Sustainability – STRINGS

Overview of the STRINGS Project Workshop 2022

Ruby Scott — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 15:10:02 +0000

‘Perspectives and Policies to steer Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals’

In times of unprecedented uncertainty, there is an increasing need for open dialogue on how to direct research and innovation investments towards sustainable and inclusive solutions. The STRINGS project has been tackling this complex challenge, investigating how to better understand the ways in which science, technology and innovation (STI) impacts upon efforts to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On Monday 28 February and Tuesday 1 March 2022, STRINGS hosted an online workshop – including presentations by the STRINGS research team on their project findings and guest speaker talks – to facilitate constructive discussions around the challenge of steering STI to address the SDGs.

Below, we provide an overview and recording of each session. We advise you to watch the recordings on desktop to view the presenters’ slides, which are unavailable on mobile view.

Session 1: Can current science, technology and innovation (STI) pathways lead to sustainable development?

Chair: Andrew Stirling (Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex)

Opening remarks by speakers from the United Nations Development Programme (Pedro Conceição, Director of the Human Development Report Office) and UK Research and Innovation (Michael Booth, Joint Head of International Partnerships), reinforced a guiding premise of the STRINGS project – that progress towards the SDGs could be enhanced by a more purposeful use of STI.

Tommaso Ciarli (MERIT, United Nations University and SPRU) shared key findings from the STRINGS project to begin discussion of this crucial question – whether or not current STI pathways are effectively contributing towards meeting the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Tommaso highlighted the fundamental issue of entrenched misalignments due to the uneven global distribution of STI investments across different countries and societies, so that often what is prioritized does not match the problems of those most in need. For example, in analysing past publications and patents in innovation, it is shown that whilst high income countries dominate the SDG research agenda, they produce the lowest proportion of research and innovation related to the SDGs. In comparison, although research in lower income countries is strongly related to the SDGs and has strengths such as being multidisciplinary, unfortunately this research is less funded and less collaborative. The talk summarised some of the main policy shifts that are needed if we are serious about STI contributing to the SDGs by 2030.

Peggy Oti-Boateng (UNESCO, France), Rajeswari Raina (Shiv Nadar University, India) and Anil Kumar Guptar (Honeybee Network, India) presented their own experiences of aligning STI prioritisations and pathways with global goals. Each speaker reinforced the need for interconnectivity between all individuals and communities impacted by STI-SDG relations:
Peggy Oti-Boateng’s presentation shed light on UNESCO’s development agenda, how gender is one of their core priorities, and how open science can serve as a transformative tool to reduce inequalities in STI.

Rajeswari Raina’s presentation focused on prioritising sustainable relationships in working towards sustainable development, discussing the process of inclusive innovation and referencing examples of collaborative research projects in India.

Anil Kumar Guptar presented on ‘Policy options for leveraging indigenous knowledge/grassroots innovation for meeting SDG goals’. Anil spoke about his experiences as founder of the Honey Bee Network, providing insight into their inspiring work and emphasising the different challenges faced by grassroot innovators.

Feedback presentations by Bitrina Diyamett (STIPRO, Tanzania), Francisca Mutapi (University of Edinburgh) and David O’Brien (IDRC, Canada) provided insightful reflections on the four presentations. Challenging questions were raised that interrogated tensions between economic development and environmental protection, and the STI-SDG paradox. Key facets of research were also discussed such as the politics of knowledge production – how it is conducted and evaluated – and the choice of methodologies and priorities. Attendees raised further points on reinforcing national systems of innovation, and research funding and impact.

Session 2: what local and global governance is needed to steer STI for the SDGs?

Chair: Tommaso Ciarli (MERIT, United Nations University and SPRU, University of Sussex)

Presenting for STRINGS, Andy Stirling spoke on the need for governance to enable greater diversity and plurality in research and innovation for the global goals. After reinforcing that there are no single, definitive ‘innovation fixes’ for any single SDG, he argued that recognising the importance of diversity and a plurality of perspectives within pathways, offers a pragmatic way of responding to many crucial and intractable governance challenges. Andy highlighted STRINGS’ practical aims amidst this complexity and what could be useful in this context, for example, helping to build formative governance networks in onward engagement processes and platforms.

Geoff Mulgan continued this discussion on what the STRINGS project may practically propose for global governance to better align research and development allocations and STI strategies to the SDGs. Building upon previous examples, Geoff spoke on establishing global platforms and coalitions to improve decision making on STI investments before presenting four clusters of recommendations, such as, more global pooled budgets to boost impact, focused on global goals or emergent new tools.

Francisco Sagasti’s presentation drew on his wealth of political experience, for example, referencing the 1979 UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development. He encouraged reflection upon lessons learned from the last 60-70 years when considering: what is to be done in governance and financing on the global and regional level?

