Panel at the ECAS on 30.6.2017: Global scientific encounters. The quest for sustainable research cooperation

In January I organized a panel at the upcoming European Conference on African Studies in Basel. The panel will take place on 30. June at 2pm in room BS004. Together with Claudia Zingerli (SNF), Thomas Laly (University of Zurich), Hikabasa Halwiindi (University of Zambia), and Martin Skrydstrup (University of Copenhagen) as discussant we will elaborate on the extent and depth of global research partnerships from various angles. To give you an idea of our approaches, I have copied our short abstracts below. Don’t hesitate to contact me for further questions.

Transformative partnerships: Funders’ perspectives on research collaborations for sustainable development

Author: Claudia Zingerli (Swiss National Science Foundation)

This paper focuses on research collaborations in the early era of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by drawing on conceptual considerations and practical experiences at the interface of science and development policy.

Making African research visible – museum partnerships and networks as driving forces.

Author: Thomas Laely ( University of Zürich)

Museums are important engines of research and knowledge production, all above university museums. They can contribute to making research from Africa more visible and accessible. How is the potential of museums in sub-Saharan Africa and of transcontinental networks to be assessed in this respect?

Sustaining gains through evolution: the case of the EFINTD fellowship

Author: Hikabasa Halwiindi (University of Zambia)

This presentation is a case study on how a post-doctoral research fellowship program resulted into the creation of a research network in order to sustain the achievements. The mutual responsibilities of the north and south partners are highlighted.

Fair and equal: Trying North-South research partnerships

Author: Stefan Skupien (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)

This paper discusses examples of establishing criteria for equal and fair research partnerships. Starting from the Swiss Commission for Research with Developing Countries (1998), it develops a framework to understand the efforts to counter negative effects in asymmetric relationships.

News and Links #3/2017

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News and Links #2/2017

Calls for Application

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News and Links #1/2017

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Research and development

When entering the debate about North-South research collaborations, I quickly became aware of the fact that such relationships with African partners are often situated in at least two different fields: In the scientific community and in the development politics community. What does this difference imply for assessing North-South research collaborations?

Basic vs applied science

On the one hand, partners with strong research interests mostly want to cooperate on specific scientific problems without regard for national borders. The socialization as scientists very often includes such a cosmopolitan outlook. Only curiosity for the solutions of challenges and puzzles is said to contribute to the driving of science and their expected innovative output for the building of theories. Such “blue sky” science is supported by different organizations such as the German Science Foundation and science academies as lobbying groups. The following introductory remark to a study by the Dutch Royal Academy of Science (KNAW) illustrates this perspective in a nutshell:

“(I)t is crucial for researchers to be able to work and cooperate freely and independently, without ulterior political or commercial motives. If that is not possible, we should probably conclude that it is better not to join forces.” (Hans Clevers, President of KNAW, 2014)

On the other hand, the explicit engagement of researchers with commercial and political actors is nothing new to science either. Captured in the differentiation of ‘applied’ vs ‘basic’ science, researchers engage with daily and local problems to generate solutions that matter in their respective societies and beyond. The story of chemistry and physics since the 19th century is replete with examples of crossing borders between industry and research centres. This story is also replete with commercial competition.

Research outputs are then expected to lead among other to patents, as usually seen in the life and engineering sciences. But also politicians want immediate public impact of research – often expressed as “value for taxpayer’s money” – to legitimize the education and research budget. References to national interest, the building and maintenance of innovative capacities to be competitive in the market appear in numerous policy papers of this field. Science is supposed to be useful to many players.

Research for Development (R4D)

Research is even more expected to lead to innovations that eventually contribute to the general welfare of the targeted society. Examples such as multi-donor multi-national collaborations in the trials of vaccines against infectious diseases are a point in case (see for example the EDCTP). Scientists linking research to development in African contexts also become part of the overall development discourse with all its promises and pitfalls. The aforementioned “knowledge-bases societies”-paradigm requests researchers and others to support scientific institutions and processes also in African countries to guarantee that they “catch up” with the research systems of Western/Northern states. Science becomes the object and subject of intervention.

Numerous funders and policy-makers have established initiatives to meet the expectations of supporting innovation and scientific systems of developing countries, which have yet insufficient research infrastructures. Capacity-building, for individuals, research organisations and polities, has become a key target in funding research collaborations. Trained scientists add to the capabilities of nations with their new technical, administrative and socially intercultural tested skills. Funders support organisations in the building of administrative capacities, for example to processing large amount of funds. Such theories of change have also become elements of research collaborations that seek to promote sustainable development, not only in the health and agriculture sectors. Each collaborative research project, therefore, has multiple dimensions, which go beyond the basic vs applied boundaries within science.

