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Top adviser says body must ‘move beyond diplomatic discussions and bring in technological expertise’
The gap between policymakers and those who understand engineering is now a major barrier to addressing the world’s most pressing problems, according to one of the United Nations’ most senior advisers.
Jeffrey Sachs has advised the three most recent UN secretaries-general and helped shape the body’s Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which target problems such as environmental degradation and policy.
But speaking by video call to an event in London on 7 November, Sachs said the UN has a “real dearth of expert input”.
There is a “miserable shortfall of even asking for expert advice” when it comes to the “actual engineering solutions” needed to achieve global commitments on areas such as tackling climate change, he warned.
“I’m trying to encourage the UN all the time to move beyond diplomatic discussions and to bring in technological expertise,” Sachs said.
In an opening address to the event on how to use science and technology to pursue the SDGs, Sachs said there is “a tremendous amount of knowledge that is not tapped properly by the policy community”.
He added, “There are expert inputs on policy design, on debating texts, but not on engineering.” Sachs said he knew of “hair-raising stories of people who really know what to do and have demonstrated it [but] cannot be heard”.
Although many of his criticisms are drawn from his 19 years’ experience working at the UN, Sachs said the issue was widespread: “The gap between the technology knowhow and policy formation is extraordinarily high in most countries.”
The economist, currently affiliated to New York’s Columbia University, said the United States was an example of a country where “experts are simply not heard at all about the actual directions of R&D and the actual bottlenecks to action”.
The United Kingdom, in contrast, is “one of the few places that systematically tries to close that gap”, Sachs said, citing government foresight exercises as an example.
Apart from bridging the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities when giving advice to policymakers, Sachs said experts were also hampered by the “increasingly degraded culture of our politics”.
“Politicians aren’t even interested in hearing these things because it’s not core to their purpose, which is staying in power,” he said.
Sachs said the global scientific community had sufficient knowledge and a strong sense of researchable priorities for addressing issues such as climate change—but he said it is “translating those researchable priorities into actual roadmaps that is the challenge”.
He called for more “tables where the experts are brought together and the outcome is increased public funding along the lines of the expert recommendations”.
A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe