy as an agent of change”. Some of the most critical include:

• Who are the agents of “global” research policy, how do they interact with one another to shape research policy, and to what effect? Even in “global” fields, most research remains funded by national governments (through, e.g., the US Global Change Research Program or the Centers for Disease Control), but scientific communities have enormous influence of the course of such research, and international agencies are often involved in planning and coordination. Some international agencies, like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, fund and operate their own research organizations, whose results play key roles in their decisionmaking activities. Still others, like the World Meteorological Organization and World Health Organization, coordinate data collection and transmission around the world, including sending special research teams to countries on occasion, and then collate and retransmit data to consumers around the world. Still others, like the International Accounting Standards Board and the Kyoto Protocol, set standards for the conduct of knowledge-production systems. Still others, such as the International Scientific Unions, operate on behalf of the professions, as transnational communities, including pressuring governments to provide visas and allow non-local scientists to collect and export specimens. Within these varied organizations, how is research policy made? Who participates and whose voices matter? With what implications?

• What are the instruments and mechanisms of “global” research policy? The list of such mechanisms listed in the proposal (legislation, industrial policy, tax credits, etc.) need to be supplemented in international settings with standards, international treaties, formal rulings and decisions of international institutions, informal coordination, etc. For many global change scientists, one of the most important outcomes of the periodic assessments conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the identification of major gaps in existing knowledge that can guide future research programs.

• What are the implications of research policy for the content and organization of global decisionmaking? Put simply, the creation of knowledge about the functioning of planetary-scale natural and human systems is an essential element in the changing constitutional infrastructure of global society. As in domestic societies, choices about what kind of knowledge to pursue (and what not to pursue), among multiple potential standards for research methods, protocols, and practices, and between various potential researchers and research institutions will have important implications for who benefits and who loses from global policies, who has voice in global policy forums, to whom researchers are accountable for the knowledge they produce and for its consequences, etc.

• How can global science and research policy be improved? On what criteria should global scientific collaborations, networks, and institutions be evaluated? Using what methods and approaches? To what extent can criteria and methods be adapted from comparable national-oriented research and to what extent are new criteria and methods necessary? What does it mean to improve global scientific collaborations? Improve to whom? For what purpose or to what end?

Infrastructure Needs: Unlike the proposal for this workshop, I am unconvinced that “international partnerships” will suffice to address the infrastructure requirements of global research policy. As I see it, several forms of infrastructure support would strongly benefit research in this area.

• Attendance at international meetings. These meetings are a natural research site for work in this area for two reasons: first, they tend to be a source of important negotiation and decisions—they are, in this case, like Congressional hearings and votes, or court proceedings and rulings, except that they are rarely reported verbatim, necessitating participant observation research for adequate data collection and documentation; second, they bring together key decisionmakers from across the world in a single location, greatly facilitating interview research. Support for systematic attendance at such meetings is scarce, however, and travel to them is generally beyond the means of individual researchers acting on their own. Such meetings are often held in a series of cities, scattered around the world. Potentially local observers might be found on an ad hoc basis for each meeting, but only at much greater expense of time and money, I suspect, and less effective research, than sending the primary researcher. Yet, standard NSF dissertation research grants that range from $8-12k, for example, are unlikely to be able to support travel to even one—let alone three or four—such meetings (which may run several thousand dollars). Further, because many graduate students in the social sciences rely on teaching assistant positions to support their education, they choose research topics that allow them to carry out research during semester breaks. Unfortunately, international meetings rarely follow that schedule. In addition, they are rarely short enough to fit into the school year, in between class periods. Climate change meetings, for example, are often one to three weeks in length, and even the shortest take up four to five days with travel time, making salary support for research time an essential infrastructure need for both students and faculty researchers doing international research policy research. Funding for travel associated with multi-sited ethnographic methods is likely to raise many of the same questions.

• Research teams. Global research is, by definition, considerably more extensive in scope and scale than policy research in a single or even a couple of countries. Arguably, therefore, it is not amenable to the individual investigator model that dominates social science funding. The irony of NSF funding is that the “small” grants for training and research SDEST and STS fund are the largest awards it is possible to obtain through these programs. Only a handful of the most elite social scientists are able to generate sustained research funding at a level of even $100k to $200k per year to support graduate students and postdocs. Yet, rare is the scientist at a major research institution who does not easily command twice or more this level of funding, operating a research program that funds a number of graduate students and postdocs on an ongoing and predictable basis. The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at UW-Madison is, for example, a $1.5 million/year operation overseen by a single faculty member, with several research scientists and postdocs and a dozen graduate students. While the social sciences are never going to match the sciences for funding, there is an argument that global research requires a higher level of infrastructure support. This may need to be done through a networked center-type approach, but ongoing support for two faculty, a postdoc, and four graduate students for five years (somewhere around $750k direct costs), to tackle a major problem, is essentially impossible at the moment in this area—let alone larger collaborations.

• International collaborations. I do believe international collaborations have some role to play in global research, but their limitations must be appreciated. First, the pool of potential collaborators is small, all of whom are busy with their own agendas, and hardly coextensive with the planet. Second, coordinating research funds for teams in multiple countries, from multiple national funding agencies, is a problem of high politics—definitely not for the lighthearted. Third, such collaborations come with their own costs, both in money and in time. International collaborations require substantial investments to bring collaborators together on a regular basis to define objectives, to develop protocols, to compare results, and to finalize publications. Such collaborations are expensive and difficult to set up and maintain over time, especially when funded projects typically have durations of only a few years. In cases where training is required to establish a local research presence, considerable expenses are required to bring the person in question to the United States for PhD-level education, if the right person can be found in the first place.

References:

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