The Wellcome Trust, a British-domiciled research foundation, is recruiting for a “Head of Global Science Policy”. This led to me to wonder what “global science policy” could possibly mean. I will say I was stumped as I am not aware that there is a global science policy.
Science policy is a national phenomenon and the degree of cross-border policy is relatively low even on a bilateral basis, let along globally, and tends to be more rhetorical than substantive.
The UN system and the multilateral development banks undertake science and research, but it is not shaped as a whole, although it does have some emergent qualities, as I noted in a report in 2022. Logically, however, that would be termed “science policy in/with/for the UN system” and could, indeed be, a concrete activity to try to help shepherd it into a more coherent whole, as much as politically possible.
ODA has elements of science and research but the use of the term in that context evokes colonial meanings, as a policy for, and of, science imposed by the Global Minority on the Global Majority. Possibly, the phrase could refer to the intellectual property regime, which is also disadvantageous to the Global Majority.
If we read the word policy loosely, the closest to a global science policy are probably the investment programs of major multinational firms, which are often genuinely cross border activities and, in terms of governments, the shaping effect of US policies, as historically the major producer, and originator, of scientific knowledge. The US certainly seeks to shape the global scientific environment and very explicitly so if we listen to figures such Michael Kratsios.
Finally, the term might be read as some kind of emergent but as yet undefined property of the various national science policies. This would be very difficult to determine in practice. Perhaps close knowledge of the national policy debates in a handful of countries from each continent could be used as a base data set. Assembling that data would be a lot of work and I am not sure we can know the payoff, if there is one, before the data has been gathered, but it might reveal something. I am not talking about the summaries prepared by OECD, UNESCO, et al., but a really forensic, historically-informed, and politically sophisticated view.
I am sure there are some other meanings we could attribute to the term. But, overall, we seem to have a manager for a concept that does not exist, and perhaps a more concrete objective would have been easier to understand and get behind.
