Global Science Diplomacy as a New Tool for Global Governance

The world is increasingly faced with a set of global problems and challenges that transcend national boundaries and that are threatening the whole of humanity as well as the planetary biosphere. These global problems and challenges are on the one hand related to the globalisation of human activities and on the other hand to human impact on the environment. Both the globalisation and anthropogenic challenges pose serious governance problems for the multilateral system.
The first problem is that the state-driven nature of governance is giving ample room for global governance. While global problems by definition require global solutions, the policy authority remains largely in the hands of states.
The second problem is that coping with global problems requires a deep understanding of the issues at stake. The relationship be-tween scientific knowledge and policy-making is, however, not obvious as states try to keep as much control as possible over policy-making processes.
Both of the aforementioned problems may be related to the way in which the current multilateral system is organised.
However, there is on-going shift towards a new Multilateralism Mode 2.0 where states allow other actors more and more involvement in global policy-making. This gives S&T more opportunities for input in the process of dealing with current global problems. Despite this, the science-policy nexus at a global level needs to be strengthened. One way to do this is by developing a new form of science diplomacy that is not driven by states but rather by the scientific community itself as well as by the multilateral system.
The main conclusion of this paper is that there is therefore a need to develop a global science diplomacy agenda, consisting of three components: a Science in Global Diplomacy initiative aimed at mobilising the science and technology (S&T) community to carry out research that is relevant for global problems; a Diplomacy for Global Science initiative aimed at facilitating scientific collaborations for dealing with global problems; and a Global Science for Global Diplomacy initiative aimed at developing the institutional nexus between the S&T community and the realm of policy-making at a global level.