Science and Technology Policy for Development: Dialogues at the Interface (Anthem Studies in Development and Globalization) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843312271 ISBN 13: 9781843312277

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2006

Synopsis

This book is about changing social relationships. The authors focus on the question of what social relations make for successful science and technology policies. In particular, the various chapters illustrate what happens at different social interfaces, such as between policy makers and researchers, and between the users and producers of knowledge. In other words, they are interested in the knowledge networks that are emerging between the many different actors involved in the development of science and technology.

About this title

About the Author

Professor Louk de la Rive Box is at the Institute of Social Sciences, The Hague.

Rutger Engelhard is Managing Director of  Contactivity bv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

From the Back Cover

'Box and Engelhard have pulled off a feat in their introduction in bringing the lessons of a very diverse set of papers written from very different standpoints into an unusually coherent intellectual framework.'
"Richard Manning
(writing in a personal capacity)
Chair of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD"
'This book is a must for practitioners in science and technology policy in developing countries, with a rich array of case studies in the continuing search for demand driven policies which can well tap into globalized knowledge production.'
"Jozef Ritzen
President of the Universiteit Maastricht and former Vice President of the World Bank's Development Economics Department"
This book is about changing social relationships. The authors focus on the question of what social relations make for successful science and technology policies. In particular, the various chapters illustrate what happens at different social interfaces, such as between policy makers and researchers, and between the users and producers of knowledge. In other words, they are interested in the knowledge networks that are emerging between the many different actors involved in the development of science and technology.
"Science and Technology Policy for Development" is the outcome of a workshop that brought together scholars and policy makers from the global South and the North, from private and public organizations, to review their experiences. What unites the authors is a common concern for research-policy linkages. In this context, research was taken to mean any systematic effort to increase the stock of knowledge, and 'policy' as any purposive course of action followed by an actor or set of actors. Linkages are seen as the communication and patterns of interaction among the actors involved. Such patterns may consolidate into knowledge networks in which information is evaluated or prioritized. A number of authors stress the communication aspect of such patterns, especially in the form of dialogue between actors or, through them, between institutions like ministries, universities or companies.
The subtitle of this book reflects this orientation: Dialogues at the Interface refers to communication between these different institutions. A must read for students of development economics, professionals in the sector and policy-makers alike.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Science and Technology Policy for Development

Dialogues at the Interface

By Louk Box, Rutger Engelhard

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2006 Louk Box
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84331-227-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, xi, 
Acronyms, xiii, 
Preface Caroline Wiedenhof, xvii, 
Foreword Callestous Junta, xix, 
Dialogues at the interface: an introduction Louk Box, 1, 
VISIONS FROM THE SOUTH, 23, 
Knowledge dependence and its discontents: the demand for policy research in Africa in the era of globalization Osita Ogbu, 25, 
Regionalism and science and technology development in Africa John Mugabe, 37, 
Building a critical mass of researchers in the least developed countries: new challenges Léa Velho, 55, 
Epistemic communities and informed policy making for promoting innovations: the case of Singapore Sunil Mani, 73, 
Science for transformation: research agendas and priorities in South Africa Johann Mouton, 89, 
NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE, 107, 
Science and technology policies through policy dialogue Wiebe E. Bijker, 109, 
From development research to pro-poor policy: evidence and the change process Julius Court and John Young, 127, 
Priority setting in research for development: a donor's perspective Theo van de Sande, 149, 
International collaboration in science and technology: promises and pitfalls Caroline S. Wagner, 165, 
Priority setting in technical cooperation: expanding the demand for knowledge-based development Jacques Gaillard, Royal Kastens and Ana María Cetto, 177, 
The use of foresight in setting agricultural research priorities Marie de Lattre-Gasquet, 191, 
Development of sustainable control of diamondback moth in cabbage and cauliflower by public-private partnership Bert Uijtewaal, 215, 
CODA, 225, 
The emerging contextual space for priority setting in development research Paul Dufour, 227, 
Workshop participants, 247, 

