The 10th Education International (EI) World Congress, meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 29 July to 2 August 2024:
Scientific knowledge is a global public good. Public research can only contribute to building a better future for humanity and be developed in the interest of human societies if academic freedoms are guaranteed by publicly funded institutions.
For research to be free, we must guarantee freedom of initiative and ensure research programmes are carried out, as well as the independence of researchers and teacher-researchers (whether permanent or on contract) who must be safeguarded from pressure of all kinds. In this regard, and to ensure they are really independent, we must ensure, as much as possible, that researchers and teacher-researchers have job security.
Resolutions from the 7th EI World Congress (Ottawa, July 2015) and the 8th World Congress (Bangkok, July 2019) supported and reiterated EI’s commitment to matters related to higher education and research, such as permanent employment, satisfactory working conditions, the fight against precarious work, a socially just environmental transition and open access to knowledge.
The UNESCO 2017 Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers providing a vision for science that goes beyond growth and productivity, puts human wellbeing and inclusion at the centre, and welcomes the UNESCO 2024 call to Action on the Freedom and Safety of Scientists.
In recent years, political discourse regarding supporting public research has shifted in many countries. Based on the pretext that research is important for addressing the many challenges our societies face, politicians have decided to steer research funding towards technological innovation: this type of innovation is supposedly the only solution that would allow us to solve, inter alia, socio-economic, environmental and health crises, through the development of businesses and consumption.
In light of the many problems caused by global changes, including climate change, this discourse and approach have also developed in the field of environmental sciences. This is why research programmes tend to be standardised and instrumentalised by being increasingly geared towards “solutionism” that is far from emancipatory.
Thus, by conflating innovation and research, political discourse ignores the fact that innovation based on research results is not research and that research doesn’t always lead to innovation (even if it is well known that different applications for discoveries have been found after they have occurred, often, for that matter, in another research context).
This demand for innovation, at the heart of political discourse, leads to an approach that restricts the place basic research holds, whether this is in the natural, formal, human or social sciences. Researchers find themselves trapped in a management system that sterilises their creativity and develops research programmes focused on innovation.
The neoliberalist economic model based on extractivism cannot last in a context of global changes: climate change, collapsing biodiversity, the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems (water, soil…), different types of pollutions, increasing inequalities.
Research must not be geared towards a single objective: meeting the needs created by an economic system based on extractivism, productivism and growing consumption. Without massive investment in basic research, aimed at increasing knowledge in all areas of knowledge, it is an illusion to believe that real innovations can be developed.
The 10th EI World Congress calls on EI and its member organisations to advocate for the importance of developing basic research in a context of academic freedom, where innovation, whether technological, economic, social, ecological or environmental, is not considered to be the driving force of research but rather a potential product of it that can provide urgently needed solutions to the socially just environmental transition. To this aim, we must increase the potential of public research whilst remembering that private businesses must also play their part in innovation and R&D.