"Science diplomacy: the case for caution"

David Dickson posted some thoughts on the SciDev.Net blog occasioned by a meeting organized in London by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society on the topic “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy“. He points out, quite rightly, that scientists talking about diplomacy often throw out all of the epistemological discipline that characterizes science.

There has been much lively discussion on the value of international collaboration in achieving scientific goals, on the need for researchers to work together on the scientific aspects of global challenges such as climate change and food security, and on the importance of science capacity building in developing countries in order to make this possible.

But there remained little evidence at the end of the meeting on how useful it was to lump all these activities together under the umbrella term of “science diplomacy”.

According to Answers.com, diplomacy is:

The art or practice of conducting international relations, as in negotiating alliances, treaties, and agreements.

It is possible to consider "science diplomacy" in two senses:

• diplomacy for science
• science for diplomacy

In the first sense, one can include the diplomacy carried out:

• to arrange for multinational support for mega-projects or programs, such as those of CERN or SESAME
• to arrange for multinational clearances for cross border research, such as that needed to facilitate access to national waters for oceanographic research voyages
• to allow donor support for efforts to build scientific capacity in developing nations.

Diplomacy, at least in the United States, is generally thought to focus on international economic affairs and secutity. It seems obvious to me that social sciences are relevant to both these concerns. The diplomacy of international economic negotiations must necessarily be informed by economic theory and data. The diplomacy of security should be informed by political science, history, and the other social sciences.

It seems to me that the physical sciences also have their place in science for diplomacy. Wars have been fought over water resources in the past, and will be in the future; hydrology can provide a basis of scientifically agreed upon information on which to base diplomatic negotiations to secure the peace. Similarly, geology can provide scientific information for negotiations over exploitation of mineral and fossil fuel resources. It would be foolish for a nation to embark on negotiations in the ITU on spectrum allocation without understanding the physics of electromagnetic communications.

More generally, however, I think the traditional view of diplomacy has to be expanded to include the diplomacy of global systems problems. Diplomats have to negotiate protections against the international spread of communicable diseases, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of epidemiologists. They must negotiate protections against climate change and its adverse effects, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of climatologists and other scientists. They must negotiate protections against international cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, and would be foolish to do so without the advice of experts involved in the emerging science of cyberspace.

These comments have been written in the spirit that science begins with taxonomy. I would further suggest that science depends on the formulation of specific questions. One question that might be asked is whether science has informed diplomacy in the past. A different question is whether science might inform diplomacy in the future. The sample one would construct to study the second of these questions would be quite different than that for the first.

Departing from science for the more comfortable realm of anecdote, I recall some years ago in a public meeting the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science said that her criterion for a science attaché was a person who could read and understand one or two articles in an issue of Scientific American. Since Scientific American is accessible to the intelligent layperson, I fear she thought that even a rather dim lay person could do the job. The failure of diplomats to adequately take advantage of science in the past of course should not imply that science is intrinsically useless for diplomacy, nor that efforts to strengthen the links between the scientific and diplomatic communities would not bear fruit.