June 21, 2003

My previous article, “What should be the top 10 S&T policy priorities for Pakistan” published in this space (May 24 issue) drew a flurry of email responses reflecting a wide range of sentiments — mostly positive, enthusiastic, and full of encouragement, but some critical as well.

“Why do we need a science and technology policy?” asks a reader. “The best thing the government can do is to not interfere in my business and leave me alone.”

I truly understand the non-interventionist philosophy of government that this gentleman subscribes to; more so because I believe that governments — in their desire to do good — end up bringing more red-tapism and harm in the techno-economic spheres. But having been a keen observer of science and technology policy around the world for over 12 years now and a formal student and a practitioner for the last four, I would be a little cautious towards passing a blanket judgement on the lack of utility of anything that falls under the rubric of science and technology policy.

I would now like to take up the issue of whether or not public-sector, or public policy, has any role to play in the development of science and technology in a country or a region.

This question is very near to my heart primarily because it is so central to the life and work of a science and technology policy analyst. One definite sign of a good educational and experiential learning program would be that it does not let its disciples assume things for granted, starts from a clean slate, and really builds upon the notions of healthy critique and curiosity.

I remember my first encounter with the Director of Science and Technology Policy Institute at RAND — a federally funded organization that advises The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on substantive policy matters. As I introduced myself, I told Dr Steven Rattien that “I’ve come from Pakistan to learn how the US makes its science and technology policy.”

Dr Rattien’s reply was a real shocker. “There is no US science and technology policy!” he remarked, much to my amazement and shall I say, chagrin.

My next question was, “Then how does then the US do what all it does in the area of science and technology and do it so well?” In the next few minutes, Dr Rattien tried to explain to me how there was no overall “national science and technology policy” of the United States but rather thousands of small initiatives in research, regional development, national laboratories, small business, and specific policy packages (for instance, R&D tax credits, technology transfer laws, etc, that formed the overall enviroment in which science and technology thrives in the US. Indeed the days of governments’ interventionist industrial policies around the world that became so popular in the 1970s and 80s and that have become quite controversial recently with the Japanese never-ending recession are long gone.

Needless to say, Dr Rattien’s description did little to satisfy me at that time. If there was no coordinated science and technology policy, how is it that these small initiatives work so well together? I was really confused. Those few minutes of discussion, however, taught me some lessons, primarily, to not take things for granted (specially the role of government in society and economy) and question the very basis of conventional wisdom, but more importantly, it shattered the mental map I carried with me of this grandiose thing called National Science and Technology Policy that somehow worked so well in the US and failed to work in Pakistan.

Science and technology policy, or for that matter any policy, works at various levels, not just in the form of documents piled up on a bureaucrat’s file cabinet or government web sites that normally come to mind when we talk of policies but also institutions, environments, programmes and real-life policies and laws that do get implemented.

One of the many books about science and technology policy that I have come across is Dr Harvey Averchs’s A Strategic Analysis of Science and Technology Policy. Dr Averch, a seasoned bureaucrat who spent an entire career in the scientific bureaucracy of the US government, and a true policy analyst at heart, talks about the conduct of science and technology policy in the US:

“Policy analysis for science and technology enterprise seemed to stand outside the mainstream . . . there seemed to be no canons or even craft rules giving guidance on what constituted reasonable and legitimate analysis and advice to decision makers. In contrast to the doing of science, the doing of science and technology policy was casual. There were no standards for debate or argument. The most bizarre kinds of reasoning and the weakest kinds of evidence were offered in support of action recommendations. Scientists, engineers, and university administrators offered views and made assertions that could not pass the minimal standards of rigor, if one accepted the canons of policy analysis developed over the last twenty-five years. Yet action recommendations were seriously offered, passionately defended, and sometimes followed.”

Perhaps the only thing wrong about this statement is that it burdens scientists, engineers and university administrators — as well as technology managers, entrepreneurs, and businessmen — with the burden of having it all wrong. These are the very people you would actually like to partner with while implementing the S&T policy. But the above excerpt makes a point. The conduct of science and technology policy, in what I think is an indictment of the S&T policy community, has lagged behind the practice of the art and science of policy analysis in general. This fact is partly to be blamed for failures in the past in terms of public sector programmes and science and technology policy initiatives thus resulting in negative public perceptions which in turn leads to a hinderance in actually coming up with something that makes sense and delivers on the ground.

