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Keynote Address by H. E. Professor Michael OMOLEWA
President of the UNESCO General Conference and
Ambassador and Permanet Delegate of Nigeria to UNESCO
at the 7th Session of the Intergovernmental Council
for the "Management of Social Transformations" [MOST]
Programme...25 to 27 July, 2005: Room IV; UNESCO
Your Excellency, Minister of Social Development,
Solidarity and the Elderly, of Mali,
Your Excellency, Vice-Minister of
Social Development of Argentina,
Chairman of the Intergovernmental Council,
Assistant Director-General of
the Social and Human Sciences,
Excellencies,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
It is a great pleasure for me to address you at the opening of this 7th Session
of the Intergovernmental Council of the Management of Social Transformations
Programme. I know that MOST has been launched in 1994, as the only
intergovernmental research programme of UNESCO dealing with the social
sciences. It joined the four intergovernmental sister programmes in the
natural sciences, the MAB, IHP, IGCP and IOC. I also am informed that
MOST undertook a major evaluation in 2002/2003, of the huge work achieved
by the interdisciplinary and international comparative research networks that
the programme created during its first life span.
It was indeed at your last session, in 2003, that you provided MOST with a set of
clear recommendations how to concentrate and re-focus on its core-business: how
to make social science research useful, usable and used? This is mindful of MOST’s
position at the cross-roads between the social sciences and the policy platform
of a UN agency, such as UNESCO. It is also in line with UNESCO’s Medium Term
Strategy, 31 C/4. Over the next three days, you will discuss new modalities of
social science co-operation and co-ordination with other societal stakeholders.
You will debate the new agenda focused on themes such as the monitoring of social
problems, the transfer of research results to the decision-making level, the
timeliness of this undertaking. I myself, as a diplomat, am far away from the
naïve assumption that policy and knowledge stand in a direct or unproblematic
relation to each other. I am, by the virtue of my profession, well placed to
know that it is a relationship that needs to be mediated. What is at stake,
though, is a long-term objective.
It is the strengthening of democracy through instilling a new culture of
evidence-based policy-making. Here in this Council session, you, the
distinguished member states who are the owners of this social science
programme, will also develop strategies to ensure the commitment of
political bodies to support the implementation of such an agenda.
The context of this opening is a welcome opportunity for me to share with
you some broader ideas on the function of the social sciences at UNESCO, -
at a time when the world is experiencing transformations of an enormous
scope at unprecedented speed. Nearly 6 decades ago, when the first
beginnings of a UNESCO Secretariat were set up in the early spring of
1946, the founders of UNESCO recommended that the social sciences occupy
a central position in monitoring the social integration of humanity.
They defined the social sciences as both positive-empirical and critical
disciplines, which basically work on questions of knowledge and on facts.
Like all other United Nations organizations, UNESCO is both a user and a
producer of social science, as a knowledge base for its own actions, through
research and analysis, statistical data, observation, monitoring, in areas
such as basic and higher education, the cultural dimension of development,
the environment, the relations between science, technology and society, and
Communication. Over the six decades, UNESCO has been very active in
international social science. It has helped major scientific NGOs into
existence, internationally and regionally; it produced the World Report on
the Social Sciences just before the turn of the last century; it produces,
for 56 years now, the reputed International Social Science Journal. It
therefore acquired a considerable experience in promoting teaching, training,
research, institution-building and co-operation at both the global and the
regional levels. The nineties have been an important period of stock-taking
as regards our inherited traditions of social knowledge. Social scientists
in universities, research institutes and international associations have
participated in this reassessment of the intellectual traditions and major
scientific achievements of the social sciences in our century. Significantly,
UNESCO’s MOST Programme came also into existence in the early nineties.
The world today faces a knowledge revolution. It more than ever needs
innovative thinking as well as effective policy-making and evaluation.
The new ideas and the politics and criteria of evaluation should be based
on high quality data and on knowledge derived from social scientific research,
analysis and monitoring. If I am allowed to borrow a metaphor from the theory
of evolution, the social sciences are here to provide the ‘missing link’
between reflection and action. Such a missing link at least partly explains
many policy failures, for example in economic development, technology transfer,
or, likewise, on environmental issues.
