6. Jul. 2006

There are many areas where international co-ordination of science policies could help to cope with challenges of globalised world. One of these globally agreed challenges are the UN Millennium Development Goals. The panel organised by ZSI is grounded on the rationale that promotion of economic and social development in a sustainable way on a global level can be effective and successful only if it is knowledge based.

The co-ordination effort of S&T policies on global level could build on experience EU has gained in creating European Research Area (ERA). In analogy to ERA a framework for global co-ordination of S&T policies could be called “Global Research Area”.
If communication and governance structures for global co-ordination of S&T policies regarding MDGs (in the sense of an emerging Global Research Area) will prove successful, countries of the world will be more inclined to utilise the dialogue platforms and procedures of co-ordination developed in this context also for globally co-ordinated issues of more controversial nature (proliferation of nuclear technologies, ethics, etc.).

Based on these deliberations institutions represented at this panel (UNESCO, TWAS, ZSI, ACNST and others) have developed in spring 2006 an international RTD policies co-ordination project “GLOBALGOALS - Global Research Initiative for the Achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals” and submitted for funding within EU’s 6th RTD Framework programme (Specific Support Actions) and UNRISD (accompanying research).

The reason for presenting GLOBALGOALS ideas at ACUNS AM 2006 is to obtain feed-back from the global governance scientific community and practitioners on how to optimise the GLOBALGOALS initiative in order to lead to further developments of the UN system and to global governance innovations in the field of multilateral coordination of S&T policies for global governance challenges like the MDGs.