Research and Sustainable Development

Scientific cooperation, serving sustainable development

The sustainable development challenge can be summed up as follows: how can economic and social progress be made compatible with maintaining the main equilibriums on the planet? To successfully address it, the international community, gathered at the Johannesburg Summit in September 2002, set out a number of objectives, including:

  eradicating poverty,
  adapting consumer activity and manufacturing modes,
  protecting and viably managing natural resources.

Without a doubt, it will be impossible to gain control over such major global issues, without first gaining new knowledge. The research carried out in various areas of life sciences, economics, human and social sciences and engineering have much to offer to the implementation of sustainable development. However, this will not ultimately be successful unless researchers work in a multi-disciplinary spirit, involving, from the outset, the civil society players who will ultimately make use of the results.

The daunting aspect of the problems at hand, along with their often cross-border nature, requires international cooperation at all levels, in particular toward the South. For this reason, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs very naturally incorporated the imperatives set out at the Johannesburg Summit into its scientific cooperation policy.

This process was carried out along two thrusts. First, the research topics connected to sustainable development were incorporated into the calls for tenders issued under the bilateral research programmes in the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China and Southeast Asia; in the same spirit, the Ministry created a “Research for Sustainable development” unit, which is in charge of ensuring that the topic of sustainable development is taken into account in the Priority Solidarity Funds (FSP) entitled “Research and Capacity-Building in Science and Technology”. At the same time, researchers in developing countries are given easier access to advanced French and European research infrastructures, in order to promote capacity-building in the South as regards the most cutting-edge technologies, and support is provided to their national research systems in order to implement them. In all of the aforementioned scientific cooperation activities, France’s research bodies dedicated to development play a prime part.

More specifically, and in line with the action plan just drawn up at the G8 Summit in Evian, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is conducting an international scientific cooperation policy, laying emphasis on the following points:

  building up international cooperation on observing the planet,
  peeding up research on energy technologies, their development and their dissemination,
  promoting sustainable development in the farming field, by combining productivity and protection for biodiversity.

The roll-out of an online “Sustainable Development” space on the Research pages of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site is intended to inform you of the measures taken to enforce scientific cooperation policy in the field of sustainable development, as carried out by France and as just set out for you in the pages above.

Online: 06/05/08