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STEaPP Working Paper Series

The STEaPP Working Paper series publishes emerging analysis and thought with the aim of improving links between research and policy.

The series will make available a diversity of outputs in different formats including pre-published versions of journal articles, drafts of longer academic or policy outputs, multi-media content and policy reports. We accept submissions from STEaPP and UCL staff, students, honorary fellows and relevant from other academic and policy colleagues.

Details on our submission guidelines

2023

STECS Plus: An analysis of contributions to COVID-19 responses by science granting councils in selected African countries - Julius Mugwagwa, Carla-Leanne Washbourne, Anne Marie Kagwesage and Remy Twiringiyimana

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended many aspects of human life across the globe, through its sudden, pervasive, and cascading impact. In pushing back against the virus, countries have deployed multi-pronged mechanisms towards preventing the spread through behaviour management, restrictions and social distancing and protecting people through the use of personal protective equipment, and medical innovations such as rapid diagnosis, deployment of ventilators and other means for oxygen therapy, trying out different therapeutics and rapid progression with vaccine development. Science granting councils (SGCs) with funding, regulatory and coordination roles in national science systems, have been an integral actor in these responses. To understand these roles more closely, this working paper drew from a multi-country case study conducted in nine selected African countries. The SGCs discussed in this paper are part of the on-going Science Granting Councils’ Initiative (SGCI) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) launched in 2015 as a multi-funder initiative to strengthen SGCs in fifteen SSA countries. The question that this study sought to answer and draw lessons from is: how have SGCs applied capacities and capabilities acquired from the SGCI in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic? The study had a timescale of 4 months with primary data being collected through structured interviews. Secondary data insights were drawn from desk research comprising a review of news and social media, academic, policy and practice sources. The study revealed a number of key lessons with respect to deployment of organisational capabilities and institutional entrepreneurship among the SGCs in response to the COVID-19.

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Tracking the impact of research on education policy during the COVID-19 pandemic - Basil Mahfouz, Geoff Mulgan and Licia Capra

School closures and other measures during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning for more than 1.5 billion students (UNESCO, 2022). Education policymakers worldwide discussed these measures in thousands of policy documents, most of which reference academic research. The project seeks to analyse the scholarly citations of Covid-19 education policies and shed light on how governments used research during the pandemic.

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2022

Resilience in and beyond COVID-19: Why this is a development, technology and innovation policy matter - Fernando García Albero, Anisha Gooneratne, Katrina Barker, Riedwaan Fakier, Sanni Lehtonen, Lukman Oesman, Julius Mugwagwa, Yacob Mulugetta and Shirah Zirabamuzale Mansaray

The COVID-19 global health pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities inherent in our societies. One of these has been the inability of many governments to effectively respond to the unfolding humanitarian emergency. The ramifications of this and other omissions have been profound and have disproportionately affected the most vulnerable collectives in society, which have become exposed to a higher risk of disease and loss of livelihoods. When looking ahead and planning for the future, it is essential that our existing decision-making systems are strengthened, building in resilience systemically to tackle future emergencies of a similar scale. Through a collection of case studies, this paper explores the view that technology and innovation can play a key role in building resilience in our existing systems and are necessary to catalyse transformative changes which foster development, thereby working towards securing the livelihoods of those most vulnerable in society.

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Enabling and improving cross-authority collaboration on infrastructure to better meet local energy needs - Marc Farre Moutinho, Alexandros Gregoriades, Jose Villacres Lozada, James Atkinson, Zi Huang and Xiyu Tang, UCL STEaPP

Climate policy in the UK has become increasingly ambitious in recent years, particularly in view of the central government’s commitment to making the UK carbon net-zero by 2050. Local government has been an active contributor to this policy shift, with over 300 local authorities (LAs) to date having declared climate emergencies, often accompanied by local net-zero targets of equal or even greater ambition than those of the central government.

The decarbonisation of heat stands out as a significant challenge in meeting local energy needs and climate goals. On top of being one of the greatest contributing factors to national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, comprising over a third of the total, the characteristics of heat in the UK create unique difficulties to achieving low carbon transitions in this field of energy.

A combination of different solutions will be required to address the urgent and challenging task of decarbonising heat, and low carbon heat networks are often put forward as a key part of the solution for urban areas. As heat network development accelerates across the country however, reaping the greatest benefits from these networks will likely involve maximising their size to increase efficiencies and capitalising on waste heat sources by matching them with local pockets of heat demand. Given the relatively small size of some urban LAs in the UK, developing heat networks in these ways may well require building them across LA boundaries.

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2021

Thinking systems: how the systems we depend on can be helped to think and to serve us better - Profesor Sir Geoff Mulgan, UCL STEaPP

This draft paper describes methods for understanding how vital everyday systems work, and how they could work better, through improved shared cognition – observation, memory, creativity and judgement – organised as commons.

Much of our life we depend on systems: interconnected webs of activity that link many organisations, technologies and people. These bring us food and clothing; energy for warmth and light; mobility including rail, cars and global air travel; care, welfare and handling of waste. Arguably the biggest difference between the modern world and the world of a few centuries ago is the thickness and complexity of these systems. These have brought huge gains.

But one of their downsides is that they have made the world around us harder to understand or shape. A good example is the Internet: essential to much of daily life but largely obscure and opaque to its users. Its physical infrastructures, management, protocols and flows are almost unknown except to specialists, as are its governance structures and processes (if you are in any doubt, just ask a random sample of otherwise well-informed people). Other vital systems like those for food, energy or care are also hardly visible to those within them as well as those dependent on them. This makes it much harder to hold them to account, or to ensure they take account of more voices and needs. We often feel that the world is much more accessible thanks to powerful search engines and ubiquitous data. But try to get a picture of the systems around you and you quickly discover just how much is opaque and obscure.

