Global Forum Calls for Intensified Effort to Support Science, Technology, and Innovation Partnerships for Development

It takes about 15 years to build a world class research institute and just two years to destroy it, or so said the late Argentine physicist Jorge Sabato.  Over those 15 years much effort is required to establish an institute’s capacity to deliver scientific breakthroughs. It means attracting top-notch human resources, building cutting edge facilities, procuring the necessary equipment, developing relationships with universities, firms, and markets and wiring the facility to ensure that scientists can easily connect to their peers and access on-line materials. 

To excel, today’s world-class research institutes must also be linked, networked, and integrated into a global web of partners.  This was a striking point of agreement among the more than 150 leading science and technology policy makers, executives, and development experts—including the Co-Chair of the Global Knowledge Initiative’s Advisory Board, Nina Fedoroff, and Chief Operating Officer, Sara Farley—attending the World Bank’s “STI Global Forum 2009” on December 10 and 11, 2009.  In the era of globalization, linking research and training institutions to global partners is no longer an option.  It has become critical for their survival.  Francisco Sagasti, Chairman of the Board of the Science and Technology Program of Peru, who was among the delegates, echoed the statements of several participants when he affirmed that “international partnerships are key instruments to build endogenous capacity in science, technology and innovation.”

Will the World Bank and other donors support more global science, technology, and innovation partnerships?

 

Building and maintaining international science, technology, and innovation partnerships is not free.  Nor is the process quick.  Helping to facilitate and maintain international science, technology, and innovation collaborations requires support.  Concerned with where support can be found for such partnerships, participants in the Forum questioned whether the World Bank is ready and willing to boost its commitment to aid in the formation of international and regional partnership-building activities.  Without renewed support to help individuals and institutions engage in global science, technology, and innovation (STI) partnerships, their relevance to the industrial, economic, and development needs of poorer countries is likely to remain minimal.  

A key problem is that the World Bank’s approach to aid delivery aligns Bank support with national needs as articulated by a country’s government.  Requests for aid and allocation of funds are generally funneled through a country’s Ministry of Finance.  The global networks of STI cooperation are a poor fit to the Bank’s standard approach.  Moving forward with the ideas offered at the Forum will require new financing mechanisms that go beyond niche modalities like the Development Grant Facility (DGF).  This kind of organizational change will take time and require champions both within the Bank and outside of it.

Al Watkins, Science and Technology Coordinator of the World Bank and the organizer of the Global STI Forum, appears to be making headway in conceptualizing and launching new mechanisms for STI funding, as well as gathering champions.  Among these is Graeme Wheeler, the World Bank’s Managing Director, who closed the Forum by speaking about the need to “build an innovation fund to develop solutions to high priority science, technology, and innovation problems.”  His remarks were echoed by Christian Delvoie, Director of the Bank’s Knowledge Strategy Group tasked with defining the Bank’s top priorities for growing a network of knowledge partnerships that can ensure that Bank staff are better informed on technical issues and more effective in meeting developing countries’ needs.

“Individual partnerships are not achieving all that they could and may not generate a coherent set of capacities in each country” when operating in isolation of partners in other countries, he admitted. Indeed, the World Bank’s historic project interface with national Federal Ministries of Finance is not amenable for the kind of regional or international support to partnership building that the Forum audience called for. 

“The World Bank should consider supporting the mobilization of non-traditional funding approaches to fund non-traditional stakeholders that are nonetheless crucial in building robust innovation systems,” Al Watkins offered in his encapsulation of the days’ events and suggestions for moving forward.

A new episode or a rerun?

To appreciate the degree to which Watkins’ and Wheeler’s suggestions constitute a departure from business as usual, it is useful to look to the Bank’s own past in support to science and technology (S&T) for development. 

The most recent assessment of the Bank’s support to science and technology in developing countries was published in 2006.  The analysis, conducted by Michael Crawford, Caesar Yammal, and colleagues, looked at the Bank’s legacy of S&T spending over a 25-year span from 1980-2004.  Between 1980 and 2004, average annual lending for science and technology totaled $343 million.  Although 647 projects over that time frame provided some support for science and technology, only 119 of the World Bank’s 6,059 projects were dedicated primarily to promoting science and technology or contained a significant S&T capacity building component.

