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Can research advise politics?
03/2003
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Development and Peace Foundation conference
Can research advise politics?
When the Development and Peace Foundation (SEF) in Duisburg issued an invitation to an expanded meeting of its Advisory Board it raised great hopes. It said its aim was to focus more strongly again on development, which the Foundation's activities had long neglected. The invitation also declared the relationship of development policy to other policy fields to be a fundamental problem. Was the dialogue between academia and politicians, which (at any rate for this policy area) has stalled badly, to be got going again? Was one to meet there academics who would deal with the problems faced by politicians every day, in order to advise them on solving them? Onetime Development Minister Egon Bahr, a member of the SEF's Board of Trustees, declared in advance that he expected the contributions to the conference to deliver "clearly defined positions on the changed framework conditions of development assistance".
What was then offered by the conference, titled "Development: myth or realistic political goal?" and held at Bremen City Hall, January 24-25, fell far short of such expectations. The politicians who took part could well have had the impression that they were hearing the same "Glass Bead Game"-playing, theoretical academics as at so many other conferences. Everything was certainly very interesting. Robert Kappel, of the University of Leipzig, reaffirmed his thoughts that the African countries were non-developable, and postulated that capital alone could not bring about development; it depended on the endogenous factors. Fred Scholz, of the Free University of Berlin, presented a "model of global fragmentation" and stated that there was development only in the "acting global cities", while the "excluded remainder of the world", the new periphery, stagnated.
BMZ department head Michael Hofmann asked what recommendations for action by politicians arose from that. Franz Nuscheler, of the University of Duisburg, replied that politicians could expect practical advice from academics only if the latter were included actively in analysis of the problems, as the British government's Department for International Development (DFID) was doing. Instead, the German Development Ministry put up a barrier against research. Several conference participants complained that the BMZ accepted only research findings that suited it.
The conference can nevertheless bear fruit. The shortcomings have become clear. On the sidelines, the participants discussed how then the two sides could come together in a meaningful way. That the academics take on the questions the politicians hold up to them, and that the politicians not shrink from asking questions and taking note of the answers. Lothar Brock, of the University of Frankfurt, suggested a global stocktaking. In which direction was the development of development policy going? What was regarded as the state of the art? That there is no such compendium, that is has to be called for, shows that the two sides have not done their homework.
Net resources:
Development and Peace Foundation: www.sef-bonn.org
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