New Manifesto ‘ Project - Process and Activities– Seminars

– Background papers

- 2009 STEPS Symposium– Draft Manifesto

Manifesto Roundtables – highlighting different perspectives

"If you had to make one recommendation to the UN, or another global body, about the future of innovation for

sustainability and development, what would it be?"

A New Vision and a 3D Agenda

A New Manifesto

Meeting the interlinked global challenges of poverty reduction, social justice and environmental sustainability is the great moral and political imperative of our age

This requires a new politics of innovation – globally, nationally, locally

Beyond S & T - Innovation

New ways of doing things

Not just science and technology, but innovation systems - encompassing policy practices, institutional capabilities, organisational processes and social relations.

Beyond one-track races

We must move away from progress defined simply by the scale and pace of innovation

And from debates cast as ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ technology

Which science? what technology? whose innovation? what kinds of change?

A New 3D Agenda

DirectionWhich kinds of innovation, along which pathways, towards what goals?

Within any given field, there are many alternativese.g. low carbon electricity production – distributed renewables; centralised renewables; nuclear fission, fossil fuels with CCS….

Political choices and trade-offs

A New 3D Agenda

Power and political-economic interests support and ‘lock-in’ some pathways

But they obscure and ‘crowd-out’ otherse.g. Food supply and hunger – High-input industrial agriculture vs. low-input alternatives for risky, resource-poor settings

Challenge the directions of dominant pathways, recognise and support alternatives

A New 3D Agenda

DistributionWho is innovation for? Whose innovation counts? Who gains and who loses?

Inclusive deliberation over equity and justice implications

Poorer and vulnerable people centre-stage – choosing, promoting, innovating

A New 3D Agenda

Enabling and building on grassroots and bottom-up innovation processese.g. farmers’ innovations rooted in local knowledge; participatory plant breeding e.g. small businesses innovating to meet the demands of low-income groups

Citizen initiatives and social movements

A New 3D Agenda

DiversityWhat – and how many kinds of - innovation do we need to address any particular challenge?

Diversity of innovation pathways is vital:•To avoid lock-in•For sensitivity to varied ecological, economic, and

cultural settings•For resilience in the face of uncertainty

A New 3D Agenda

Protecting creative experiments in diverse nichese.g. sustainable housing

Integrating technical with social and organisational innovatione.g. Community-Led Total Sanitation

Politics of technological diversity

A Vision for Innovation

Science, technology and innovation work far more directly for social justice, poverty alleviation and the environment.

The energy, creativity and ingenuity of users, workers, consumers, citizens, activists, farmers and small businesses is harnessed and supported.

Innovation is shaped, designed and regulated through inclusive, democratic and accountable processes.

A deliberate diversity of innovation pathways flourishes.

Areas for Action

Agenda Setting Establish national ‘Strategic Innovation Fora’ that allow diverse stakeholders - including citizens’ groups and social movements representing marginalised interests - to scrutinise investments in science, technology and innovation and report to parliaments.

Establish an international 'Global Innovation Commission' under a United Nations umbrella to facilitate open, transparent political debate about major technology investments with global or trans-boundary implications.

Areas for Action

Funding

Require public and private bodies investing in science, technology and innovation to ensure that a significant and increasing proportion of investments are directly focused on poverty alleviation, social justice and sustainability, with transparent reporting.

Enhance incentives for private sector investment geared to these challenges: e.g. advance purchase agreements, technology prizes, tax breaks.

Make specific funding allocations to support experimentation in niches, and networking and learning across these.

Establish procedures to involve end users in the allocation of funding.

Areas for Action

Capacity Building

Increase investment in scientific capacity-building that trains 'bridging professionals' who connect research and development activity with business, social entrepreneurs and users.

Invest in new or refashioned institutions that actively link science and technology to located needs and demands, and build new learning platforms.

Areas for Action

Organising

Build and support organisations and networks that link public, private and civil society groups, and facilitate informal, lateral sharing of innovation.

Extend policy focus from basic science, to emphasise other aspects of the innovation system, including engineering, design, science services, and social entrepreneurship.

Increase support for open source innovation platforms, and limit narrowly-defined property-based systems.

Areas for Action

Monitoring, Evaluation and Accountability

Establish benchmark criteria – nationally and globally - relating to the priorities of poverty alleviation, social justice and environmental sustainability as the basis of indicators for monitoring innovation systems.

Improve and shift data collection systems and methodologies to enable assessment of the directions, diversity and distributional outcomes of innovation efforts.

Require reporting on these criteria to be open to public scrutiny.

Realising the Vision

Catalysing a vigorous, new global politics of innovation

Involving diverse people, places, contributions

Today

• Responses to the New Manifesto

• Reflections from two other, African and Indian Manifestos

• Breakout groups around Areas for Action