Values and vendettas: Populist science governance in Mexico

Abstract

This article aims to diversify STS perspectives on populism by addressing a sequence of episodes of Mexican science policy in terms of clashes between populism and scientific communities. The article describes a reorientation of Mexican science policy that has destabilized the academic system during the present administration. Specifically, it looks at the legislative project initiated by Mexico’s National Science and Technology Council (Conacyt) to overhaul the national regulatory framework on science, technology and innovation, and controversial political actions taken by Conacyt against the scientific community. Contextualizing these grievances, the article concludes that at stake is a form of ‘trickle-down populism’ that, through systematic authoritarianism, seeks to impose on the academic community a model of ‘populist science governance’.

The circulation of knowledge beyond the academia: On scholarly couplers at porous borders

“…Consequently, one of the central strategies it has been using at its discretion is justified: defining priority issues for the country, without any kind of broad consultation with citizens or stakeholders. Thus, Reyes‐Galindo (2022) has pointed out that, using the vocabulary that is common in debates on the democratisation of science, CONACYT ends up reinforcing the political hierarchy and allocating resources only to the problems it considers to be priorities (and to the groups of scientists, often aligned with the government, that can research them).…”

“…Finally, because in some contexts that we could call populist, the relationship between science and society has been problematised at deeper levels. Thus, some governments ‐ such as that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, since 2018 ‐ hide in progressive discourses attacks on the scientific community, its practices and its interests (Reyes‐Galindo, 2022). In these contexts, scientists are presented as an elite, concerned with their own benefits and prerogatives, interested in trivial or socially useless topics, coupled to corporate or cognitive capitalist interests and enraptured by a Westernised and, for that reason, imperialist, patriarchal and classist model of science (Mede & Schäfer, 2020).…”

“…We conclude by discussing some current issues in Mexico's science and technology policies that provide a context for the heated debates on research evaluation taking place in the country. These debates, however, cannot hide the fact that deeper, populist-rooted changes have been taking place in the country's public policies, with important implications for the production and circulation of knowledge (Reyes-Galindo, 2022).…”