Science and Technology in Development

Abstract

This entry presents the dominant modes of thinking about science and technology in development relations, emphasizing that these categories are interlaced in complicated ways. There is no universal agreement on their synergistic value. The perspectives summarized here include the normative notion that science and technology can lead to development in Western modernity and the establishment of asymmetries in which Western science and technology prevailed over all other knowledge forms. The science and technology used in development since colonial times engendered many a debate about their legitimacy in changing geopolitical landscapes but have been central to international cooperation since World War II. Among the main ingredients were arguments and facts about building up infrastructure and the transfer of technology and institutional designs to countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development; dependence theory as a critical response from the South to development proposals in the politicized world context of the 1970s; successive understandings of poverty, the value of local endogeneity, and sustainability; and competitiveness and territorial issues.

‘Capacity for what? Capacity for whom?’ A decolonial deconstruction of research capacity development practices in the Global South and a proposal for a value-centred approach

“…RCD is generally discussed in evaluative terms to draw best practice. If challenges are identified, they mostly relate to implementation issues, for example, language barriers, authorship arrangements, differing expectations, expertise, interest and agendas, limited institutional and political commitment to research, political or economic instability, or other (see Vasquez et al, 2013 for a review of the literature on RCD). What is not immediately evident in these studies is reflexivity about the universalising premises of the technoscientific paradigm that are replicated in RCD interventions and which preclude consideration of the wider context and epistemological frameworks underpinning scientific knowledge production.…”

“…The aforementioned approach to RCD, rooted in a technoscientific model of development assumed as normative and universal, and lacking sufficient attention to wider social contexts, follows the seemingly apolitical technocracy of current development discourses ( Vessuri & Cancino, 2019 ). These technocratic framings and approaches to RCD emphasise transfers of knowledge, methods, technologies or research processes, presented as politically and value-neutral.…”