Document(s) 6 of 8

A message from IDRC President, Maureen O'Neil

In fact, UNCED's concern with equity was emphasized throughout its proceedings. The Declaration itself asserted "the goal of establishing a new and equitable global partnership," and declared as a matter of principle: "The special situation and needs of developing countries, particularly the least developed and those most environmentally vulnerable, shall be given special priority."

This was the lasting message from Rio: the obligation to place equity at the core of any true definition of sustainable development. In the past 10 years, we have learned that development is not sustainable if it is not equitable, and certainly not equitable if not sustainable.

These same truths have informed IDRC's own approaches. Now, more than ever, the Centre collaborates in development research that is both multidisciplinary and policy-relevant. Our programs, by design and execution, reach across specialties to discover and exploit new knowledge and applications. They are all intended to answer questions that challenge societies in their quest to achieve sustainable and equitable development.

Social Innovation, Key to Sustainable Development

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, in August 2002 in Johannesburg, will undoubtedly raise more questions on how best to conserve the globe's resources for current and future generations. Achieving true social and equitable development remains a huge challenge: it requires new knowledge and applications, new ideas and polices, and new perspectives and relationships. This application of new knowledge, drawing on new ideas, can be summed up in one phrase: social innovation.

Social innovation provides the context for hundreds of research projects supported by IDRC and carried out by our partners around the world. Social innovation encompasses far more than technical ingenuity: it also includes policy innovations — new ways of informing public thought, eliciting public preferences, and making public choices.

Social innovation means engaging people in the processes of defining how public policy is developed. And it means gathering those affected by any decision, especially the disadvantaged and marginalized, into the conversation. It is in this process of informed debate that research finds its particular role. If development is to prove both sustainable and equitable, then research must attend to the specific circumstances of poor people, in their own communities.

Relevant Knowledge, Good Governance

Social innovation for development imposes two imperatives. First, it calls for timely, pertinent, and reliable knowledge. Second, it requires creating and maintaining good governance. Where governance is recognizably transparent, participatory, and responsible, it is much more likely to generate productive, fair, and enduring policy.

Satisfying these dual imperatives — relevant knowledge, good governing processes — will challenge even the settled, wealthy democracies. Rich countries, no less than poor, need to search out ways of informing citizens about the choices they face, ways of resolving discord, ways of changing how people understand the impact of their choices on our physical environment.

The previous pages provided many examples from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East of technological innovation, new forms of institutions and partnerships, and social, political, and attitudinal change — social innovation. They demonstrated how such innovations as strengthening local capacity for economic analysis of environmental problems can inform policy; how considering the health of the environment and of populations together can improve both; how looking to the relationships between communities and their ecosystems and fostering shared management can benefit people, protect resources, and manage conflicts over their use.

Above all, these examples demonstrated how social innovation can advance sustainable and equitable development. And if this research is usually conceived in part to explain the environmental and human implications of policy and action, fundamentally, it represents attempts to develop methods of governing that are better informed, fairer, more open, and more effective.

Whether the result is incremental changes in practice or large scale changes in policy, in rich and poor countries alike, this social innovation can help people to achieve, as it was said in the Rio Declaration, "a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature." That is a purpose as urgent and compelling now as it was 10 years ago.

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Document(s) 6 of 8