International Cooperation for Sustainability Science Programs

1. International Cooperation for Sustainability Science Programs YARIME Masaru Associate Professor Graduate School of Frontier Sciences University of Tokyo yarime@k.u-tokyo.ac.jp Forum for Sustainability Science Programs AAAS Annual Meeting February 16, 2008, Boston, U.S.A.

2. Motivations for Scientific Collaboration • Spreading access to scarce equipment • Tackling problems at scale • Assembling appropriate expertise for cross-cutting problems • Building (or building on) relations with colleagues • Collaborative pleasure, enjoyment, etc. • Because your funder told you to (Shrum, et. al., Structures of Scientific Collaboration, 2007; Jackson, 2007)

3. Dimensions of Scientific Collaboration • Formation (origins, histories, and motivations) • Magnitude (number of orgs, number of PIs, budget size, project duration, scale of instrumentation) • Organization (division of labor, nature of leadership, degree of formalization) • Technology or material practice (equipment, specimens, information practices (collecting, storing, transmitting)) • ‘External’ relationships (funders, publics, other institutions) • Social relations (trust, conflict, and performance) (Shrum et. al., 2007; Jackson, 2007)

4. Effects and Impacts of Scientific Collaboration • Science itself (new, bigger, and faster discoveries; new ways or models of science; more and new kinds of collaborations; conceptual revolutions (paradigm shifts); more papers, patents, and other productivity markers; more joint-authored papers; faster and wider dissemination of results and ideas; reduced duplication of effort and/or disruptive activities) - Methodologies • Scientific careers (greater diversity of scientists; participation outside elite research universities; support and recognition for early-career scientists; improved job satisfaction and quality of life) - Fellows • Learning and education(training more and new kinds of scientists and engineers; more student mentoring; more effective pedagogy; new distance learning models) • Funding and public engagement (more public engagement, understanding, and participation; improved governmental, private sector, and foundation support; new and ongoing funding initiatives) • New tool development (new development models; sustained and growing user bases; user innovation and adaptation; prototype to production quality (Olson et. al., forthcoming 2008; Jackson, 2007)

5. Factors Influencing International Collaboration • Formation of a core group with strong commitment • Allocation of responsibilities • Structurization of knowledge and participants • Appropriate Incentive structure of relevant actors • Effective management of organizations (based on the international experience of AGS and IR3S, Komiyama and Takeuchi)

6. Current State of International Collaboration on Sustainability • Collected a set of academic publications including sustainability or sustainable in their titles, abstracts and keywords • Used Web of Science, which is a Web-based user interface of ISI’s citation databases. • Searched the papers using sustainab*, thus including papers that include sustainability and sustainable. • Total of 29,391 retrieved.

7. Number of Co-authored Articles on Sustainability

8. Collaboration Intensity • Counted the number of appearance of country and affiliation name and also co-occurrence of them in the record. • After gathering these statistics, calculated the link intensity of two nodes, Inti, j, by the following equation, • where nj and nj are the number of papers of node i and j, kij is the number of co-authored papers by node i and j, respectively. • The number of link between two nodes was normalized by the number of papers per each node in order to cancel out the convergence effect to specific nodes having a large number of papers.

9. Collaboration-Intensity Similarity • Calculate the link intensity similarity of two nodes, • where ki and kj are the number of links of node i and j, N is the number of all papers, respectively. • A pair with a high Simi,j means that the nodes have more focus on the link.