We have come a long way from Averch’s observation in 1985: science and technology policy is alive and well and it would be fair to say that the state-of-the-art has considerably developed over the course of the last two decades since then. To illustrate it clearly, I would divide science and technology policy in two different realms. The first is the micro or analytical realm — the actual pursuit of analysis — to support the scientific and technological enterprise. This is the job of trained analysts, namely, economists, technologists, operations reserchers, organizational scientists, lawyers, sociologists, scientists, and even philosophers interested in the science and technology enterprise. In the developed world, this is a full-time profession with its own unique technical training and experience requirements.

A 1997 report by Dr William Boesman for the Congressional Research Service of the US, that analyzes ten major science and technology policy studies completed since 1991, describes three different types of purposes of S&T policy studies and analyses. These include, major system restructuring, reactions to crises, and fine tuning of the S&T system.

The variety of issues that falls under the rubric of science and technology policy are plenty. Drawing upon and adding onto Boesman’s list, these might include:

• The perceived shortage of a country’s own citizen researchers in critical areas;

• The need for the identification of critical technologies and investment levels to ensure future sustainability in these areas;

• The need for the government to fund the right amount of investment in basic research;

• The issue of role of government in basic vs applied research vs development;

• Assessment of the overall health of the national innovation system and fine tuning its various components that might be needed;

• What is the appropriate mix of gender in the S&T workforce and how do we improve the current situation, if needed;

• The balance between civilian and defense R&D;

• The issue of technology transfer and commercialization of federal laboratories; and

• The issue of the relative importance of universities’ mission in teaching, research and technology transfer, etc.

These are just a few of the issues that might be rigorously analyzed as a part of a science and technology policy exercise. The analytic rigour is essential, for science and technology merely forms only a small part of the overall series of societal issues that put a demand on public and private resources.

Dr Averch expresses this in the most apt manner: “At heart, it [science and technology policy] is about money and priorities and who gets them. . . . Even though controversies over governance arise periodically, science and technology decision makers spend most of their time thinking about getting money and spending it in the right directions once it is obtained . . . awarding public resources to any enterprise raises questions about the effectiveness and absorptive capacity of the recipients . . .”

Why should Pakistan invest huge amounts of money on a Virtual University? How can, and what can our policymakers and implementors learn from the experience of Allama Iqbal Open University’s distance education programmes of the 1980s to decide whether investment in VU makes any sense? If yes, then what is the right type of services it should offer to justify spending precious taxpayers’ money? What can our policymakers learn from MoST’s S&T Scholarship Programme of the 1980s and 1990s — through which thousands of Pakistanis went abroad to study — as it develops a new foreign scholarship programme for the future? How can the new programme be designed to ensure maximum retention and benefit to the country? How should the Higher Education Commission learn from the successes and failings of UNDP’s Tokten Programme (Transfer of knowledge through expatriate nationals) of yesteryears as it designs Pakistan Organization of Collaborative Research?

In the words of Averch, what is the effectiveness (costs and benefits) and absorptive capacity of these different initiatives? And, more importantly, how would these very different initiatives work together to become one effective and coherent whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? These are some of the many questions relating to science and technology policy that are as applicable to Pakistan as they are to the advanced parts of the world. In fact, they are much more important to Pakistan than they are to the more advanced countries primarily because the competing demands on every dollar of investment in Pakistan are much greater than they are in advanced countries.

For Pakistanis, the Rs7bn spent on science and technology is a very high cost. This cannot be said about even $7bn in the US. It is common knowledge, for example, that in the healthcare system in the United States any new technology or intervention is considered “cost-effective” if it saves one life for every $60,000 spent on it. In Pakistan, we probably can’t even afford to spend two dollars per additional life saved. That’s a remarkable proportion and puts a huge burden on the S&T policymaker. That’s why micro-level analysis of each of these initiatives is so important and it makes some of us really nervous when we see our policymakers thoughtlessly spending money on PR exercises and cosmetic investments.

