Africa-EU Summit Science Dialogue Events

The Sustainability, Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress: Creating a shared community and shared language/vocabulary around societally inclusive science for global environmental change.

Words and language have power - and one of the challenges at the science-society interface is in finding a shared language that we can all relate to, particularly as we struggle to identify ways to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change, work to address the sustainable development goals, and tackle other internationally identified global change priorities that will have tangible impacts on our communities world wide.  By looking at problems holistically - with a full life cycle, or systems approaches, and bringing together all of the interested research parties and stakeholders we can more effectively co-create, co-develop and co-deliver solutions to shared societal problems.  This allows us to build trust between actors, all of whom are investing in the solution, create a sense of ownership among all parties, and hopefully result in solutions that will be more readily accessible, acceptable and easily implementable in a societal context.  This is what we are aiming for through fostering of transdisciplinary projects to help understand, adapt and mitigate the impacts of global environmental change. That being said, working between and across sectors and disciplines is not something that comes naturally to many of our societies - where we have built institutions in silos, delimited by many different factors, including (but not limited to): funding envelopes; jurisdictional boundaries; thematic area; sector or discipline.  With this panel we will explore the concept of co-developed and co-implemented research - or transdisciplinarity as some of us refer to it - and explore case studies from Africa where the language used to describe this may be different, but it has been happening effectively for a long time.  What can we learn from the African experience? How can we co-develop language that will allow us all to have common understanding of this collaborative way of working, so that we can learn from one another and rally our respective communities, and global communities together towards our common grand challenges.