Asia & the Pacific

In this new lead article, Prof. Calestous Juma, Harvard University and Prof. Yee-Cheong Lee, UNESCO, reflect on the progress made since the UN Millennium Project's Task Force report on science, technology and innovation (ST&I) was published. In 2005, the Task Force released the report Innovation: applying knowledge in development. It outlined a number of ways in which ST&I could be used to realize the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The authors claim that the report has played a key catalytic role in raising global awareness of the importance of ST&I in development.

In the modern global economy, nations do not compete; it is specialized regions that compete, according to Calestous Juma, faculty chair of the Innovation for Economic Development executive program. To help countries strengthen their regional innovation systems, the Belfer Center will join Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Education in sponsoring a high level executive program beginning May 28.

"The Green Revolution played a critical role in helping to overcome chronic food shortages in Latin America and Asia. The Green Revolution was largely a result of the creation of new institutional arrangements aimed at using existing technology to improve agricultural productivity. African countries are faced with enormous technological challenges. But they also have access to a much larger pool of scientific and technical knowledge than was available when the Green Revolution was launched in the 1950s."

"...[T]he rivalry between models of socio-economic development did not begin with the cold war. During the Depression, liberals sought to show that planned economic and social development was possible without the use of autocratic methods. Liberal internationalists, aware that their totalitarian ideological competitors offered their own attractive modernization programmes needed a liberal champion. In the TVA they found a global model that became nearly synonymous with liberal development because of its claim to harmonize potentially destabilizing forces. At a time when development models were features of the international discourse, the TVA distinguished itself by offering proof that large-scale, socially transformative, planning-based development was viable in a liberal democracy. The ease with which these ideas supplied an ideological strategy during the cold war illustrated the degree to which modernization had already proved its effectiveness as a weapon against ideological challenges to liberalism."