Within the PRODIGEES project, Instituto Mora in Mexico City and DIE in Bonn have exchanged research staff for advancing cooperation and transnational knowledge in the field of digitalisation.
Dr. Simone Lucatello from Instituto Mora – a Mexican Public Research Centre and member of the PRODIGEES (Promoting Research On Digitalisation In Emerging Powers and Europe Towards Sustainable Development) network – joined the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) for a visiting period. He studied and deepened the research on the impacts of digitalisation across the environmental dimension of sustainable development, climate change and its governance. Dr. Lucatello engaged in several meetings and interviews with colleagues at DIE as well as other international institutions in Bonn and elsewhere. At the beginning of 2021 and under the same project, Dr. Lucatello offered a talk on climate change and digitalisation, as part of the research activities that can be found on the PRODIGEES website.
Open Science: a transformative paradigm
Benjamin Stewart, a research associate and PRODIGEES project manager at DIE, as well as doctoral student with the University of Bonn, joined Instituto Mora. He investigates how the implementation of UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science institutionalises the use of digital technologies and online networks in research and higher education institutes. Open Science is a transformative paradigm for how the scientific community thinks about and does science, addressing questions of inclusion and transparency, and posing challenges to science policy and sustainable development. Stewart conducted interviews with staff members of Instituto Mora, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), commentators for the Permanent Mission of Mexico to UNESCO, UNESCO’s Open Science Advisory Committee, among other organisations. The preliminary results of Stewart’s work were demonstrated in the workshop, “Open Science: Epistemologies, science policy implementation and digitalisation”, which can be found in PRODIGEES’ comprehensive repository on Zenodo along with the work of Dr. Lucatello. The research staff exchange lasted from September to December 2021.
Transnational knowledge cooperation
PRODIGEES, a project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme, is an instrument for catalysing ongoing research in digitalisation towards sustainable development, and for invigorating knowledge cooperation networks between advanced and emerging economies, specifically those countries with a history of partnership in DIE’s Managing Global Governance (MGG) network. The project is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Action – Research & Innovation Staff Exchange (MSCA-RISE), the basis of which is the exchange of research staff between partners. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have all but halted staff exchanges for all Horizon 2020 MSCA-RISE projects since March 2020. However, now that vaccination rates are increasing world-wide, staff exchanges are beginning again, fulfilling their promise of transnational knowledge cooperation.