CHAPTER 1

KNOWLEDGE DEPENDENCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: THE DEMAND FOR POLICY RESEARCH IN AFRICA IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

OSITA OGBU

In the early days of independence there was a congruency between the intellectual ideology of the time and the development policy focus of many African states, with strong demand for domestic policy research. In contrast, the era of structural adjustment and current globalization fostered knowledge dependence, through un-negotiated policy options that tied development aid to the acceptance of 'external' knowledge. Today, there are new opportunities due to new leadership in the continent and the various new economic development plans that could provide the basis for a stronger domestic research–policy interface. The development of the continent will require a political leadership that appreciates the intellectual capacity of Africans, a core of confident, liberated intellectual freedom fighters who are ready to use their knowledge to liberate the continent from poverty, and the emergence of new institutions such as the African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS) that would provide the platform.

1. Introduction

There is a great deal of interest in understanding policy-making processes in Africa, and the role of research in informing policy decisions and actions. Ideally, equal emphasis should be placed on both. It is only when we understand the political economy of decision making that can construct the form and content of policy advice based on new knowledge, and direct such advice to appropriate decision centres.

In spite of the urgency of the need to understand the role of research in informing policy decisions and actions, very little intellectual capital has been spent on such inquiries. Yet, donor agencies and some African governments continue to spend a great deal of resources on policy research. The research-policy nexus is not linear, even in advanced countries, and even when governments of those countries are funding the research. Carol Weiss noted the haphazard connection between social science research and policy making in the United States, and the misguided belief by many social scientists involved in policy research that the results of their work would be used by the government. Weiss observed that they 'tend to believe that if officials ignore relevant research, they are either ignorant, uncaring, or overtly "political" in the pejorative sense of the word'. This means that in assessing the research-policy interface, a fair amount of value must be assigned to serendipity and knowledge externalities that may not be readily captured and quantified.

In Africa the situation is even more complicated. The policy terrain is murkier, due largely to domestic pressures and the heavy external influence from decision centres located outside the official bureaucracies. Borrowing from work on the politics of trade policy making in Africa, it has been noted that '... the underlying forces behind policy epochs and episodes vary from country to country and from regime to regime weaved around ethnic, military or other ruling and bureaucratic interests in a manner that suggests a forced consensus ... the loss of policy autonomy in most countries and the absence of the organized private sector as key players in the policy process compound the picture'.

In addition, a tradition of contesting ideas has not been firmly established in Africa, due to the lack of a home-grown vision by the leadership, inadequate knowledge-generating infrastructures and weak intellectual censorship, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Such contests would have forced the competing constituencies to rely on research to support and advance their positions on how to attain a given vision. In the United States in the 1930s, such contests were sometimes played out in the arena of science and technology (S&T) policy making. Between 1933 and 1935, for instance, Karl Compton, then President of MIT, proposed that greater funding be directed to university-based scientific research in order to generate innovation that firms could use to create new industries that would in turn create jobs. Unemployment was a major issue at that time, and Compton lobbied President Roosevelt and the public with a campaign, 'science makes jobs', stating that 'federal funding could make jobs by making science'. His views were hotly contested by those who held that technological innovation caused unemployment by raising productivity without providing other avenues for taking care of the resulting redundancies. They therefore urged the President not to heed the Compton campaign but rather to regulate the pace of technological change in order not to exacerbate the unemployment problem.

Three important points emerge from this example with respect to the research-policy interface. First, it is useful to have a market for contestation of policy ideas. Second, policy entrepreneurship is critical in bridging the research–policy gap. Third, policy research priority setting involves many players and can be demand or supply driven, depending on the coalition for policy change and the institutional arrangements on the ground. In Africa, all of these conditions have, for the most part, been either weak or absent.

