STEPS Book Launch: Science and Innovation for Development
2010 January 26
The STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability, UK) just recently launched a book entitled “Science and Innovation for Development”. The STEPS Centre blog reports:
A large part of the book consists of reviews of different technologies relating to development. The reviews use the Millenium Development Goals as a starting point, and focus on agriculture, environment and health (with an unsurprising emphasis on scientific/technical aspects, given the authors’ backgrounds).
You can download individual chapters, or the whole book, here.
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This really is an excellent book, reviewing, as it does both Western and traditional/indigenous knowledge, and also including a section on resilience. One point…
… it was actually authored by Jeff Waage of the London International Development Centre:
http://www.lidc.org.uk/
… which is a consortium of London University Colleges (School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, School of Oriental and African Studies and others) who’s mandate is to adopt a problem centred, inter-disciplinary approach to development. On that note…
… although I’m a big fan of both the Resilience Alliance and Steps Centre, and am very interested in complexity/systems theory, in the interests of balance, I should point out that quite a lot of LIFE SAVING innovations in development have, actually, come out of a reductionist/cartesian model of science!
I have a Swedish mother and am currently based in Stockholm but, sometimes, reading the RA posts one can’t help but wonder whether the Swedes have it in for Descartes (who, I hear died of pneumonia up here in Sweden, cos Queen Christina made him get up early in the morning in the middle of winter to teach her about science
) On a more serious note…
… clearly some kindof BALANCE between reductionist science and holistic/systemic/complexity science is what is needed in relation to real world problems in the developing world. So I’d, personally, like to see more books like this which adopt a BALANCED ideological/rhetoric free stance looking at the best things coming out of both models of science.
Mike