Monday, September 26, 2005

Science vs. politics in the MDGs

From an article originally in SciDevNet, Yale Global posts this assessment below of the science vs. politics debate over the Millennium Development Goals. I've posted the MDGs at the bottom of the article (click the list for the larger image).

The question has larger implications. I've been doing some work on the case of bioprospecting as a mechanism for conserving biodiversity and have found that scientists have created quite a mess of the original schemes that led to access and benefit-sharing agreements between drug and biotech companies and researchers on one hand and biodiverse nations, local groups, and indigenous peoples on the other. The mess stems from faulty utilitarian logic on the part of scientists in making various moral assessments about the economic value of both bioprospecting and biodiversity itself. These assessments have been followed largely due to overly broad, nearly mythical, assumptions about the boundaries and merits of scientific authority, and we've seen faulty assumptions and arguments turn into a morass of political, economic, legal, and ethical problems.

But, of course, politics can run afoul of good science. We're seeing this played out in the inane national debate over intelligent design. "Inane" may be too strong a word, but I make this caveat only in the sense that we're potentially dealing with nutty and harmful educational policy. The science is really no question here. Thus, it's ostensively a political debate over "science" and how it should be taught in American schools, while it is actually a political debate over ideology and religious belief with serious consequences.

Of course, the MDGs are indeed vague. They were intended that way -- as "ends-in-view," as John Dewey might have put it (ideals that may never be achieved and may themselves be constantly transformed as we do attempt to achieve them in practice -- but the point is in the achieving, the attempting, and not the final achievement. There is no way of knowing in genuine inquiry at this point what any "final" achievement would even look like). Perhaps they're overly idealistic. Certainly, they serve as political goals. But some of them -- not all of them by any means (see for yourself) -- require good scientific data to get us on the route towards these ends-in-view. And there is debate within the scientific community over the merits of much of the data with which we presently have to work. As I noted in an earlier post somewhere, there is even a significant dispute over how to measure poverty itself.

But caution should be taken not to collapse the debate over the MDGs into a dualistic one of taking positions on one side (the science community) or the other (the politics and ethics) regarding their overall merits. This is a multi-faceted, multi-leveled discussion that needs hammering out in the process of developing real responses to the ideals the MDGs represent. It involves various sciences, social sciences, ethicists, political leaders and governments, local peoples, economic good sense, and the understanding that it matters.

Here are some excerpts from the SciDev article:

...In his discussion of the malaria targets, for example, Attaran points out that difficulties in obtaining reliable data on the current extent of the disease is such that even official agencies such as the World Health Organization admit that they cannot be confident about any particular set of figures. Despite this, the MDGs continue to list a reduction in malaria incidence as one of the top health targets.

By placing such emphasis on dubious figures, Attaran argues, the UN is building its MDG house on sand. He castigates UN officials who appear to argue that the robustness of the figures is not particularly important, as they are only intended to be indicative. And he even suggests that the UN itself is in danger of destroying its credibility by placing too much faith in statistics that may later prove to be bogus....

Not surprisingly, Attaran's critique has generated a strong response from some of those who have helped to turn the MDGs into an article of faith within the development community. In comments posted on this website, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York, and two of his colleagues on the UN Millennium Project, John McArthur and Guido Schmidt-Traub, provide a vigorous response.

While acknowledging that some of Attaran's criticisms are valid – for example, they accept that data for some of the goals are poor – they also suggest that he has overstated his case. Furthermore, they argue that, by focusing on the scientific uncertainties that surround the way that the MDGs are expressed, Attaran is underestimating their political value.

Implicit in this argument is the suggestion that, whether or not they are scientifically valid, the MDGs have already proved their worth as a way of helping to increasing both the amount and the effectiveness of international development assistance.

As in most such instances, however, there are merits in both sets of arguments. Sachs and colleagues are correct to suggest that there are times when political action is appropriate even in the absence of scientific certainty. After all, what matters is not the precise figure reached; even reducing the incidence of infant mortality in Africa by half, rather than two-thirds, by 2015 would be a major achievement.

In other words, it is important not to become obsessed with quantifiable targets. As development expert Calestous Juma has pointed out, the physicist Albert Einstein once said: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted".

Overemphasising scientific accuracy can have the same dampening effect on political initiatives as dressing up development goals in jargon that means little to non-specialists.

But Attaran makes an important point when he warns that a lack of robustness could be storing up problems for the future. Too often a lack of scientific clarity reflects a lack of scientific understanding. And this in turn can encourage short-term solutions to problems that could persist if insufficient attention is paid to their root cause....

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