New knowledge economies – Rising against the odds

The field is not level when it comes to competing in the game of knowledge production. Although we’ve known for a long time that research and publishing are centred in the Global North, this has been problematised by the emergence of the idea of Southern Theory in the last decade.

Southern Theory was developed as a concept by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell in her book of the same name in 2007. It describes a geopolitical situation where the majority of published research works emanate from the Global North. A consequence of this is that rival knowledges and approaches are either marginalised or silenced.

There is an historical dimension to this captured in concepts such as epistemic violence which point to colonial attacks on indigenous knowledge systems.

Interest in Southern Theory has boomed and contributions can now be found in many disciplines, from urban geography and planning to criminology and sociology. In widely disparate parts of the world, India and South America, Southern Theory is being debated. Among the questions that are asked are: how is knowledge produced, who produces it, who funds it and who determines what is important?

Conditions in the Global South

These are questions that are addressed in a new book called Knowledge and Global Power (2019) by Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, Joao Maia and Robert Morrell. The book is based on studies in Australia, Brazil and South Africa which are, respectively, the largest producers of knowledge in Australasia, South America and Africa. One of the goals of the book was to analyse how knowledge was actually produced in these Southern locations and to determine the conditions under which the work was done.

Intellectual workers in the Global South labour under some disadvantage. In the case of Brazil, for example, not writing in English-as-first-language makes it more difficult to target high-impact journals. Invariably, researchers (at universities and in research centres) are less well-resourced than their Northern colleagues. Big funding is often sourced from the Global North and this often comes with strings attached, including setting the agenda and determining author order.

Researchers in the South are often more sensitive to development needs and respond to requests for community or governmental research assistance. This results in fewer peer-reviewed articles and less visibility. The cumulative effect of these conditions is that universities in the South generally do not feature amongst the highest ranked in the global ranking tables.

New knowledge economies

But it is not all doom and gloom. Collyer and her colleagues investigated three new knowledge domains – areas of study of recent provenance. Climate change, HIV and AIDS and gender are all domains that have emerged since the 1970s. One implication is that dominance based on long histories of metropolitan scholarship was not a factor and it was hypothesised that new knowledge economies could contribute more freely. In fact, this proved largely to be correct.

In the area of HIV and AIDS, South Africa ranked third behind the United States and the United Kingdom, punching far above its weight. There are some fairly obvious reasons for this prominence. South Africa became the epicentre for the heterosexual phase of the pandemic. Under the Thabo Mbeki presidency, life-saving drugs were denied to HIV-positive people resulting in the activism of the Treatment Action Campaign.

This activism reached into the research community, inspiring new projects and campaigns designed to introduce and then roll out anti-retroviral drugs and, more generally, to develop prevention strategies. A combination of urgency, activism and existing scientific resources resulted in South African scientists occupying apex positions in HIV research.

A similar story is to be found in relation to climate change where Australia ranked fifth. Despite not having ready access to the very expensive equipment needed for much of the climate modelling research, the obvious importance of climate change for life on the planet has been a powerful driver of research productivity. National politics and the battle between fossil fuel capitalists, activists, scientists and government have kept interest high.

National challenges

Apart from being located far from the centres of knowledge production in the Global North, the countries of the South often face additional, national challenges. These conditions are examined in minute detail in a book by Johann Mouton and colleagues, The State of the South African Research Enterprise (2019)*. The book is based entirely on quantitative data and bibliometrics, and identifies three areas of the research enterprise for examination – funding, human resourcing and research production.

The bald findings are that South African research is under-funded and lacks adequate human resources (number of researchers) but that despite this, it has increased its productivity and its world rank from 2000 to 2015.

“This has translated into a doubling of our world share and a significant improvement in our overall world rank to position 28 in 2016,” write Mouton and his colleagues.

What are the reasons for this situation? The inadequate state of funding is a result of declining corporate investment and low levels of government funding. In terms of gross domestic product, the percentage devoted to research is well below that of comparable countries like Malaysia, Portugal and Poland. On the other hand, South Africa’s share of international funding has risen.

The South African government has been pouring money into the production of PhD graduates – and here the numbers are internationally respectable, but at the same time the number of full-time equivalent research positions has actually fallen. This is also an effect of a funding crisis that has been exacerbated by the state’s commitment to make higher education ‘free’ for students post the #FeesMustFall protests.

South Africa’s research productivity is boosted by strong collaborative engagement with Northern researchers. This results in more and better publications and reflects both the power of networks forged in colonial times but also the increasing need of Northern researchers to work together with Southern colleagues.

Dr Robert Morrell is an associate in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town and director of the Next Generation Professoriate. Along with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia, he is co-author of Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (2019) published by Monash University Publishing and Wits University Press.

* The State of the South African Research Enterprise (2019) is authored by Johann Mouton with Isabel Basson, Jaco Blanckenberg, Nelius Boshoff, Heidi Prozesky, Herman Redelinghuys, Rein Treptow, Milandré van Lill and Marthie van Niekerk, and is published by the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and was commissioned by South Africa’s National Research Foundation.