PhD Students Explore Relationship Between Science, Policy
“What does it mean to be a scientist in a policymaking context?” asks Eugenie Dugoua, one of SIPA’s PhD students in sustainable development. Dugoua and several classmates joined peers in Europe earlier this summer for an eight-day program exploring this very question about the relationship between research and policymaking.
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For the second consecutive year, the Alliance Summer School in Science and Policy brought together SIPA’s PhD students with mostly Paris-based peers . The program is sponsored by SIPA, the Earth Institute, and Sciences Po and hosted by Sciences Po’s sustainable development department at the school’s campus in Paris.
Among the 25 participants were six doctoral students who had completed their first year at SIPA and one student pursuing an MA at Columbia in climate and society. The remaining attendees came from PhD programs at institutions including Sciences Po, École Polytechnique, and the Sorbonne.
The student-crafted agenda featured multiple presentations by SIPA and Sciences Po faculty. On a typical day, participants heard from two speakers before moving on to breakout sessions. “We want to sit with people of different backgrounds and hear speakers from different disciplines , to draw conclusions,” Dugoua said.
Indeed, students sought insights into the relationship between science and policy — how scientific research feeds policymaking in the real world, the challenges inherent in balancing competing interests, and best practices for bridging the gap. Speakers — including SIPA faculty John Mutter (the PhD program director), Scott Barrett, Wolfram Schlenker, Laurence Tubiana, and Claude Henry — talked about their own research and projects while addressing the strengths and failings of the science-policy relationship within their own disciplines, and how they might be improved.
Dugoua, of France, studied chemistry and chemical engineering. Before enrolling in the doctoral program she worked for the consumer giant Procter & Gamble in Europe, studied economics, traveled, and volunteered for NGOs in emerging countries.
Having the opportunity to sit with peers and debate a theme, she said, “is when you realize all the dimensions of interdisciplinarity and the different challenges of communicating across disciplines. For me it was important to be concretely in that situation; it made me realize how challenging it is. When you bring it back to real-life situations. It become less theoretical, less rhetorical.”
Francis Annan, another SIPA PhD student who participated, is a native of Ghana whose training in agricultural and applied economics includes an MS from Mississippi State University. His primary interests include environmental and development economics.
Annan said the summer program has already been an influence. “I think I’ve learned to understand how people with different backgrounds think about a common topic,” he said. “Moving forward, the need to do interdisciplinary research with people from different backgrounds is important because problems are becoming more complex and you need people with different backgrounds to solve them.”
For both Annan and Dugoua, one highlight was the chance to discuss the social contract with respect to scientists — to ask what duty there is to be involved in the policymaking process. In either case, they said, after spending much of the past year studying theory, it was helpful to think about concrete policy questions and the tools to pursue them.
Dugoua said all the participants were grateful to the three sponsors for funding the program and giving students logistical support. “The opportunity to meet and work with people with different backgrounds – to truly understand interdisciplinarity – helps us choose where to go in our own research for the next four years.”