Cablegate: Usunesco -- Draft Declaration For

This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 PARIS 008057

SIPDIS

FROM USMISSION UNESCO PARIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: AR UY UNESCO
SUBJECT: USUNESCO -- DRAFT DECLARATION FOR
INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON THE SOCIAL SCIENCE - POLICY
NEXUS TO BE HELD IN ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY, FEBRUARY 20-
24, 2006

1. This is an action request, see para. 4.

2. The following is the draft declaration for the
International Forum on the Social Science-Policy Nexus
to be held in Argentina and Uruguay February 20-24,
2006. The meeting is being organized by Unesco's
Social Science Sector as part of its Management of
Social Transformations (MOST) program. The conference
website says, "" For five days, more than a thousand
participants (academics, decision-makers and civil
society actors) are expected to attend the meetings in
Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba and Montevideo, to
discuss the way in which social science research can
accompany the decision-making process and encourage the
development of innovative social science projects.""
The website can be found at:
http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=8667&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.h tml

3. Begin text:

Draft Buenos Aires Declaration calling for a new
approach to the social science - policy nexus

Taking note of the Declaration of the 1995 World Summit
on Social Development, of the United Nations Millennium
Declaration, and of flagship reports on human
development and equality by United Nations agencies and
by the World Commission on the Social Dimension of
Globalization.

Sharing the concern expressed by the Secretary-General
of the United Nations in his foreword to the 2005
Millennium Development Goals Report that ""If current
trends persist, there is a risk that many of the
poorest countries will not be able to meet many of the
Millennium Development Goals. Considering how far we
have come, such a failure would mark a tragically
missed opportunity. This report shows that we have the
means at hand to ensure that nearly every country can
make good on the promises of the Goals. Our challenge
is to deploy those means."".

Taking into consideration the Lisbon and Vienna
Declarations on Social Sciences, both of which stress
the indispensable contribution of social science to the
social development objectives of the international
community.

The International Forum on the Social Science - Policy
Nexus, at its closing plenary session in Buenos Aires
on February 24 2006, hereby offers its own diagnosis of
contemporary challenges as they relate to the relations
between social science and policy, and sets out and
endorses an action plan to revitalize those relations.

The erosion of the universal thrust of human rights,
human dignity and justice under the pressure of
contemporary social and economic transformations is a
matter of urgent concern. The Millennium Development
Goals and other internationally agreed development
goals are not the ambitious statement of new moral
purpose. They are the minimum threshold compatible with
the proclaimed values of the international community.
Failure to make serious progress towards achieving them
would entail both moral bankruptcy and practical
disaster.

The means required to meet these challenges include,
crucially, moral vision and political will. In
addition, however, this Forum expresses its conviction
that the challenges call for new knowledge used in
innovative ways and the better use of existing
knowledge. In this regard, the social sciences have a
crucial contribution to make.

Hunger and poverty, education, health, the environment,
and development - the five areas to which the eight
Millennium Development Goals relate -, are social
dynamics. None is solely within the purview of social
science, but without social science none is fully
intelligible. Yet prejudice, dogma and spurious common
sense too often crowd out rigorous social science
research from policy design. The result is policies
that fail, even in their own terms, prolonging
avoidable human misery.

This Forum states its conviction that better use of
rigorous social science can lead to more effective
policies. Such use requires a new approach to the links
between social science and policies for social
development. For the knowledge that social science
seeks is precisely the knowledge that policy needs.

It is with these urgent concerns and this diagnosis in
mind that this Forum adopts the following action plan
and commends it to the attention of the international
community.

1) The Forum encourages the establishment of new
networks to bring together policy-makers, researchers
and civil society around their shared concern for the
urgent demands of global social development.

2) The networks should encourage cooperation and
exchange of information, research results and best
practices with respect to the inclusion of policy
relevance within project design and, to this end,
should promote the development of innovative
institutional arrangements and tools to facilitate
linkages between research and policy communities.

3) Recognizing the need for genuinely international and
interdisciplinary social science research sensitive to
policy concerns, the networks should facilitate
cooperation in enhancing existing funding programmes
for international social science research and in
developing new modalities for productive work across
disciplinary and national boundaries.

4) Recognizing the need for policy-makers to be
sensitive to research that questions existing thinking,
the networks set up in response to this call should
promote the sensitivity of policy-makers to critical
and alternative social science research.

5) The networks should pay particular attention to
assisting developing country institutions, especially
in Africa, in meeting their research needs and in
restoring and ultimately enhancing their capacity to
implement their social policy priorities.

6) In order to perform their functions, the networks
should be equipped with adequate Secretariats drawing
on resources provided by all institutions committed to
the spirit of this Declaration. The networks should
consider, inter alia, follow-up events of a similar
nature to this Forum and publication of reports on
social science for social development policy in order
to provide a focus for ongoing debates on paradigms,
tools and practices and to draw together the full range
of activity at the interface between academic and
policy communities.

7) The Forum commends this action plan to the attention
of all relevant United Nations agencies and calls on
them, along with national governments and other
appropriate bodies, to endorse it and to provide it
with such support and encouragement as may be
appropriate.

4. Comment and action request: We note some troubling
language in this declaration. For example, the
preamble states that the erosion of the ""thrust"" of
human rights et al. is caused by ""social and economic
transformations""-ignoring the effect of autocratic
regimes and implying that globalization and economic
freedom are the cause of human rights violations,
rather than their the best guarantor. We also are
concerned by the reference to the MDGs as the ""minimum
threshold"" and that failure to meet them represents
moral bankruptcy and practical disaster."" Please
provide guidance on how to react to this document.

KOSS

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