Global governance of technology: meeting the needs of developing countries

In 2000, world leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration in which they pledged to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world’s people earning less than a dollar a day, suffering from hunger and unable to obtain safe drinking water. This paper argues that meeting these targets will entail concerted efforts to raise economic productivity in the developing world and to redirect research and development (R&D) in the industrialized countries to address problems that affect the developing countries. Doing this will require approaches that place science and technology at the centre of development policy in a world that is marked by extreme disparities in the creation of scientific and technical knowledge. Mobilizing this knowledge to meet the agricultural, health, communication and environmental needs of developing countries will continue to be one of the most important issues in international relations in the years to come. The paper identifies ways of using the world’s scientific and technological knowledge to meet the needs of developing countries. More specifically, it examines linkages among science, technology and development; emerging trends in innovation systems;