Science Diplomacy as Evidence-based Policymaking

Science matters; but science and the ideas of scholars and scientific researchers also need to be made to matter. Diplomacy is one field of policy and decision-making where science can be made to matter. Global problems have... [ view full abstract ]

Science matters; but science and the ideas of scholars and scientific researchers also need to be made to matter. Diplomacy is one field of policy and decision-making where science can be made to matter. Global problems have made scientific capital and knowledge creation progressively ascendant relative to economic and military might in transnational policy-making. Scientific knowledge becomes a critical form of diplomacy pivotal to how global policy problems are politically articulated, prioritized and resolved.

The social technology of networks is one important mode of making science matter across national borders. Scientists and their organisations have become transnational actors, aided by the internet and digital communications in the twenty-first century, to create and collaborate through scientific research networks. International networks are also a mechanism through which knowledge organisations and scientific communities become entwined with the governance ambitions of international organisations and the foreign policy concerns of governments.

In terms of the panel, science diplomacy is a set of strategies “used to promote or embed expertise in policy processes”. The paper speaks to the panel themes by interrogating not only how the relationships between scientific expertise and foreign policy differs across countries and Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs), but also how civil servants outside MFAs (in departments of Health, Trade, Environment etc) interact regularly with scientists and are also drawn into policy making “across national boundaries”.

Science Diplomacy (SD) is disruptive of traditional diplomacy. Today, SD also occurs via a fragmented, complex and networked cast of non-state actors, agencies and institutions. This medley of channels – including regional and international trans-governmental networks (TGNs) and global partnership programmes – have ‘perforated’ traditional state sovereignty by diffusing decision-making. In other words, diplomacy now occurs across the public-private divide where government officials and international civil servants formally and informally partner with private actors. This can be undertaken via global partnerships such as GAVI-Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or it can also be through trans-governmental networks of public sector officials and international civil servants seeking to secure multi-level policy coordination through bodies like CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). This paper will address the challenges and pitfalls of SD as a mode of ‘transnationalised’ evidence based policy making.

Our vantage as public policy scholars affords an alternative perspective to the diplomacy literature, which is theoretically premised on International Relations concepts. To understand SD, we employ concepts and frameworks on policy transfer, knowledge-utilisation, and policy networks. For public policy scholarship, we generate new knowledge of the structures and agents that are involved in global and regional governance and which impinge upon and are interconnected with, national policy processes. We do this transnational reorientation of policy studies (which has traditionally focused on national dynamics) to determine how the sciences – in the form of expertise, data and/or theories and models – are used to inform knowledge of (and institutional solutions for) the transnational policy challenges that threaten both national and international interests.