Webinar held on 12th May 2022
Author: Josephat Okemwa
Background to the webinar
Covid -19 has brought the relevance of science, innovation and evidence into everyday conversations. In these conversations, the quality and nature of innovation, evidence and science advice and their ability to address critical societal issues are being heavily scrutinised for the extent to which they position innovation as both a technical and social endeavour. The pandemic has buttressed long-established arguments that innovation is not only about new technological innovations like new drugs or vaccines, but also introduction of new organizational approaches or behaviours that (should) facilitate timely and equitable access to those drugs and vaccines. The context of the pandemic is dynamic and pervasive, with new data and competing models emerging in attempts to define and anticipate a rapidly changing reality. This raises both challenges and opportunities in the urgent need to recognize, develop, and test scalable solutions and improvements in health policies, systems, products, technologies, services, and delivery methods to improve treatment, education, outreach, research quality and delivery, and overall access to health care at global and local scales. The webinar explored and reflected on some of the implications of these new widely shared perspectives on the relevance and quality of science and innovation for the way we configure and deploy STI policies and innovation strategies in Sub Saharan Africa. It attracted over 60 participants from within and outside Africa. It was designed to be interactive and engaging such that the participants freely expressed their opinions about the topic of discussion. This was achieved through plenary presentations, as well as the use of the chat function. The speakers were Prof. Joanna Chataway and Dr. Julius Mugwagwa from University College London, UK. The session was moderated by Prof. Rebecca Hanlin.
Key Messages
- The COVID-19 pandemic has provided lessons on how science and policy interact.
- Key influencers and knowledgeable intermediaries are important in opening doors for innovation to move swiftly
- Lowering interaction barriers and cultivating institutional entrepreneurship in a time of need is important – promoting more ‘pollination’ of effective policy responses is needed.
- We need much more research being done in the low and low-middle income countries which in turn, requires more funding.
- But much of the success of research and its ability to influence policy will be dependent on relationship building.
- Pollinators – individuals and organisations that encourage and promote the sharing of knowledge between different stakeholders – will be essential to increase effective connection between research, science, technology, innovation and policy.
Introduction
Innovation systems literature has taught us a lot about how different parts of the innovation systems can be integrated to achieve innovation goals. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has been important in getting STI stakeholders to sit back and ask: how have places with strong scientific institutions performed during the pandemic? How have they leveraged the push pull relationship to confront challenges and harness opportunities? What can we learn about what’s needed in in different African countries to help make the connections? Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a lot of emphasis on looking at how evidence has met the needs of people during the pandemic and inform policy. However, when you look at countries with the best research institutions like the UK, beyond health, the extent to which research has informed our response to COVID-19 seems to be very limited. There are many reasons for this including our learning and lack thereof about how to match between supply and demand and how to integrate across subsystems of research to provide science advice.
A Pollinator concept of linking evidence and policy
The first part of the webinar focused on how the pandemic has opened up opportunities for new ways of ensuring science, technology, innovation and policy actors interact. Prof. Chataway noted that there were several approaches that have been used to promote the best way to bridge policy and research. Common approaches include dissemination events, policy briefs, post research policy briefs and post research engagement.
Against the backdrop of these routine approaches, Prof. Chataway informed the audience that there was another emerging concept that was perhaps useful: the idea of the “policy pollinator”. This concept focuses on the idea that the more people interact, the more activities, people and organizations connect to bring together the supply of research and science, advice and demand, knowledge synthesis science advice work. In turn this further encourages networks to build connections between different spaces be it in the area of regulation or allocation of research funding for example. Creating spaces for networking and knowledge exchange enable individuals and organisations to pollinate the science-policy space with new ideas.
This is very different from the classically brokering model which tends to encourage that stakeholders are bought into to the research space at the end of a project during knowledge synthesis activities. The pollination concept focuses on building relationships, co-producing knowledge, integrating knowledge from multiple perspectives, and shaping agendas, often across policy and evidence silos. In so doing, it acknowledges the diversity and plurality of actors and approaches needed, the need to be open, transparent and keep the dialogue going and the importance of operating with a degree of humility.
Reflections on knowledge systems, notion of brokering, and local capabilities.
Drawing from multiple streams of work (Mugwagwa ,2020; Mugwagwa et al, 2020; Banda et al, 2021), the second part of the webinar, focused on case studies that highlight the complexity of supporting and promoting the creation and embedding of policy pollinators.
