Meta-Governance for Science Diplomacy - towards a European framework

Abstract

More and more foreign policy organisations become imbued with the promises Science Diplomacy might hold. It may transform or at least reframe the mobilization of knowledge in and for international scientific as well as political relations, not least to address Grand Societal Challenges. Such populari-zation in the foreign policy field has caught the attention of science policy with the intention to sub-stantiate the hitherto opaque de facto patterns of interaction and exchange that shape Science Diplo-macy as a practice aimed at bridging science and policy in the international arena. As one objective of the EU H2020-funded S4D4C project, the empirical substantiation of Science Diplomacy in nine case studies co-evolves with the development of a meta-governance framework aimed at enabling EU sci-ence-diplomatic processes to thrive. Hence, this paper focuses on the process and emerging substance of the meta-governance framework in the making. In order to discover the patterns and structural mechanisms guiding Science Diplomacy, its inner workings and appearances in different fields need to be described. Science Diplomacy, is here understood as a constellation of governance arrangements, stakeholders and de facto governance practices. Governance arrangements include the formal organization of the case topic, a.o. legal frameworks, rules, policy instruments, governmental strategies, official guidelines and prescribed ac-tors. This includes how and through which channels/interfaces actors relate to each other in terms of substance and procedures, and the challenges of interactions between different stakeholders. De facto governance practices involve the actual mix of all formal processes and procedures and those where actors deviate from the formal governance arrangement and perform with bureaucratic discre-tion. Here, it is also interesting how synergetic links are made to other social or political problem fields to further actors’ interests. With these inner workings in nine Science Diplomacy cases, the building bricks for the meta-govern-ance framework can be derived. Preliminary findings point to the fact that facilitating interaction and exchange between actors in the foreign policy community and the science community as well as the provision of strategic intelligence is a hiatus that such a meta-governance framework can use to de-velop principles of interaction.