Aldo Stroebel gave insight from a public funder perspective, specifically the National Research Foundation, South Africa, sharing a range of encouraging examples that demonstrate the impactful, collaborative work that can be achieved in relation to STI-SDGs, before formally announcing the African Open Science Platform.

Anabel Marin’s presentation focused on grassroots innovation with Bioleft, an open-source initiative for seed breeding in Argentina. Anabel discussed Bioleft’s goal to help deliver an alternative knowledge system that promotes the direct involvement of farmers in the production and use of knowledge leading the development process. Anabel shared some successes and challenges faced throughout the project.

Group discussions emphasised the need for inclusion – to bridge gaps of wealth, gender and access to knowledge, and especially to better incorporate local communities into the knowledge-exchange systems and decision-making processes to contribute to global governance structures. Colleagues also discussed the influence of political change upon policy success, and the need for improved education, training and working dynamics for international collaboration.

Session 3: What types of STI can lead to a positive impact on SDGs? Under what conditions? In which contexts? With which synergies and trade-offs?

Chair: Joanna Chataway (STEaPP, University College London)

Saurabh Arora introduced the STRINGS team case studies which analysed specific STI-SDG challenges in three locations, each investigating:

how are sciences being developed to address the Chagas disease in Argentina?
how are conflicts around overfishing being addressed using STI in the Lake Victoria Region of Kenya?
how are rice seeds for resilience being produced and adopted in Odisha, India?

Each case study lead – Valeria Arza, John Ouma-Mugabe and Rasheed Sulamain V – provided an overview of their work, explaining their research methodologies and key findings. Each lead presented how different STI pathways are valued by different stakeholders to differently address the above challenges. They highlighted the importance of giving attention to such different pathways, for STI to better address the SDGs.

Guest speaker Wilhemina Quaye (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Ghana) provided a comprehensive overview of the ways in which Ghana is developing its approach to grounding the SDGs in the national context through her presentation on the STI4SDG roadmap for Ghana, which prioritizes specific SDGs like SDG 2 (zero hunger) and SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure). She explained how those prioritisations are made in Ghana, providing a very useful example to steer STI towards the SDGs.

Following the presentations, attendees discussed in more depth what types of STI can lead to a positive impact on SDGs? Key points included the challenge of navigating the complex interlinkages between the various SDGs and the notion of intentionality behind policymaking. It was fantastic to hear a geographically diverse range of examples with references to work in Kenya, India and Mexico.

Session 4: How do we recognise STI impacts on SDGs? Using more inclusive data, tools and methods for research and policy.

Chair: Hugo Confraria (University of Lisbon and SPRU, University of Sussex)

Hugo highlighted the importance of session four’s guiding topic given the need for funders to prioritize the research they support ahead of the 2030 Agenda.

The STRINGS team presented their proposals to combine different data, methods and tools to elicit STI directions and pathways, with presentations by Ine Steenmans (UCL) and Ismael Rafols (Leiden University). Ine reinforced the intentionality central to the STRINGS approach when analysing STI-SDG relations, particularly in the importance of considering multiple perspectives, methods and data types to “really explore the diversity of innovation, science, research and the future of the SDGs.”

Ismael discussed ‘Mapping the SDGs for empowering stakeholders: capturing diversity and supporting plurality’, towards facilitating stakeholders to make their own informed choices for supporting specific SDG research relevant to their own contexts. To support such decision making, Ismael introduced the SDG Mapping Tool developed by STRINGS, and proposed a “new way of thinking about mapping research” using “plural and conditional mappings” rather than definitive maps.

Three speakers then presented their experiences using different tools and methods in the delineation and decision-making processes, within the specific contexts of their own work.

Tatiana Fernández (Economic Production, Government of Catalonia) discussed the use of open data, semantic techniques and visualisation tools before sharing insight on how these were applied to map the contributions of research and innovation to Catalonia’s ecosystem.

Glenda Kruss (Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators in South Africa) presented on ‘Developing new measures and indicators for STI oriented to SDGs in the South African context’. Glenda provided insight from a practitioner point of view with a focus on STI investments and the frameworks and models by which we can understand them, exampling the STI strategy for Africa 2024.

María Verónica Moreno (Solutions Mapping for the Accelerator Lab, UNDP, Argentina) focused upon the acceleration of development through citizen science. María shared inspiring true stories and drew on multiple examples of environmental citizen science projects like eBird Argentina, demonstrating the far-reaching, positive impact that such projects can have upon sustainable development.

Further discussion of these experiences followed in a Q&A session with the speakers, before the commencement of breakout sessions on the use of more inclusive data, tools and methods.

