We live in a very unequal world. Striking and persistent disparities in development between macro regions, countries, and even regions within countries are apparent. Differences in income, health , education, and other basic aspects of life are often considerable even between families inhabiting the same geographical location. The possibilities human beings have for living valuable lives are highly dependent on where they are born, geographically and socially. The spectacular expansion of scientific and technological knowledge that has taken place during the last centuries has been a source of great benefits. Many of these benefits have largely been denied to large parts of the world population where social ills and inequalities remain unabated in the face of scientific progress. This is the starting point of this book.
We want to explore paths that have already been pursued or that may be opened in the future for better contributions of advanced knowledge to improving living conditions, particularly where and for whom it is more urgent. That is the significance of the subtitle of the book, in search of alternatives for knowledge democratization in the Global South .
Advanced knowledge is not referred to here implying that other types of knowledge are less important or relevant. Advanced knowledge denominates the outputs of academic work and its applications. It is not “Western knowledge” anymore, even if it started developing some centuries ago in a very small part of the Western world. Today, advanced knowledge is cultivated in the whole world, albeit with expressive differences in intensity. This consideration is important because the knowledge involved in grassroots innovations, those innovations done by people who themselves modify different facets of their ways of life, are in a sense much more democratized than advanced knowledge. Such knowledge is widely shared and is focused on the problems that people themselves identify as problems. In contrast, advanced knowledge is relatively concentrated and generally weakly oriented toward solving those kinds of problems. Democratizing advanced knowledge means then to broaden its scope by taking on board a wide set of research problems and innovation projects that until now have been below its radar. It means putting the might of advanced knowledge—a might nobody would deny, even if fearing its consequences—at the service of people until now underserved by it. In this book, “knowledge” will be used mainly referring to “advanced knowledge”. Our main purpose is to explore the possibilities for its democratization. But this delimitation of our topic does not imply in the least a pretension of completeness or a tacit assumption of an exclusionary importance of advanced knowledge.
Knowledge generation and utilization take place in diverse social processes that involve many actors. The set of such actors and their interactions can be thought of as the Innovation System of a given country or region. Power relations within an Innovation System define who gains and who loses from innovation broadly understood as the effective incorporation of new knowledge to social and economic practices. We contend that prevailing policies for science, technology, and innovation foster rather than hamper knowledge-based inequality . If a goal of an efficient Innovation Systems is to favor social inclusion , different policies are needed.
The increasing role of advanced knowledge implies that universities are ever more important actors in the context of Innovation Systems. Combining higher education, research, and knowledge utilization is what universities do or should do. They can do it more or less efficiently and also in ways that restrict or expand the benefits of knowledge. When they efficiently contribute to knowledge democratization , thus cooperating in overcoming inequality and underdevelopment , they may be considered to be Developmental Universities. They can function and work not in solitude or connected only with privileged elites but in the highly integrated contexts of Inclusive Innovation Systems.
So this book is about Developmental Universities in Inclusive Innovation Systems.
An Overview of the Book
The book is divided into two interrelated parts. The first part focuses on the relationship between development and knowledge production . The second part considers the contribution of universities to development.
Chapter 2 starts the first part by discussing the concept of development and how it has been interpreted by different schools of thought in the developmental discourse. For that a sequential analytical model is proposed that considers values, facts, trends, and policies as a coherent whole. The model features four approaches and their interlinkages—the normative, the factual, the prospective, and the propositional approaches —and uses them as analytical tools in the following chapters to explore alternative paths to development. Taking a point of departure in Amartya Sen’s characterization of development as the expansion of capabilities and freedoms as well as paying special attention to environmental issues, the normative notion of Sustainable Human Development is summarized. The core of the factual and prospective approaches is the increasing role of knowledge as the main resource in power relations. That is one of the most relevant processes concerning possibilities and obstacles for Sustainable Human Development. Advanced knowledge becomes directly related to inequalities and even to social exclusion . Consequently, democratization of knowledge appears as a main component in the propositional approach. It exemplifies the main connection between the normative approach and proposed policies given by Sen’s assertion that the expansion of capabilities and freedoms not only characterizes the ends of development but also is its fundamental tool.
Chapter 3 focuses on inequalities related to knowledge, which have been rising during the last decades. What knowledge is generated and how it is used greatly influence the amount and distribution of power in society. Such influence is seen in who are the winners of scientific expansion and economic growth . It is also seen in who are the losers of such fundamental processes that have been changing the human landscape and also the natural landscape. The highly unequal consequences of those processes become apparent by looking at who are less or more damaged by environmental degradation. The notion of learning divides summarizes the description and explanation of knowledge-based inequalities.
Given the power of knowledge, its production should be oriented, above all, to contributing to Sustainable Human Development. In order to translate such a normative assertion into proposals, a factual study of the social processes of learning and innovation is needed. That is the task of Chapter 4. Generating and using knowledge involve many actors and their interactions, a set often called the Innovation System. Innovation processes are shaped by who these actors actually are, what they do, in which ways they relate (or do not relate) to each other, and how power is distributed among them. A key aspect of innovation is how knowledge is incorporated in social practices. Analyzing those issues helps gauging the possibilities of knowledge democratization. When the power of knowledge is apparent in facts and trends, learning processes deserve special attention. They take place in different contexts, more often than not stemming from interactions between several actors, and are closely related to innovation. Democratizing knowledge requires generalizing learning activities. Regions where this does not happen tend to be peripheral; social groups with weak learning opportunities risk exclusion.
Our understanding of the problems of development suggests that a fundamental question concerning social inclusion is what kind of knowledge is being produced and diffused in the innovation system and for whom. This question is not very relevant when social inclusion is expected to result from the trickle-down effect of productivity enhancement and economic growth . But such an effect is quite weak in a world deeply shaped by knowledge-based inequality and by environmental damage. Thus, knowledge-based inclusive policies that foster frugal innovation are central for the propositional approach presented in this book. They are specifically discussed in Chapter 5, in the context of the trends and possibilities considered in the prospective approach. Their aim is to curtail environmental and social threats by making Sustainable Human Development–friendly scenarios more feasible. Fundamental among such scenarios are what can be called Inclusive Innovation Systems.
Universities are usually relevant actors in Innovation Systems. Universities that give priority to the democratization of knowledge as a strategy for development in the context of Inclusive Innovation Systems may be considered developmental universities. Elaborating this notion is the task of the second part of the book. It starts in Chapter 6. There some factors that shape the evolution of universities in the long run are taken into account, particularly in connection with the rise of the so-called Humboldtian University, which was the dominant model up to recent times. Then actual debates and contrasting proposals for transforming universities are discussed. The following questions are considered: which are the main differences among current proposals for the third mission of universities? How are the demands for social responsiveness of universities expressed and by whom? How do universities react and answer to such demands? The currently dominant model of the “entrepreneurial university ” is briefly analyzed.
Chapter 7 introduces the normative idea of developmental universities as an alternative to the dominant models of the recent past and of the present. It starts by characterizing the situation of academic institutions in the Global South . This situation is mainly shaped by the actual traits of underdevelopment . One of them is the comparatively weak commercial demand of advanced knowledge stemming from the economic dynamics of underdeveloped countries and related to national producers of such knowledge, universities above all. Universities should pay attention to social demand of knowledge in general, particularly when it is potentially related to the needs of deprived sectors. Developmental universities expand and democratize knowledge by combining teaching, research, and cooperating with other collective actors in fostering development. This notion and related ones have in common a view of considering knowledge and education as public goods. The possibilities of contrasting models for transforming unive...