Stein, Josephine Anne | United Kingdom

Josephine Stein is a Pricipal Research Fellow in Innovation Studies at the University of East London in England. Her main research interests concern the interplay between science, technology and democracy, including global knowledge dynamics; science, international relations and security; expert-lay interactions in S&T-related civic affairs; computer ethics; and sustainable technological innovation. She holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where she was also a Departmental Instructor. Other experience includes working as a cryogenic/aerospace engineer designing cooling systems for spaceborne sensors at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and working at the General Atomic Company in San Diego on nuclear power engineering/design. Her career in S&T policy analysis has included working for the US Congress, with the European Commission, at the Royal Society and in academia, and she has provided consultancy for the OECD and various national and international S&T organisations. She has directed numerous studies for the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the National Science Foundation (USA). She has lectured, given academic talks and briefings to policymakers in sixteen countries, and has published in half a dozen languages. She has written, co-edited or contributed to fifteen books and has published numerous reports, academic and conference papers and shorter works for the popular press. She was the guest editor of the December 2002 issue of Science and Public Policy on “Globalisation, science, technology and policy” and is the European Editor of World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development.

Project at IAS-STS: Science and security through international cooperation:
Europe in a globalising world

The 21st century is characterised by increasing global interdependency and global insecurity brought about by a combination of certain impacts of the networked political economy and the "collision of civilizations". Insecurity emerges as much from societal changes related to scientific and technological developments as to new types of vulnerabilities to human aggression. This lecture identifies some of the principal threats to European security and analyses how science and technology can be enlisted to promote genuine security within and beyond European borders. The emphasis is on international cooperation and policies designed to address both human and technological aspects of sustainable development.

The proposals outlined in this lecture derive from European Union experience of security building strategies based on cooperation, including in research, while critically appraising more recent moves towards the Europeanisation of more traditional approaches to maintaining security associated with the nation state, such as military capacity and border control. The argument is made that such traditional approaches are increasingly irrelevant in an age in which the mobility of people, ideas, trade in both goods and services, finance, and production have made territorial defense superfluous.

The greatest insecurities facing European society now derive less from external threats from hostile nations than from the byproducts of modernism: a “risk society” in which industrial environmental hazards, the vagaries of the labour market and the impacts of the information age threaten health, employment security, privacy and community, often in indirect and insidious ways. Security is also threatened by the “internalisation of colonialism”. Pluralistic societies have developed in Europe through patterns of migration, in which “conflicts” arise locally from different economic, social and religious realities of people living in close proximity.

Globalisation processes and interdependencies have extended the geographical basis for “a destiny henceforward shared” that was the impetus behind the establishment of the European Community half a century ago. European security now depends upon extending the regime it has itself so effectively applied internally to cooperation with external partners, including forms of S&T cooperation that have been demonstrably successful in building prosperity and harmony within the European Union.

Project at IAS-STS: Science, technology and international diplomacy: Globalising scientific advisory systems and technology assessment

Foreign policy has traditionally been the province of professional diplomats and driven by economic and political forces, yet scientific and technological issues have always had relevance to international relations. The diplomatic landscape is littered with scientific cooperation agreements, some painstakingly negotiated in order to enable research that could not have been done otherwise; others mere expressions of international goodwill. At the same time, international agreements, whether on trade, the environment or on research cooperation itself, concern issues that are intrinsically bound up with the state of scientific and/or technological knowledge. Yet the scientific and diplomatic professions are today still structured differently, around scientific rationality and the universalism of Mertonian science, in contrast to human-centred notions of history, identity and nationalism. This lecture explores the prospects for overcoming this duality.

Globalisation has progressed to such an extent that it is no longer possible for national policymakers to ignore the domestic impacts of decisions taken elsewhere, whether by other countries, supranational entities such as the European Union or by multinational corporations. S&T-based public issues such as controlling the spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases, trade in biotechnological products, the impacts of information technology systems on world financial markets, and climate change span the globe. It has become important to consider how S&T expertise could become more systematically embedded into the negotiation of international agreements to address global problems, including through research itself.

This lecture reviews the state of international scientific cooperation and the ways in which scientific advisory systems inform international policymaking. It covers the structure and characteristics of knowledge systems and the mismatch between S&T expertise and political/economic institutions. The lecture identifies structural, thematic and diplomatic approaches that could be used to address common problems through international cooperation in science, technology and diplomacy. New approaches to public policy, and especially new, more flexible forms of multilateral cooperation, and effective expert advisory systems, would help to address the complex challenges confronting the world community.

Selected Publications

J.A. Stein and A. Ahmed, Global Partnerships in Science and Technology: The European Union as a model of international cooperation, in “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development: The Role of Academic Institutions and Societies in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals”, A. Ahmed and D. Newton, Editors, Emerald, Bradford, UK, pp. 73-84, ISBN 0-903622-99-8, 2005.

J.A. Stein, "Is there a European Knowledge System?", in S. Borrás (editor), special issue of “Science and Public Policy”on a European System of Innovation, Vol. 31, No. 6, pages 435-447, December 2004.

A. Ahmed and J.A. Stein, “Science, Technology and Sustainable Development: A world review”, World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 5-24, June 2004

J.A. Stein, Science, technology and European foreign policy: European integration, global interaction, in J.A. Stein (editor), special issue of “Science and Public Policy”on Globalisation, science, technology and policy, Vol. 29, No. 6, pp 463-477, December 2002.

J.A. Stein, Openness in Scientific Advisory Committees, (also published in French, German and Spanish), “The IPTS Report”, The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Sevilla, Spain, Vol. 39, November 1999.