Amongst the various though-provoking points raised, the need to look more closely at intersectionality stood out with calls to consider: what do responsible metrics look like? And what can be done to tackle obstacles to accessing data and learning? Such questions relate to, and remind us of, the central issues of power and privilege within STI-SDG research work that the STRINGS project highlights. In his closing comments, Tommaso Ciarli reinforced the need for researchers to listen to views that diverge and dissent from mainstream research communities to better understand and align STI towards the SDGs.

The STRINGS team would like to thank all participants for their generous contributions and the invaluable sharing of their diverse experiences. A special thank you to artist Raquel Durán for producing live illustrations throughout the event.

Publication of the STRINGS Final Report is forthcoming and will be accessible via the Research Findings page of this website.

Andy Stirling presents at the SDG Conference Bergen 2022

Ruby Scott — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 12:00:36 +0000

On 11 February at the fifth SDG Conference Bergen 2022, Professor Andy Stirling gave a presentation on ‘Ways of Knowing Sustainability: diversity, plurality & politics of liberatory action.’ Andy’s lecture opened Session 4 which considered how higher education and research should meet sustainability challenges. Watch Andy’s full talk below, beginning at 02:38.

Andy’s talk focused on the challenge of “acknowledging different ways of knowing, not just how to implement sustainability, but what sustainability means in itself.” In particular, Andy emphasised that “sustainability is an inherently political notion”, exampling how different discourses and knowledges of sustainability are influenced by factors like power.

For example, he reinforced the need for diverse, plural perspectives on sustainability in order to better understand and tackle the reality of its multifaceted challenges – “towards recognising that difference is a way of knowing.” This differs to dominant, politicized narratives that suggest ‘the‘ singular pathways towards sustainability – an issue also addressed in the forthcoming STRINGS report.

Key findings from the new UNESCO report on universities and the 2030 Agenda were also referred to. The 2022 report discusses the role of higher education institutions in contributing to the sustainability 2030 Agenda, and Andy was one of several expert co-authors.

Read the UNESCO report on Knowledge-driven actions: Transforming higher education for global sustainability

COVID-19 and Sustainability

Editorial Staff — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:00:51 +0000

– John Robinson

Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the School of the Environment, at the University of Toronto.

15 April 2020

The plethora of articles about the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis makes me think of the Danish saying, (sometimes attributed to Niels Bohr) “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”. Many articles provide a mixture of highly plausible projections, mixed in with some wishful thinking. However, I think it is fair to say that such lists consist almost entirely of what might be called first-order predictions: expectations about the immediate consequences of COVID-19. Another saying I like is that the only law of sociology is the law of unanticipated consequences, and I think there will be lots of second and third-order effects that may take us in entirely different directions, even if many of the first order prognostications turn out to be correct. My own personal view is that the second order consequences of any major socio-technical system change are often in the opposite direction of the first order consequences, and bigger. Think of projections of IT leading to the paperless office or of highway building leading to less congestion. The first order effect indeed happened (for a given level of activity) but was overwhelmed by second order effects in the other direction.

In fact, I believe the COVID-19 crisis is a perfect illustration of the need to move beyond predictive forecasting approaches to thinking about the future of complex systems, to an approach based on scenario analysis and an effort to determine what strategies may be resilient against the huge degree of uncertainty that stems from the fact that complex systems are characterized by inherently unpredictable emergent properties. Attempts to predict the outcomes of this crisis have not succeeded, and we have a huge amount of uncertainty about how this will play out. This, of course, is not to say that we should not try to model outcomes, based on the best possible data and science, but simply that we need to plan for quite divergent possible outcomes.

I think this point applies in spades to the issue of how COVID-19 will affect our responses to climate change. I have seen many recent articles that put a positive spin on this, and one of the best of those, in my opinion, is a March 5 article by Thomas Homer-Dixon (“Coronavirus will change the world. It might also lead to a better future”) in the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail. Homer-Dixon makes the important point that it is not just massively greater connectivity that makes us vulnerable, but also much greater uniformity, in both biological and socio-political terms. Given the virtual inevitability of significant tipping points from COVID-19 (and also from climate change, as well as many other changes) the key question is how to create what he calls ‘virtuous cascades’ of positive normative change. I agree with this and made a similar argument, at more length, in the IST2019 conference in Ottawa last year. In summary my argument was in three parts:

Change                     We need to steer change, not create it, . . .

Pathways                  at the level of underlying development paths (not just policies and technologies) . . .

Interventions           in order to normalize sustainability (make it the default, not the change).

So, my answer to the question of how to think about the relationship of COVID-19 to sustainability is that we need to look for leverage points emerging out of the COVID-19 crisis that will allow us to foster and encourage more sustainable outcomes. The strong focus in many climate change strategies on identifying co-benefits, including health co-benefits, offers a starting point for such a search, I think. Perhaps we need to resurrect the idea of ‘no regrets’ or, ‘worth doing anyway’ strategies[i].