The founders of UNESCO, whom I quoted earlier, had clearly identified the
problem in 1946, and recommended that ‘the social sciences occupy a central
position in the programmes of UNESCO . . . [and] . . . secure the essential
unity of UNESCO’s task’. I believe that the social sciences needed to mature
over time to move closer to this challenge. A lot of “housecleaning “was needed.
The social sciences have indeed made considerable progress in the last half of
the 20th century. A self-critical re-orientation of the social sciences implies
two questions: What kind of knowledge? Knowledge for what and for whom? The first
question entails scrutinizing concepts, models and methods which guide the
interpretation of the social world. The second question - knowledge for what
and for whom? - raises the issue of the pertinence of social knowledge to the
challenges of our times. There is in fact an awareness that effective
policy-making requires a solid socio-economic and cultural knowledge base;
and a huge demand for evidence from social science research.
Yet there continues to be a disjuncture, a mismatch between the demand
from society and the supply from the social sciences. Once again, this
is not a relationship which will come forth at once: it needs to be
facilitated and mediated! In addition, the convergence of three distinct
but interconnected trends- unrelenting globalization, increasing knowledge
intensity of decision-making and growing worldwide electronic connectivity
is creating powerful challenges for politics. Increased information demands
in this rapidly changing and challenging environment by far surpass existing
capabilities for access, retrieval, organization, interpretation, and overall
use. This situation is severely impeding prevailing capabilities for
decision-making in both national and international contexts.
But this reality creates also a condition of ‘mutual hostage’ for research
advances in two diverse domains of scholarship, the one relating to the social
sciences as a whole, and the other one to information technology (IT). Each
needs the other in order to make serious headway in knowledge, theory, and
applications. Unless advances in information technologies remain ‘one step
ahead’ of emergent realities and related complexities, strategies for better
understanding and focused responding to critical global challenges through
evidence-based policies will be severely impeded at both national and
international levels. Once again, you need a set-up where the relationship
is facilitated and mediated. Why not turn to UNESCO? The examples could
go on and on.
Social Science as you are discussing here at your meeting, social science
explicitly aimed at producing policy-oriented knowledge and enhancing
co-operation between social scientists and decision-makers, such social
science has, by the virtue of its needs, its legitimate place in UNESCO.
Underlying all these topics is a concern of utmost importance, a concern
intimately related to UNESCO's mission: the social sciences’ central role
with respect to the universal ideals of democracy and human rights. In the
face of the multitude of problems induced by the prevailing mode of
globalization - the growing contradiction between wealth and impoverishment,
social marginalization, the commodification of culture, xenophobia, exclusion,
poverty, misery, violence and terrorism, - in the face of all these - the
social sciences must demonstrate the viability of the modern vision of
human rights and democracy.
The ideals of liberty, justice, equality and solidarity can indeed
counterbalance the trends of uniformization, of disenchantment, of
distrust and injustice. The social sciences must help the emergence
of structures which accommodate religious, linguistic and historical
diversity. Structures which mediate between North and South, structures
which are integrating a human rights-based approach into capacity-building
programmes, which are encouraging theoretical and empirical research and
disseminating knowledge on human rights. Structures which are further
promoting human rights education as an integral part of the right to
education, and developing and implementing human rights standards.
This requires a clear prospective vision. And the mediation between action
and vision requires, in turn, well-founded social sciences. The social
sciences can also bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences
and reconnect trans-disciplinary social science to an ethical vision. As
the “intellectual arm” of the UN system, our Organization also has a specific
ethical mandate, and has stepped up efforts to tackle the ethical implications
of science and technology. As we know, scientists, individually and collectively,
are increasingly caught up in complex ethical issues and problems with which
they may be ill equipped to deal. Examples include the dilemmas associated with
bioethics, particularly in terms of the human genome, and info-ethics.
As you see: my considerations have been derived from UNESCO’s six decades
of action and experience in the international social sciences and the lessons
we learned as regards the role the latter should be playing vis-à-vis societies
at large. No other field of knowledge can so decisively contribute to building
a bridge between reflection and thought about human affairs, on the one hand,
and policy and action to improve the lives of human beings, on the other.
I am wishing you every success for your work…
Thank you
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