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Searching for Macro-Meso-Micro-Level Links in Studies of North-South Research Collaborations

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Abstract

Scientific collaboration between Northern and Southern researchers and development programs for research capacity-building have received new attention of practitioners and scholars during the last decades. This essay review takes four recent publications on North-South research cooperation and development politics as a starting point to ask for possible links between macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of social analysis that has found renewed interest in the sociology of science literature. The approach has the advantage to heuristically systematize the anthropological, sociological and policy-driven approaches chosen by the editors and authors of the books under review. Moreover, the focus on links between the three levels adds to the conceptual interaction of sociology of science and the science policy fields to estimate the effects of science governance in international and especially in asymmetrical relations with different access to resources.

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Notes

  1. The books solely focus on relationships with Africa. This focus leaves out other areas of North-South research cooperation and hence does not provide material for comparison across regions. Nevertheless, the diverse studies cover many aspects of African countries, which are numerous and complex in themselves.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Nicolas Rüffin and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the essay’s first draft.

Funding

The review essay is part of a study that is funded by Volkswagen Foundation.

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  1. WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785, Berlin, Germany

    Stefan Skupien

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Skupien, S. Searching for Macro-Meso-Micro-Level Links in Studies of North-South Research Collaborations. Minerva 57, 391–410 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-019-09371-8

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