In this new policy brief, Mitchell Young and a team of contributors from S4D4C elaborate on what we can learn from the COVID-19 crisis to build a stronger science diplomacy interface for better handling global challenges in the future.

COVID-19 has highlighted shortcomings in the current interaction between international relations and scientific cooperation. The crisis demonstrates the need for improving science diplomacy practices, something the S4D4C project has been pursuing since the beginning of 2018.

The S4D4C case studies investigated a broad range of global challenges and are useful for both analysing the current crisis and guiding the process of drawing lessons from it.  The case studies exposed key element of what is important for science diplomacy – four of them are discussed in the policy brief: narratives, interests, values, and interdisciplinarity. Building on this, the policy brief provides five recommendations to improve future science diplomacy efforts:

1. Create interactive spaces
2. Promote bi-directional science and diplomacy fluency
3. Engage the full spectrum of science
4. Ensure open and interpretable science for diplomacy
5. Exert bold values-based leadership

Those recommendations are crucial to address both the current crisis and other future global challenges that arise in the time ahead.

You can access the policy brief here:    S4D4C_PolicyBrief_June2020_BuildingBetterScienceDiplomacy_COVID-19