Dr. Mugwagwa noted that the pandemic has revealed vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity which have led to a shifting level of capability, accountability, and responsibility. It has exposed tensions between science, politics, and society, as well as a disconnection between global and local not just as a place but location in terms of agency and local empowerment. He noted that on the one hand, there were examples across the African continent of interdisciplinary learning and collaboration in the development of new breathing apparatus to assist patients with COVID to breath. He also noted that on the other hand the pandemic ushered in a new wave of transitional approaches to international relations, some kind retreat to narrower national interests. The ability to respond locally to emergency needs has been determined by two big factors namely, accumulated manufacturing capabilities and institutional structures that shape and constrain innovation such as university technological capacities, regulatory structures, and procurement skills. While the COVID-19 has opened a lot of innovative activity on the continent in relation to the production of personal protective equipment, oxygen therapy and sanitizers, on the other side of the spectrum, African countries have been held at the back of the queue for vaccines and other support.
A key requirement to overcome this juxtaposition is the need for more local innovation and manufacturing capabilities to be built. This requires more policy pollination between STI actors and policy makers to ensure policy is as enabling as possible.
Dr. Mugwagwa noted that while the case study of local pharmaceutical manufacturing during the pandemic highlights the difficulties of policy pollination, the Science Granting Councils Initiative highlights a more positive opportunity for policy pollination.
He noted that African science councils have been able to leverage their agency and influence national responses either directly as members of national Covid-19 response task forces or through feeding ideas, evidence, and advice from a range of different contexts into response mechanisms. SGCs have played a big role as policy pollinators by lobbying for funding, issuing calls for research that were responding to pandemic and funding relevant calls.
Way forward
The webinar finished with a discussion on how to move the interface between STI and policy forward. It was noted that we need much more research done in the low and low-middle income countries which in turn, requires more funding. At the same time, it was noted that much of the success of research and its ability to influence policy will be dependent on relationship building.
Key to relationship building is the credibility embodied in individuals, as much as it should also be in the systems, but it is the individuals that occupy spaces within systems and may shift and shape the credibility in different ways. Covid-19 has taught us that in Africa, we have diverse policy cultures and even within countries, we have different loci of policy making. We require different pollinators in a country targeting different spaces depending on the resource based in the country. There is need to develop capacities of pollinators who will develop policies in Africa. This is because, imported policies tend to undermine the potential role that actors who could function as pollinators could play in developing countries. For developing countries, fundraising has been made to develop domestic competence in policymaking in a way that is responsive to the local. Also, there needs to be documentation of these things that have worked well, and also, the need for local agency and local capabilities.
Speakers
Prof. Joanna Chataway is the head of department of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at University College London (UCL). She is a leader in the field of science and innovation policy and, with colleagues at STEaPP, is spearheading new integrated approaches to researching and teaching science policy and science advice. She has extensive experience in the fields of interdisciplinary co-produced policy analysis, evaluation approaches and methodologies, public and private sector intersects, international development, health research and innovation policy, capacity building, equity and innovation. She is interested in successfully navigating the tensions between demands and requirements of policy research and academic rigour. She Joanna has strong publications record and demonstrable policy impact. She has managed highly successful interdisciplinary research teams and projects across a number of academic and policy research contexts. She contributes assessment and advice to South African, Kenyan and other Research Councils.
Dr. Julius Mugwagwa is an Associate Professor in Innovation and Development at the UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP). He is an interdisciplinary academic whose passion is research and teaching on the governance and development implications of technologies and innovations. His most recent research endeavours have focused particularly on technologies and innovations in health care and agricultural systems in low- and middle-income countries. He also the thematic director of the Global Health cluster at the Global Governance Institute (GGI), UCL. This thematic area explores how policy interventions at different levels, from global to local, can best be aligned and reframed to tackle persistent and emerging health issues and their determinants.
Prof. Rebecca Hanlin is an Innovation and Development Specialist for AfricaLics based at African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi, Kenya and a Professor within the DSI/NRF/Newton Fund Trilateral Research Chair in Transformative Innovation, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development at the University of Johannesburg. Prof. Hanlin has spent the last 10 years advocating and working to strengthen innovation studies training in universities in Africa and is currently part of a team setting up the first African matching service between policy makers and science, technology and innovation studies scholars.