Strengthening science policies for orienting knowledge production beyond Sustainable Development Goals in Latin America

Latin America continues to experience low utilization of locally produced knowledge to overcome social, economic and environmental challenges. In addition, science policies have encountered difficulties in generating and capturing innovations from the productive sectors of these countries.

This project seeks to analyze the capacity of science and technology policies in Brazil, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic to guide the changes in research content and knowledge production methods over time towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To date, the effectiveness of these policies and instruments in achieving these goals has not been assessed in Latin America. Therefore, it is timely to assess the extent to which science and technology policy instruments have been effective (or not) in guiding knowledge toward the SDGs, and what impacts they have had on the knowledge produced.

The SDG framework will be used as a reference to understand policies that orient science towards global collaboration schemes. A series of focused studies will be conducted in the participating countries to test a methodology to capture the evolution of research methods and content, as well as the evolution of research agendas over a specific period, to examine the effectiveness of the implemented policy mechanisms. The aim is to influence the design of a new generation of science policies — with a broader range of stakeholders — that will more effectively guide scientific knowledge to overcome historically identified obstacles.