At the macro or implementation level that draws heavily upon the micro or analytic level, science and technology policy is about national priorities, institutions, environments, policies and laws and how each of these come together to work as complex system. A lot has changed since the interventionist industrial policy movement of the 1970s and 1980s and fashions of what is legitimate for the government to do and not also change with time and political philosophies of incumbents, some things have stood the test of time. For example, it is common established wisdom that there are certain things that only governments can perform ably, primarily because only they have the credibility, the resources, or the legitmacy to do that. Investing in basic research is one example (based on market failure argument), ensuring the continuity of defence industrial base is another (based on public goods argument), and policy legislation and enforcement is the third (based on legitmacy argument). Just for the sake of an example, an ambitious research effort sponsored by The Competitiveness Council at Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University and headed by Dr Lewis Branscomb — one of the most eminent researchers in this field — identified six priority areas for a federal technology policy, namely, encouraging private innovation, emphasizing basic technological research, making better use of available technologies, using a diverse set of policy tools (not just R&D support), leveraging globalization of innovation, and improving government effectiveness and reliability as a long term research partner. While the readers might argue and disagree about the specifics of each of the above priorities identified by a particular researcher, I do not think one can make a very strong case that there is absolutely no role of government in the area of science and technology policy.

Ultimately science and technology policy at the national level is all about environment, institutitons, policy frameworks, and lawmaking and enforcement. If I take the reader’s advice, mentioned earlier, seriously and do away with any government role in science and technology policy, there would be no public university system, less than optimal investment in basic research, no national laboratories investing in science and technology for defense or agriculture, no internet infrastructure etc. etc. all of which would ultimately lead to stiffling of innovation. These are all things that are absolutely foundational to the health of a thriving scientific and technological enterprise.

In Pakistan we have not yet been able to do this well — and hence the skepticism and paranoia of the practitioner community — but I can assure you that we would be able to register ourselves on the science and technology map of the world if and only if we learn to create the right institutions, environment and policy frameworks and that’s something that is the task of the government not an individual professional although the latter can be a part of and an input into the process.

Final point: This brings me to the final point I want to make. While the science and technology policy is made through the labours of full-time, experienced, and professional analysts and policymakers, with the inputs of the scientific and technological community, and legitimized by the government involvement and ownership of the process — they are implemented solely by the practitioners on the ground. This important point is worth repeating.

A science and technology policy that is found only in the thick documents lying on a bureaucrat’s shelf is worse than having none at all. It is the S&T community — the scientists, engineers, technicians, entrepreneurs, investors and businessmen — that implements the policy. It is, therefore, all the more important to have a participative process of policymaking, a public-private partnership between various stakeholders, and a sense of broadbased ownership of the overall exercise to enable the implementation on the ground.

What we need in terms of science and technology policy is not a bureaucratic exercise in paper pushing but a truly private-sector-driven, public sector-supported, performance-based policy framework that is formulated and implemented not in the offices of some bureaucrat in Islamabad but in hundreds of minds, offices, and labs in Pakistan and around the world.

We need an explicit, transparent, and participative process of policymaking that involves multiple interactions between stakeholders and ultimately a consensus on what needs to be done, and how, and how much is to be spent on it? What would the government do to support it and how would the private sector lead the implementation effort? Leadership on the part of the private sector is important, not only in policy fomulation but more importantly in execution. It is only after all these important interactions take place and stars are aligned that truely ground breaking mobilization of the country’s scientific and technological enterprise can happen.

What Pakistan went through in the last 3-4 years is only a small portion of what needs to happen to ensure the realization of our S&T ambitions. I am sure we are fully capable of doing that. We are a nation of superstars as individuals but underdogs in a collective sense. We just need to get our act together and answer the calling. In a future article I will examine one instance of how one country — the United States — managed to create a national consensus and generate remarkable momentum when it found itself at a truly opportunate moment, one that is often considered as a turning point in its S&T history. While not totally adoptable, there are valuable lessons to be learnt from that example.

The writer is a doctoral fellow at the RAND Graduate School of Policy Studies with a specialization in science and technology policy and also the founder of the Virtual Think Tank Pakistan. For readers’ comments ProudPakistani@ieee.org

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