I am a rural sociologist and gender integration specialist working primarily in East Africa on food insecurity and biomass energy and energy poverty more generally. This conversation is critically important and I am honored to contribute.
In my professional experience working in East Africa and elsewhere, there is a substantial missing piece when we think about the creation and sharing of knowledge. First, there is the assumption that scientific inquiry is in and of itself sufficient for the formation of policy, leaving out the reality that the issues of key importance to the lab-based sciences may or may not answer the needs of policymakers and communities. Secondly, there is an assumption made that knowledge flows in one direction: lab to policy to communities when in fact complex problems such as the ones we currently face require input and expertise from multiple sources. Finally, culture matters. What I mean by that is that each of us participating in the knowledge generation process is a product of cultural assumptions and habits. Natural scientists who study technical issues, say soil science just as an example, are not equipped, nor do they have the time, to be experts on socio/cultural conditions and the interaction between natural science findings and every local circumstance where that work might be applied. There is a deep need to include social scientists and humanities scholars as well as community members in the research and policymaking process. Moreover, in East Africa where I work at least, virtually no support is offered for basic social science and cultural investigations of agricultural and rural communities. Local languages are seldom taught, leaving those who speak them cut off from the scholarly community and sometimes even the policymakers in their own country, just as an example.
If there was one major contribution the FAO could make to link different types of knowledge together for the improvement of food and agriculture innovation, it would be to fund and sponsor transdisciplinary research and polity teams to study and collaborate with communities and governments to understand local and regional needs and search for appropriate responses. Scientific innovation is critical to policymaking but it is only one pillar in a successful change process. We must even be aware that ideas that look great in the lab may be inappropriate at the grassroots level.
It goes without saying but I will say it anyway, East Africa where I work is full of brilliant young people who could be part of this process if there was international support for research and research translation employment by East Africans. I am all in favor of international collaboration but at the same time, building a research career in East Africa for citizens of African nations, is very difficult. Teaching burdens at universities and dependence on short-term funding at research organizations mean that many serious voices move to the Global North or non-research careers for financial security reasons. This reality makes the kind of policy interface I have described even more challenging to achieve.
Dr. Ruth Mendum