Presentations
Presented in the panel "From global change toward sustainability science" at the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community. 7 October, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abstract
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his Millennium Report on the role of the UN in the 21st century, challenged the international community to collaborate in efforts to guarantee the peoples of the earth three fundamental human freedoms: "freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom of future generations to sustain their lives on this planet." He noted that the first two of these challenges are long standing issues incorporated in the UN Charter and pursued by a number of relatively mature if not always effective international institutions and arrangements. In contrast, he continued, the third challenge -- that of sustainability -- is new, reflecting threats that the UN''s founders could not have imagined. Institutions and strategies for pursuing this goal are in their infancy with only halting progress since they were highlighted in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development and the follow-up UN Conference on the same subject held in Rio in 1992. Increasingly, however, it is recognized by scholars and practitioners alike that sustainable development -- if it is to work at all -- will be a knowledge intensive enterprise, requiring international research systems of far greater scope, density and effectiveness than even our best existing models.
The importance of thinking in terms of entire research systems when seeking to bring science and technology to bear on development problems has long been recognized in the agriculture and health sectors. Such systems incorporate and integrate not only elite laboratories that may be anywhere in the world, but also operational monitoring systems, field "extension" agents and intermediary R&D capacity at national and regional levels. Moreover, it is now clear that they must make provision for not only "piping" basic discoveries "down" to field level, but also for two-way communication that:
- adapts those discoveries to local conditions,
- conveys special needs encountered in the field "up" to elite laboratories that have the specialized resources to address them,
- integrates "local," context-specific knowledge with "exotic," generalizable knowledge to create effective solutions for particular problems, and
- entrains private and public sector agents in the knowledge production and application process.
Unfortunately, however, understanding the need for such problem-driven research systems and the functional capacities that they must exhibit has proven far easier than designing and implementing them. In fact, a recent international meeting identified the absence of effective international research systems and the institutions to support them as the principal barrier to future progress in meeting the information needs of a transition toward sustainability. This paper will present a critical appraisal of what has made problem-driven research systems in some sectors (e.g., agriculture, public health, materials science) more effective than others. It will then analyze the strengths and weaknesses of present global change research systems from the perspective of their likely ability to address the problems of sustainable development. It will conclude with findings on the research system reforms most needed to enable the expansion of the global change agenda toward a vigorous program of sustainability science.