10. Similarity Measures

11. Collaboration Networks on Sustainability (by country) Yarime, Kajikawa, and Takeda (2008)

12. Research performed by Country Pairs with High Sim. countryi(#paper)-countryj(#paper): #co-author SWITZERLAND(120)-NIGERIA(46): 7 Articles in Journals such as Tropical Medicine & International Health, Annals Of Tropical Medicine And Parasitology SPAIN(103)- GREECE(41): 9 Articles related to Waste Water, Aquaculture, Water Supply FRANCE(191)- BELGIUM(68): 39 Articles related to Environment, Agronomy, Veterinary, Water Japan(159)-China(210): 52 Articles related to Water, Environment, Plant

13. Clustering of Collaboration Networks • The network is divided into clusters using the topological clustering method (Newman, 2004; Newman and Girvan, 2004) as seen in Fig. 2(c). The clustering algorithm is based on modularity Q, which is defined as follows (Newman, 2004; Newman and Girvan, 2004): • where Nm is the number of clusters, ls is the number of links between nodes in cluster s, and ds is the sum of the degrees of the nodes in cluster s. In other words, Q is the fraction of links that fall within clusters, minus the expected value of the same quantity if the links fall at random without regard for the clustered structure. Since a high value of Q represents a good division, we stopped joining when became minus. • A good partition of a network into clusters means there are many intra-cluster links and as few as possible inter-cluster links. • The clustered network is visualized by using FR method. FR method is based on a spring layout algorithm where links play the role of spring connecting nodes.

14. Clustering by Country

15. Countries in Clusters

16. Collaboration Networks in Sustainability Science (by Country) Asia + Oceania America Europe+Africa Diffusion and sharing of knowledge and information might be limited to regional clusters. Yarime, Kajikawa, and Takeda (2008)

17. Focused Areas of Countries

18. Focused Areas of Countries

19. Focused Areas in International Collaboration

20. (Virtual) Forum for Science and Innovation for Sustainable Development (http://sustainabilityscience.org)

21. International Cooperation and Collaboration Programs Related to Sustainability • Sino-U.S. Center for Conservation Energy and Sustainability Science (SUCCESS), China, USA • Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS), USA, Switzerland, Japan, Sweden • Millennium Project, Many countries • Resilience Alliance, Many countries • African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), Kenya, Malawi, Malta, and Uganda • Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change (CIS-HDGC), USA, Sweden, Australia, France, India, Netherlands • Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), Many countries • East African Regional Programme and Research Network for Biotechnology, Biosafety and Biotechnology Policy Development (BIO-EARN), Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda • Envirofit International, USA, Philippines • Equator Initiative, Many countries • International Foundation for Science (IFS), Many countries • International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI), Many countries • Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD), Brazil, Canada, China, Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Francophone Africa, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Southern Africa, USA • Regional Workbench Consortium (RWBC), USA, Mexico • Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Sweden, Estonia, UK, US, and Thailand • Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI), European countries • Many other programs

22. (Virtual) Forum as Knowledge and Information Commons • Efficient exchange and transaction of information • Emphasis on information as fixed, objective, and transferable property/commodity • Issues of data evaluation and reliability, open access, database maintenance, intellectual property rights • Creative interactions and collaboration • Emphasis on fields/infrastructure/tools for creating context-dependent and evolving information/knowledge • Issues of framing, engagement, feedback mechanism, chance discovery

23. Characteristics of Knowledge and Information • Public goods (non-rivalry & non-excludability), increasingly becoming club goods (non-rivalry & excludability) • Cumulativity (“Standing on the Shoulder of Giants”) • Scope for addition, expansion, and combination • Stickiness • Tacitness • Context-dependence • Weak persistence • Fragmentation • Localization • Distance to commercialization

24. Issues for Discussion Sharing of experiences of international collaboration • Achievements, Possibilities • Difficulties, Challenges Action plans for international collaboration through the Forum • Objective • Scientific values (contribution to the development of academic disciplines) • Economic values (commercialization, macro-level economic growth) • Social values (health, environment, equity, culture, etc.) • Involvement of actors • Identification of stakeholders (universities, government, private companies, NGOs, etc.) • Incentives and institutional mechanism for participation • Practical steps for implementation • Empirical analysis examining in detail the structure and mechanism of global information commons (sectoral and international comparative studies, science of collaboration) • Projects and best practices for demonstration • Top-down approach vs. Bottom-up approach • Potential outcomes and impacts • Definition of success