2. The legacy of dependence

Without labouring the point, colonialism was anti-indigenous knowledge and technology. It created a legacy of knowledge and technology dependency that is still very much in evidence. The cultural emasculation of the colonial era denied Africa both the capacity to generate, disseminate and adapt knowledge in an orderly and progressive manner, and the establishment of a knowledge order that would have evolved systematically as societal requirements became more complex.

Africa is perpetually going through forced technological transitions, first by colonialism, second, by post-colonial ties, and most recently by globalization. Unfortunately, this last transition is embedded in consumerism without a corresponding interest in building indigenous production technology capacities and capabilities. As Ali Mazrui put it, 'the West's consumption patterns have arrived, but not necessarily the West's technique of production'. In the same vein, Kabira Kinyanjui noted that 'the cultural dynamism of any society enables its members to discard old ideas and techniques and to be receptive and accommodating to new knowledge, skills, technologies and patterns of life ... A central obstacle to this process in Africa has been the separation of African culture from the culture that guided major economic, technological and political changes in society'. Apart from the material reality of this dependence, both the psychological dimension and the phenomenon of self-doubt it engendered have been profound, and have enormous implications for research agenda setting, research–policy links and technological renaissance.

3. The convergence of national vision and intellectual ideology

On coming to power after independence, African leaders and their economic advisers had a common focus and strategy. The focus was industrialization and the strategy was import substitution. The spirit of Uhuru (freedom), Ujamaa (self-help), and the indigenization polices of the many newly independent countries were used to rally society, policy advisers and the research community to a common cause. While this is not the place to debate the efficacy of these policies and programmes, what is important is that there was a convergence of national vision and intellectual ideology. There was agreement on the vision, and on the path to take to attain it. It was therefore easy to agree on a set of research priorities and on the research infrastructure that would feed into the development policy process. In the pursuit of this agreed strategy, it was easy to mobilize intellectual capital both from Africa itself and from other countries pursuing similar strategies.

The point here is that the ownership of a development strategy and the goals of a society are critical to influencing the direction of research and its practical application, and hence, to bridging the research-policy gap. Policy advisers must be chosen by the policy makers themselves and their nationality should really not matter. In the demand for research, the centrality of this point cannot be overemphasized. Part of the reason for the economic success of Botswana was its independence in choosing its key advisers, some of whom were non-nationals. These were not fly-by-night advisers but resident experts who took time to understand the policy environment and to explain their positions in open seminars, including one-to-one meetings with cabinet ministers and parliamentarians.

In the field of S&T policy, the convergence was both subterranean and explicit in the early days of independence. In pursuit of an industrialization strategy, it was clear that an independent technological trajectory was being charted. The import policy was in favour of capital goods, and there was robust research that supported this policy and emphasized indigenous technological capability building, learning and knowledge spillovers.

4. Knowledge dependence, policy autonomy and demand for research

Policy making in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s was dominated by what is widely known as the 'Washington consensus'. By implication, two institutions in Washington, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, agreed on both the diagnosis for the lack of economic progress in Africa and the preferred solutions. Needless to say, African leaders and peoples were not consulted; they disagreed significantly with both the analysis of the problems and the solutions that the two institutions forced them to adopt. Interestingly, at this time African leaders met under the auspices of the Organization of Africa Unity (OAU) and produced their own blueprint for Africa's economic renewal, the Lagos Plan of Action. This platform had a clear roadmap specifying how to lay solid scientific and technological foundations for sustainable social and economic development in Africa, but it was completely subverted by the Washington consensus.

The neoclassical thinking and the market fundamentalism so central to the Washington consensus did not allow for any alternative view. African governments, by then heavily indebted and reliant on the IMF and the World Bank to bail them out of their economic quagmires, capitulated and reluctantly adopted their policies. The ideas and knowledge from Washington were backed by financial resources, and the role of the IMF as the global arbiter of good policies precluded access to other external sources of finance if a country's rating, in their judgement, was unsatisfactory. Many in civil society and the international community did not fully appreciate the dangers inherent in this strategy of bundling together economic ideology and aid.

These predatory tactics stimulated a game plan on the part of African policy makers, who adopted 'stop and go' tactics as far as the implementation of the agreed policies was concerned. Not fully convinced about the policies in the first place, they took a piecemeal approach to their implementation and used delaying tactics to extract further monetary concessions from the Bank and IMF, almost on a quid pro quo basis. The two Washington institutions, anxious to show quick and positive results, coupled with other political considerations, often obliged. Rather than improve economic performance, this cat and mouse game created more development problems. It did not occur to African governments that mobilizing the intellectual capital of their own citizens and other disparate but friendly views from the international community to challenge the Washington consensus would have been a better strategy.

However, with its growing financial muscle and influence in Washington, the government of Japan sought to encourage an alternative view. It sought to promote economic policies that emphasized the role of the state, drawing lessons from the public policies that had produced the East Asian economic miracle. Unfortunately, it gave resources to the World Bank to conduct the research and to document how these policies worked. Evidently, the Bank was not prepared to contradict itself, exposing by implication that their policy prescriptions for Africa were ideological and that the only alternative view was still its own.

The outcome of this exercise was a book, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy? In a critique of the book, and more importantly of the process of writing the book, Robert Wade indicated that the 'final document reflects an attempt at compromise between the well-established World Bank view and the newly powerful Japanese view. The result is heavily weighted towards the Bank's established position, and legitimizes the bank's continuing advice to low-income countries to follow the "market-friendly" policies apparently vindicated by East Asia's success'. This experience is important because even though the World Bank's paradigm emerged intact, it conceded some intellectual grounds to another powerful donor. There was no such concession to poor African countries. It therefore became extremely difficult to view the Bank as an honest broker that was willing to draw from certain intellectual traditions and cultures but not from others.

The loss of sovereignty and policy autonomy in most of Africa was aptly captured by Joseph Stiglitz in an account of Ethiopian experience with the IMF. The Ethiopian government, after due analysis, decided that it made better economic sense to pay off a loan owed to an American bank, at a huge interest rate, by drawing from its foreign reserves that were attracting very low interest. Rather than applaud this sensible domestic initiative, the IMF officials were upset, and threatened to cut Ethiopia from its programme. At issue was not the economic sense of the action itself, but that the action was not authorized by the IMF. As Stiglitz put it 'to Ethiopia such intrusiveness smacked of a new form of colonialism; to the IMF, it was just standard operating procedure'.

There is virtually no country in Africa that has not experiences such policy emasculation. In the late 1990s, for example, the Ugandan Ministry of Trade and Industry wanted to initiate a process to recreate and support its research unit that was virtually non-existent. The minister was asked how his ministry generated the knowledge and facts with which his officials negotiated with the World Bank and the IMF on trade policies. Looking baffled, he calmly explained, in a fatherly but resigned voice, that they did not negotiate. In a nutshell, he said 'they have the money, they have the ideas and we need the money. What is there to negotiate?'

What this minister did not realize was that, as George Soros noted in a discussion of reality, fallibility and reflexivity, 'the shortcomings of dominant ideas and institutional arrangements become apparent only with passage of time, and the concept of reflexivity justifies only the claim that all human constructs are potentially flawed ... nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth'. In retrospect, many of the economic policy proposals flaunted at that time as 'gospel truth' were flawed.

The 1980s saw the emergence of international agricultural research organizations with a mandate to support Africa's development efforts. Supposed to champion Africa's green revolution, several of these organizations were grouped under the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). An implication of this arrangement was that resources that would have gone to national research institutions went to these international bodies, which were supposed to assemble the best minds to address specific agricultural problems. In addition, it sent a signal that someone else was adequately taking care of the research needs of the agricultural sector and that African policy makers need not worry. This further widened the gap between African researchers, the national research institutions and the policy makers.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Science and Technology Policy for Development by Louk Box, Rutger Engelhard. Copyright © 2006 Louk Box. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843312271
• ISBN 13: 9781843312277
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350
• Editor: De La Rive Box Louk, Engelhard Rutger