 

The conclusion of that study called for the Bank to do much more around partnerships:  “There is clearly room for the Bank’s S&T projects to sponsor greater cooperation among client countries.” 

A 2007 UNCTAD study looked at the Bank and several other multilateral, bilateral, and foundation donors to compare how they were funding science, technology and innovation in the context of international development.  That study found that support for capacity development dwarfs support for science partnerships that cut across national boundaries.

Shifting approaches, however, needs to be done carefully. Support for projects that link countries through joint research and twinning arrangements for training can successfully build capacity in scientifically advanced, scientifically proficient, and even scientifically developing countries.  However, for the 80 poorest “scientifically lagging countries” of the world, linkage strategies are not as successful.  This finding came from a 2001 RAND study by Wagner et al.

 

The RAND study describes the conditions in which collaboration sometimes builds capacity and why integrating measures to build capacity with a partnership-based approach would work better in poorer countries: “Like a stream of liquid, collaboration is a route through which scientific and technical knowledge can flow into a country from international sources.

 

If the country lacks the ability to absorb that knowledge and put it to good use, its potential positive and lasting effects will simply drain away.  Taking advantage of the flow requires institutions and resources to create an absorptive capacity that will allow the country to make the knowledge and technology its own and put it to its own uses. In the case of scientific research, this requirement constitutes a ‘baseline’ level of scientific infrastructure to make collaboration an effective mode of capacity building. Nations having capacity below this baseline level cannot measurably use collaboration to build capacity” (RAND 2001).

 

An integrated innovation model for support to STI for development

If the World Bank is ready to design new mechanisms to better harness science, technology, and innovation to the challenges of development, a new “Integrated Innovation Approach” is advised that would combine capacity building with partnership creation and maintenance. This was the advice of the participants gathered at the Forum.

 

The World Bank does not have to look far to find examples of what an integrated innovation model might look like in practice.  Participants at the Forum offered many good ideas.

 

The InterAmerican Development Bank shared its crowd-sourcing model for selecting investments in technology development, which was tested in its program called “A World of Solutions.”  Harold Varmus offered his vision for the Global Science Crops to help a workforce of experienced near-retirement scientists to work on science-related problems in low and middle income countries through Peace Corps-type rotations at universities and research organizations in developing countries.  An Egypt-Japan partnership was lauded by JICA officials at the Forum as an internationally-focused science and technology research and training institute in Egypt that will link Japan, Egypt and the Middle East and North African countries through the E-JUST program.  The African Institute of Science and Technology (AIST) based in Arusha, Tanzania, which was announced at the Forum by the Minister of Science and Technology in Tanzania and the Institute’s Vice Chancellor, Burton Mwamila, offers another example of a regional approach to STI training through the establishment of an institution that links curriculum design, faculty recruitment, and research to the needs of the East Africa region.

 

Other more integrated examples of support to partnership and capacity building included the Global Research Alliance (GRA), which aligns the research and engineering capabilities of more than 50,000 scientists and links some of the world’s top industrial research organizations and private sector engineering firms.  The Cyprus Institute’s experience as a regional asset for research and education partnerships in Southern Asia, the Caucuses and the Middle East was also mentioned by Forum participants as a model to consider.

 

With so many great ideas, the pressure is on to see if the Bank and other donors can augment, redesign, or, in some cases, forge brand new mechanisms to support these vital efforts.

 

In 2003, the Bank released a blueprint for supporting STI for development titled “Strategic Approaches to Science and Technology for Development.” It established the Bank’s commitment to “tak[ing] the lead in facilitating new partnerships and deepening existing ones. One part of such an effort might be the stimulation of the public-private partnerships that can make development-relevant knowledge available and usable” (Watson et al 2003). 

 

The Global Knowledge Initiative is committed to working with the World Bank to integrate support to partnerships with building research and education capacity in developing countries. 

 

For more information on the Global Forum, you may visit the World Bank’s STI website here:  www.worldbank.org/sti.  For the UNCTAD 2007 Review of Donor Support to Science, Technology and Innovation for Development, see Paper #9 here:  http://www.unctad.org/Templates/Page.asp?intItemID=4316&lang=1. 

 

Contributor:  Sara E. Farley

Photo credits:  World Bank; Christina Kang