If you think seriously about these systems it’s also hard not to be struck by another feature. Our systems generally use much more data and knowledge than their equivalents in the past. But this progress also highlights what’s missing in the data they use (often including the most important wants and needs). Moreover, huge amounts of potentially relevant data is lost immediately or never captured and how much that is captured is then neither organised nor shared. The result is a strangely lop-sided world: vast quantities of data are gathered and organised at great expense for some purposes (notably defense or click-through advertising) but very little for others.

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2020

The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination) - Professor Sir Geoff Mulgan, UCL STEaPP and Demos Helsinki

We are in the midst of a very urgent, real, global and deadly crisis. But as that crisis hopefully comes slowly under control, some at least will need to attend to a very different kind of crisis, and one which is scarcely visible.

This ‘imaginary crisis’ is the result of a deficit of social imagination. We find it easy to imagine apocalypse and disaster; or to imagine new generations of technology. But we find it much harder than in the past to imagine a better society a generation or more into the future.

There are many possible reasons for this decline; loss of confidence in progress and grand narratives; declining imaginative capacity; slowing down of innovation. Key institutions – universities, political parties and think tanks – have for different reasons vacated this space. The decline of imagination matters because societies need a wide range of ideas and options to help them adjust, particularly to big challenges like climate change and ageing.

Social imagination has a long and fascinating history, from utopias to political programmes, model communities to generative ideas and fictions which fuelled our ability to understand and then shape human progress.

There are many methods available which can be used to stimulate imagination – sparking creativity or cultivating estrangement from dominant beliefs. The most interesting social imagination is often dialectical in that it simultaneously goes with, and against, the grain of historical trends.

Looking to the future we can map out some of the possibility spaces for the next few decades: possible futures for care and health, democracy and property, and we can also map cross-cutting conceptual ideas that may have a wide influence (from circularity to platforms, empowered nature to algorithmic decision-making). The most valuable ideas are ones that are sufficiently defined that they can be interrogated and improved – and drawn on for action.

We also need better theories of social imagination, and, for example, its relationship to evolving forms of consciousness (since progress has to involve some qualitative evolution of how we think and feel), or how ideas get ‘thickened out’ and mobilise implementers.

To fuel social imagination we need to engage the many institutions that could be supporting it, but don’t now: research funders; foundations; universities and governments.

And we need to remember the promise of reviving shared social imagination: that communities can once again become heroes in their own history rather than only observers.

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COVID-19: Health Systems Policies and Key Lessons from Successful States - Arda Ozcubukcu and Katrina Barker, UCL STEaPP

Pandemic preparedness is a concept that has demanded the world’s attention in the wake of COVID-19, an outbreak that has clearly indicated that no health system is fully prepared to face a pandemic. The novelty of this virus has ignited a range of responses in countries across the world, sparking debate around those that have proved to be the most effective in mitigating the outbreak.

This work aims to identify these responses, focusing on health systems policies, by analyzing the actions of eight countries deemed as having performed highly effectively within their respective continents. The analysis incorporates available data from Oxford University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker with relevant literature review. The findings indicate that swift, decisive action was taken by these states to implement comprehensive contact tracing, testing of symptomatic patients, public information campaigns and strict public health guidelines including mandatory mask wearing.

Despite certain contextspecific variations, it was found that the overarching commonality across all nations has been transparency and public informationsharing, which is likely to have increased compliance with public health guidelines. The authors hope that these findings contribute to the global conversation about aspects of health systems that should be strengthened in preparation for future – inevitable – pandemics.

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A Systematic Literature Review of the Use of Foresight Methodologies Within Technology Policy Between 2015 and 2020 - Chris Neels, UCL STEaPP

This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of 37 academic papers to identify how foresight methodologies are being used to address technology-related policy questions around the globe. These papers illustrate that policymakers are employing a diverse range of foresight methods to devise future-oriented policies impacted by or directed towards a panoply of technologies.

The results of the SLR highlighted a number of methodological tensions that could impact the efficacy of foresight studies. For instance, the desire for actors to plan for a wider array of potential futures may be impeded by a tendency for actors within studies to produce futures resembling the present. Additionally, policymakers face a quandary with the dualuse nature of foresight, which can either stimulate technology-driven growth or constrain technological development to mitigate negative consequences. Finally, papers were divided on where the sources of foresight knowledge should reside. The sample suggested a European affinity to participatory techniques and an Asiatic orientation towards conferring with experts.

Overall, the SLR suggested that futures studies, as a relatively young discipline, has found an audience with policymakers looking to subdue uncertainties around technology. The issues surfaced in this SLR offer potential discussion points to reframe how foresight methodologies might best be applied to inform far-sighted policy making.

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5G Technology – A Demonstration of How Innovation is Political - Charles McIvor, Shintaro Ikeda and Okky Oktaviani, UCL STEaPP

Government funding for science and innovation has fundamental political and economic repercussions. To demonstrate this point, this paper looks at how the UK can achieve its mission of becoming a world leader in 5G. It begins by exploring the history of previous generations of telecommunications, and how leaders of this industry have emerged with government support.

It then identifies what problems the UK might face in achieving its goal of becoming a world leader in 5G, and uses the cases of China and the United States to provide a more detailed exploration of how they have developed or lost their leadership.

Finally, it uses these cases to formulate a series of recommendations that the UK should consider in response to the problems we identify.

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