Whose research interests matter?

Moreover, the literature on scientific collaborations reveals that science has had a strong applied character in developing countries. Besides the capacity building, researchers from the South have long criticized that Northern partner were not very keen to respond to local needs and to apply their methods to develop local solutions in their collaborations. Sometimes, Southern partners emphasize more often the “third mission” of universities, that means the community outreach alongside teaching and research. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is one example of such an approach, especially in the field of health. Each partner of collaborative projects therefore needs to ask for an equal agenda-setting and agreement about the challenges or puzzles to be tackled together. Of course, this should not be restricted to African contexts alone.

There are several precepts and criteria available for assessing the equality and sustainability of research cooperation along these lines: The Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries in as early as 1998 developed a set of criteria along which to establish and enable fair research partnerships, which satisfy the needs of both sides. The Research Fairness Initiative is another attempt to contribute to “measures to create trusting, lasting, transparent and effective partnerships in research and innovation” in the field of health. I will dedicate further blog entries on this issue.

Why research about scientific collaborations?

Global challenges are often said to be effectively tackled by knowledge-based societies. “Knowledge societies” became prominent during the late 1990s due to its use by Joseph Stiglitz and has influenced funding agencies and banks such as the World Bank. Therefore, scientific collaboration and their funding mechanisms with focus for example on health and energy, security and education on a global scale – as summarized in the Millennium Development Goals and their successors – become viable instruments for sustainable development.

However, research shows that science cooperation does not always work out well, especially when it is biased by persistent structural North-South asymmetries. During the process of collaborative research projects, such asymmetries affect the agenda-setting, financing, administration and the division of labour. Frederic Moyi Okwaro and Peter W. Geissler aptly summarize such inequalities for the life sciences:

“Collaborations in biomedical research are necessary and beneficial for scientists and institutions both from the north and the south. These partnerships, however occur, under conditions of gross economic and ethical inequality that serve both as a problem to be confronted and an opportunity for professional knowledge production. They are further compounded by dynamic and constantly evolving models of partnerships that both address and obscure inequalities, which nevertheless occasionally breed tension and conflicts.” (2015: 506)

Future blog entries will take these observations as a starting point and discuss elements of collaborative research agendas and funding initiatives within African-European science partnerships. I will draw examples mostly from the fields of infectious diseases/neglected tropical diseases and renewable energy for three reasons: both fields are among the core global issues of our times and require a high degree of scientific cooperation. At the same time, both disciplines are affected by economic competition for research results and production. Finally, both fields differ in age. While tropical medicine has a long history which roots in colonial empires, engineering and renewable energies are a rather new field of cooperation, facilitated by the need to find alternative sources of energy in countries with sometimes only rudimentary energy infrastructures. Moreover, both fields are influenced by different disciplinary cultures, although both belong to the realm of the natural sciences. These commonalities and differences should somehow affect the design of projects and the expectations of funders, intermediary institutions and researchers.

This does not mean that I want to leave out the social sciences and humanities. Interdisciplinary projects are becoming the norm in collaborative research, as a researcher from a British development funder just recently pointed out to me. The social sciences and humanities are included by large projects with their expertise to critically accompany, monitor and evaluate the implementation of activities such as the development and transfer of technologies or the planning of clinical trial studies. Moreover, public health and energy research and planning are essentially interdisciplinary undertakings, depending not only on the technicalities of biochemistry and engineering of efficient solar cells but also on the understanding of local social processes of communally deciding about priorities and their effective implementation. However, I would find it even more interesting – than simply noting interdisciplinary contributions of social sciences – to follow genuine collaborations in the social science or humanities, as they are often not very visible but equally influential. If there are resources, I will try to include such projects and their experiences with cooperation in my blog entries as well.

In my analysis of private and public funding instruments and aims of five West European countries and the EU I will shed light on the expectations and funding strategies for scientific collaboration as well as their changes during the last decades. So far, I have found few meta-studies and comparative project evaluations. Evaluators of single often rightly point to the time constrain and the lack of appropriate databases to compare experiences across research projects.

Over the course of my blog entries, I will not only present recent developments in the field of funding but also discuss some of the hypotheses and topics in the field of sociology of science in a comparative and explorative manner. I hope my approach will over time be used to inform scientists, funding agencies, policy-makers and a wider audience about the trends, patterns and the self-understanding in a growing field of global partnerships.

Don’t hesitate to join this discussion yourself through the comment function or by writing me an email. Over time, I will invite colleagues for guest articles and will try to share short interviews with you. Additionally, I will collect links to projects, events and call for papers and publish them as “News and Links”.