Professor Sir Hans Singer considered it one of the three most important reports he had been involved in writing. Given Prof. Singer’s illustrious career spanning seven decades from 1936, that is quite an endorsement. The report in question is The Sussex Manifesto: Science and Technology to Developing Countries during the Second Development Decade (1970).

Professor Geoff Oldham, one of the original report’s co-authors and now working on our New Manifesto project, gave a STEPS Centre seminar in February 2008 about the writing of the Sussex Manifesto, its controversial reception and the impact it had on science and technology for development, almost 40 years after he and the rest of The Sussex Group wrote it.

>> Watch the full-length version of this Seminar on blip.tv

Prof. Oldham is a former director of SPRU Science and Technology Policy Research, former chairman of the United Nations Advisory Committee on Science and Technology for Development, and for five years was the UK Delegate to the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development.

He not only gave us a personal potted history of the writing of the Manifesto, but reflected candidly on what he believes The Sussex Group got right, what they got wrong, whether the report made any difference and finally, what he might have included had he helped write the same document today.

The seven-strong Sussex Group – Profs Oldham and Singer, Charles Cooper, R.C. Desai, Christopher Freeman, Oscar Gish and Stephen Hill – were an early example of collaboration between IDS and SPRU at the University of Sussex, which both opened their doors in 1966.

Causing controversy at the UN
The joint IDS/SPRU team, with Prof. Singer as chair, was asked by the Office of Science and Technology at the UN to give an overview of the issues around science and technology for development, complete with diagnostics and some effort at solutions. The commissioned report was intended to serve as the introductory chapter to the UN World Plan of Action on Science and Technology for Development for the ‘Second UN Development Decade’, the 1970s.

“So we were given the opportunity of looking forward 10 years, and the group made some radical suggestions, for the time at least,” said Prof. Oldham. And it was those radical suggestions that garnered a radical response from the UN: they rejected the report. It was too extreme, and it contained ‘targets’. At the time the UN did not consider it appropriate for a group of academics to be advocating targets. The UN claimed ownership over the report and forbid the Sussex Group from publishing it.

After the efforts that had been dedicated to the production of the report, this response was unacceptable. Oldham and Freeman, who had already flown to Ethiopia to represent the Sussex Group, demanded the right to present their recommendations at the dedicated UN meeting in Addis Ababa. They also decided that whether or not the UN would use the report, they were going to publish it anyway because they, quite rightly, believed the work was important.

So they took the highly unusual, some might say inflammatory, step of challenging the UN to sue them. After the mayhem died down, the UN agreed to publish the “manifesto” (as it was later referred to in the UN General Assembly) as an annex to the final report, but that they instead would write the introductory chapter.

Opportunities taken, and missed
Prof. Oldham believes that among the things The Sussex group did well were demonstrating the need for a systems approach for science and technology for development (albeit focussing mainly on science and technology for economic development as defined in their Terms of Reference); showing the need to consider demand for science and technology as well as supply; and developing indicators and targets.

But more prominence should have been given to social and environmental issues, Prof. Oldham said. Making no mention of “innovation” and ignoring implicit science and technology policy in governments’ economic and fiscal policies were failings, he believes. Ethical issues and the gender dimension were also ignored: “In hindsight we should have recognised them but we didn’t do them justice,” he added.

Positive impacts
The Manifesto did have positive impacts, said Prof. Oldham, including raising awareness of science and technology in UN circles, at a time when there was hostility to any increase in expenditure to science and technology; impacting on the design of IDRC – the Canadian International Development Research Centre - and being used for teaching courses in both North and South universities.

But if The Sussex Group was writing the report today, five further issues would be included: globalisation; poverty; market economies; the growth of science and technology capabilities in emerging economies; and the impact of new technologies, such as IT, biotechnology and nanotechnology.

The worlds of science, technology and development have changed beyond recognition since 1970, but in producing such influential reports, Prof. Oldham believes two things remain as important today as they were forty years ago: creating an esprit de corps among group members to build on their strengths and those of their institutions; and being optimistic about the future.

Resources

>> The Sussex Manifesto on Wikipedia

>> The 1970 Sussex Manifesto: Science and Technology to Developing Countries during the Second Development Decade (pdf 1.5MB)

>> A copy of the full UN report - Science and Technology for Development: Proposals for the Second United Nations Development Decade is available. Email to request a copy (the Sussex Manifesto is Annex II)

>> Watch the video clip of Geoff Oldham’s seminar (YouTube)

>> Watch the full-length video of Geoff Oldham’s seminar (blip.tv)

>> Listen to the podcast of Geoff Oldham’s seminar

>> Read Geoff Oldham’s presentation (pdf 44kb)

>> Read the seminar blog

>>See photos (link to Flickr)

Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto recommends new ways of linking science and innovation to development for a more sustainable, equitable and resilient future.

The full text is now available to download free. You can order a hard copy from the IDS shop, at a cost of £5.

>> Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto (pdf 1MB)

A multimedia version, with extra audio, video and documents, is also available as a CD or to browse on this website.

The production of the Manifesto was co-supported by UKIERI.

The multimedia version of Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto, is exactly the same text as the printed  version but helps bring the issues raised to life with video, audio and other materials.

The material used is a mixture of video, audio and reports collected during the course of the manifesto project, including clips from some of the 20 roundtables that have been run in association with the project, as well as relevant resources drawn from the work of other people and organisations.

Some of these materials concur with the ideas put forward in the New Manifesto, whilst others put forward different perspectives. Our aim is to illustrate these differences and encourage debate and action around these issues into the future. To that end, we welcome any comments or examples of innovation for development, which you can send to us via email to steps-centre@ids.ac.uk for posting on this site. Or you can comment via our blog.

The multimedia manifesto is available on CD, which may be helpful for people with limited or no internet access.  Those without access to the net will be able to view much of the video, audio and reports presented here as it is loaded on to the CD, while those with an internet connection will also be able to view the ‘additional online resources’.
Efforts have been made to ensure that those using older computer software or hardware will be able to view the materials.

The production of the Multimedia Manifesto was co-supported by UKIERI.

» Read the Multimedia Manifesto online

» Download a copy of Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto (pdf 1MB)

» Request a copy of the multimedia manifesto on CD

» Order a printed copy of the New Manifesto, cost £5.00 from the IDS bookshop

» Online press pack

» Photos from the launch (link to Flickr)

There is a recognised relationship between economic growth and technical progress; however the intimacies of the relationship includes technical development in relation to the market in which it serves together with the role of institutions ability to influence the rate and direction of technical change, the theories of technical change have been categorised as demand-pull and technology-push. Dosi argues that demand-pull categorises technical progress as the adoption of a given technology from a number of options while technology-push does not consider economic activity. Rather, technical progress results from technical and economic interactions with the resulting specific outcomes termed ‘technological paradigms’ moreover, the selection, promotion and establishment of a paradigm is directly influenced by both economic and institutional dynamics.

Dosi is unable to state that economic and institutional dynamics have a pre-determined outcome and is thus unable to offer a mathematical ‘model’ to either predict of engineer a specific technical paradigm. However, he makes a number of observations; technological paradigms can be considered as a cluster of potential technical solutions to a problem, they have a need for knowledge, skills and experience and they are not necessarily all conquering in their outcome or implementation. Dosi also acknowledges that similarities between science and technology used in his hypothesis may be tenuous and thus not entirely reliable.

Developed in various documents from the early 1980s onwards, the Capability Approach (CA) evaluates well-being in terms of “capabilities”, the real opportunities available to individuals to do and be what they have reason to value. The selection and weighting of these capabilities depend on personal value judgments and constitute a choice between possible life-styles. The development process is hence seen as one of expanding capabilities.

The CA has since emerged as the leading alternative to standard economic frameworks for thinking about poverty, inequality and human development generally and it underpins the Human Development Index used in the UN Development Programme’s annual Human Development Reports.
The CA also constitutes a conceptual framework for sustainable development at a global scale: Sustainable development aims to ensure well-being of present and future generations and this is only possible if worldwide population has enough capabilities to satisfy its needs. In this sense the approach provides a framework to assess individual well-being, evaluate social arrangements and design policies and proposals about social change in society.

See Sen, A. (1983) Poor, relatively speaking. Oxford Economic Papers (New Series) 35(2), 153-169

Since its publication in 2005, this book has inspired significant innovations, not in technological change, but instead in the development of advocacy programs for childhood development and environmental conservation. Spurring a national dialogue between teachers, physical and mental health professionals, parents and environmentalists, a number of organizations have now been created with the sole aim of reconnecting children with nature. Some examples include, the ‘Urban Wildlife Refuge Initiative’, which aims at transporting kids to national wildlife parks where they can freely explore and learn about the ecosystems surrounding their cities or the ‘Green Hour Program’, which regularly outlines practical methods of reconnecting kids with nature. In defining and outlining the negative effects of a growing trend, this book has inspired innovation in advocacy programs that will hopefully lead to increased environmental awareness and sustainability.

A self-published occasional ecology magazine, which ran from 1968-1974 (with various successors), The Whole Earth Catalog provided a rallying point for the US environmental movement, ‘where primitive wood stoves and survivalist supplies for counterculture neo-Luddites share the page with personal computers, geodesic domes, and oscilloscopes.’ (Kirk, 2001: 375)
Arguably the point at which the idea of ‘alternative technologies’ began to diffuse into the public consciousness, with the birth of a more nuanced and technologically-literate strain of green politics.

The term is built on the earlier work by Karl Marx, and has helped somewhat describe the role of small and large firms within industries. It is important within innovation for sustainability as it promotes the idea that creating something new which makes the current process/idea/way of thinking redundant should not be feared, and that it is necessary for continuous innovative improvements.