On a related point, one issue I see raised in the discussion of COVID-19 and climate change or sustainability focusses on the difference between the big changes in individual behaviour that COVID-19 is causing and the lack of such changes with regard to climate change. Of course, some of the reasons for the difference are obvious (climate change has been around, as an issue for decades, so has become normalized; and the consequences will take place over a much longer time frame) but to me the bigger issue is that we may be barking up the wrong tree in looking for individual behavioural responses to climate change. I have recently published a blog in the Business of Society blog of Copenhagen Business School which argues that information does not change behaviour but there are much better things to do in any case.

For sure we need to build climate change and sustainability responses into any attempt to “bounce-forward” from the COVID-19 crisis (I think it is critical to think in terms of bouncing forward, not bouncing back). A good example of this approach in the energy sector is proposed by Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, here. I also like this article by Sally Uren of Forum for the Future here. The key perhaps is to realize that we are surfing the waves of massive unpredictable change (COVID-19 will not be the only such event), and we need to develop adaptive, integrated and multi-issue response strategies that are resilient to huge uncertainty. In this connection I like looking at the UN Sustainable Development Goals because they outline the range and scale of issues we need to address.

All this suggests that we need to pay close attention to how we think about the resilience of systems. The point about ‘bounce-forward’ resilience vs ‘bounce-back’ resilience, is connected to the question of baselines. Bounce-back strategies assume there is a kind of current trends baseline (sometimes misleadingly called ‘business as usual’; misleading because all business as usual projections I have ever seen are so infeasible as to necessarily lead to massive non-business-as-usual change). The goal of bounce-back strategies is to return to this current trends scenario. But if we believe that substantial change from current trends is required to achieve sustainability, then we don’t want to bounce-back to current trends, but to bounce-forward to more sustainable trajectories. So, we need to pay explicit attention to the baseline scenarios we are talking about. Resilience strategies, for example, should not be tied to current conditions, or to current trends scenarios, but to future scenarios that are intended to move us in more sustainable directions.

This, in turn, has implications for how we think of the mitigation-adaptation relationship. Note that mitigation policies are intended to lead us to more sustainable futures. So, they are inextricably connected to resilience strategies intended to bounce-forward to precisely such futures. It is in that sense that we can think of mitigation as pro-active adaptation.

While these theoretical arguments are important (we need a coherent theoretical framework), the real power of thinking of sustainable futures, and the integration of adaptation and mitigation approaches, is how those approaches play out in practice. In essence I think these two ideas suggest the importance of creating integrated sustainability scenarios, based on participatory community engagement processes, that incorporate both adaptation and mitigation measures and their interactions in a particular jurisdiction[ii]. Such scenarios could be a powerful way to explore the kinds of leverage points I have described above, and the opportunity to tie our responses to COVID-19 to the societal project of creating a more sustainable world.

Of course, in a way, all this is just a long-winded academic way of saying, “never let a good crisis go to waste”. But I am an inveterate optimist.

Footnotes

[i] Robinson, J., Fraser, M., Haites, E., Harvey, D., Jaccard, M., Reinsch, A., & Torrie, R. (1993). Canadian options for greenhouse gas emission reduction (COGGER). Final Report of the COGGER Panel to the Canadian Global Change Program and the Canadian Climate Program Board; Royal Society of Canada.

[ii] See for example, Bizikova, L., Burch, S., Robinson, J., Shaw, A., Sheppard, S. (2011). Utilizing participatory scenario-based approaches to design proactive responses to climate change in the face of uncertainties. (Feichter, J., Gramelsberger, G., eds.) Climate Change and Policy: The Calculability of Climate Change and the Challenge of Uncertainty, Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag; Bizikova, L., Burch, S., Cohen, S., Robinson, J. (2010) A Participatory Integrated Assessment Approach to Local Climate Change Responses: Linking Sustainable Development with Climate Change Adaptation & Mitigation. (O’Brien, K., Kristoffersen, B. and St. Clair, A., eds.) Climate Change, Ethics and Human Security, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157-179; Bizikova, L., Robinson, J., Cohen S. (2007) “Linking climate change and sustainable development at the local level”, Climate Policy, 7: 271-277; Burch, S., Shaw, A., Kristensen, F., Robinson, J., and Dale, A. (2015) Urban Climate Governance through a Sustainability Lens: Exploring the Integration of Adaptation and Mitigation in Four British Columbian Cities, in Johnson, C., Toly, N., and Schroeder, H. (eds.) The Urban Climate Challenge: Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime, London: Routledge; Shaw, A., Burch, S., Kristensen, F., Robinson, J., Dale, A. (2014) “Accelerating the sustainability transition: Exploring synergies between adaptation and mitigation in British Columbian communities”, Global Environmental Change, 25: 41-51