ResIST

Work Package 0

Like other European research, ResIST will produce outputs for a variety of bodies and actors in policy and practice.  However, rather than simply produce reports for consultation at the end of the research process, ResIST researchers will initiate on-going engagement with these contexts of application from the beginning of the research. This intention has already shaped the membership of our consortium, and is the main business of our horizontal Work Package 0.     This will act as a space for interrogation of and dialogue with the work of the four other work packages with the aim of retaining focus on the overall objectives of the project to facilitate policy and practice which can support balanced growth.  It will integrate conceptually the work developed in the different WPs, and will be the main forum for testing the policy implications of the work packages with policy stakeholders.

One early piece of integration was a small workshop (held in month 4) bringing in a few guest scholars from complementary work in scientific governance or development studies.  This workshop had two main objectives: to review how each work package is proposing to: (a) clarify and operationalise certain key concepts which run through the project, and (b) to incorporate the ethnic and gender dimension.

Subsequently Work Package 0 is based mostly on the implementation of three sets of consultative meetings in three geoeconomic world regions:  Southern Africa, Latin america and the Caribbean, and Europe.  These world regional meetings take place both at the early part of the project (months 8-12)  and late on (months 32-34). Leaders of all the work package and significant numbers of the whole research team will attend these workshops. 

An important part of the first  set of world regional meetings will be to test the formulation of research issues, and to seek helping the identification of key issues, cases and sources.  We hope that as a result of these meetings we will recruit a small subset of stakeholder who see themselves as potential users of ResIST’s research and who will stay with and comment on its developing conceptual and empirical work. 

As our preliminary research results become available we will test them with this advisory group drawn from the three world regions.  This is a process designed to increase not only the quality and focus of our research but also its impact.  There will be two more speculative and longer term aspects of stakeholder engagement at this stage.  One will be to take the qualitative understandings generated by our research and discuss how far we might progress in future towards assessment tools.  The second will be a re-consideration of ResIST’s scope: other issues and approaches we will have neglected up to that point, and other countries and regions which might be involved.  We may take these developing agendas up in FP7 or other contexts.

One particular and policy sensitive issue will be explored de novo in these stakeholder exchanges. It arises from the observation that research programmes as themselves distributors as well as creators of technical capacities in the forms of human resources, infrastructure, and intellectual property rights.  It will explore how the understanding generated by other work packages, especially WP2 and WP3, will help us to analyse the structural, distributional and representational inequalities embodied in these programmes. It aims at producing a framework for the assessment of research programmes in this respect as well as with respect to the effects of such programmes on the building of research and innovations capacities and the distributional effects of policy programmes.   A research funders’ workshop organised around a major analytical/prospective paper produced under this study will test the potential scope for real time assessment of the distributional consequences of research programmes and their possible remedies.  The workshop will also be asked to consider FP7 as a research site for assessment of new experimental approaches to securing balance between the creation and equitable distribution of technological capacities.

WP0 Milestones and expected results

Time Expected Results
Months 8-12 Three project workshops (one in Southern Africa, one in Latin America/the Caribbean and one in Europe)
Month 12 Framework on structural, representational and distributional inequalities in S&T capacity building
Month 20 Review report 1
Months 28-30 Three project workshops (one in each representative area) assessing drafts of the second review report and the two policy papers
Month 34 Two Policy papers and second review report
Month 36 Final report