Enabling Transformative Research: Lessons from the Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1999–2015)

Abstract

World leaders at the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York have reconfirmed the relevance of sustainability as the guiding paradigm in countering the development and climate crisis of the Anthropocene. Recent decades however, have been characterized by confusion, contestations, and arbitrariness in defining the nature and pathways of sustainable development. Humanity must urgently find ways to unlock the potential of the sustainability paradigm and organize a sustainability transformation. An emerging sustainability science community has already established considerable consensus on essential features of transformative science and research. Sustainability scholars are providing growing evidence that an emancipatory and democratic construction of sustainable development and more equitable, deliberative, and democratized knowledge generation are pivotal in tackling sustainability challenges. These findings are further underpinned by experiences gained in the Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1999-2015)-a rare case of a long-term, transnational, and transdisciplinary research endeavour already completed. The programme fulfilled the dual role which is compulsory in transformative research: It generated contextualized knowledge and innovation at the science-society interface while simultaneously securing meaningful participation and Southern agency in a co-evolutionary process. This paper offers insight into the programme's adaptive structure and implementation processes, which fostered deliberation, capacity development, and joint programme navigation benchmarked against local needs and broader sustainability demands. The ESAPP experience confirms that, if taken as the overarching frame of reference for all actors involved, the sustainability paradigm unfolds its integrative and transformative power. It enables sustainability-oriented actors from all scientific and practical fields to seek consilience between differing development and innovation paradigms and synchronize their development agendas and research frameworks on behalf of societal co-production of knowledge and innovation. Accordingly, the sustainability paradigm has the power to guide development and innovation policy, and practice out of the current confusion and ineffectiveness.

Introducing the dilemma of societal alignment for inclusive and responsible research and innovation

“…Indeed, a fundamental aspect of bottom-up approaches, but also of co-production mechanisms, is how publics are included and understood in these processes (Ott 2017). While public participation has been claimed to be beneficial in the democratisation of science, technology and innovation, it has also been argued that civil society involvements in very technical projects are mostly top-down exercises in disguise (Irwin 2001;Joly and Kaufmann 2008).…”

“…Since the turn of the millennium, an emerging sustainability science community has been building the epistemological base of equitable science-society interaction (Spangenberg 2011). These sustainability scholars have been moving towards a strong theory of sustainabilityan understanding of sustainability as an emancipatory concept (Dedeurwaerdere 2014;Ott 2017). With this, they aim to acknowledge and mainstream notions of normativity, values, justice, and human rights.…”

“…The challenge lies in crafting such transdisciplinary interactions between representatives from science, policy, business, and civil society, and in opening up processes to the point which allows actors to make meaningful contributions, i.e. to influence decision-making (Ott 2017;Ott and Kiteme 2016).…”

Treaty Preambles and The Environmental Justice Gap

“…The common heritage of mankind principle, explicitly included in some MEAs requires funded, participatory and informational processes that are able also to protect and compensate those suffering environmental harm (Jaeckel et al, 2017). Justice also includes principles of social and relational inclusiveness (Gupta and Vegelin, 2016); transformative sustainability (Ott, 2017) and transformative solutions (Patterson et al, 2017). Disparate political economy approaches apply different approaches to justice, from the freedom and equality of individuals to pursue private goals to state intervention to redress systematic injustices and guarantee equity in social and economic systems and even ‘justice without borders’ (Tan, 2004).…”

“…The CBD preamble used similar language, stating that states were aware of the ‘intrinsic value of biological diversity and of the ecological, genetic, social, economic, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and aesthetic values of biological diversity and its components’. The references to values in the Ramsar and CMS preambles do not suggest transformative sustainability (Ott, 2017) and transformative solutions (Patterson et al, 2017) based on a fair or just distribution of resources, but rather a recognition of and desire to preserve the status quo.…”