International Cooperation for Sustainability Science Programs

YARIME MasaruAssociate Professor

Graduate School of Frontier SciencesUniversity of Tokyo

yarime@k.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Forum for Sustainability Science ProgramsAAAS Annual Meeting

February 16, 2008, Boston, U.S.A.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

Number of Co-authored Articles on SustainabilityRank Country Pair #co-au

1 USA CANADA 638

2 USA ENGLAND 537

3 USA AUSTRALIA 264

4 USA MEXICO 244

5 USA SWEDEN 234

6 USA NETHERLANDS 224

7 SCOTLAND ENGLAND 213

8 USA BRAZIL 206

9 USA CHINA 204

10 USA GERMANY 185

11 USA FRANCE 162

12 USA INDIA 162

13 USA SWITZERLAND 158

14 USA ITALY 148

15 NETHERLANDS ENGLAND 140

16 GERMANY ENGLAND 111

17 ENGLAND CANADA 101

18 ENGLAND AUSTRALIA 99

19 USA NORWAY 99

20 USA PORTUGAL 98

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.

ji

ijji nn

kInt

2

,

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.

jij

ij

i

ijji nn

N

k

k

k

kSim

2

,

Similarity MeasuresRank country i country j Sim i,j

1 SWITZERLAND NIGERIA 33.7

2 SPAIN GREECE 28.9

3 FRANCE BELGIUM 25.3

4 JAPAN CHINA 23.4

5 SWEDEN FINLAND 16.4

6 NETHERLANDS DENMARK 15.3

7 SWEDEN NORWAY 15.2

8 ENGLAND SCOTLAND 14.9

9 ITALY SPAIN 14.1

10 SWEDEN DENMARK 12.5

11 AUSTRIA DENMARK 12

12 AUSTRIA FINLAND 11.4

13 DENMARK FINLAND 11.3

14 BELGIUM KENYA 10.6

15 AUSTRIA NORWAY 10.4

16 FRANCE SPAIN 10

17 GERMANY AUSTRIA 9.86

18 SOUTH AFRICA KENYA 9.51

19 DENMARK NORWAY 9.37

20 NETHERLANDS KENYA 9.26

Collaboration Networks on Sustainability (by country)

Yarime, Kajikawa, and Takeda (2008)

Research performed by Country Pairs with High Sim.

SWITZERLAND(120)-NIGERIA(46): 7

countryi(#paper)-countryj(#paper): #co-author

Articles in Journals such as Tropical Medicine & International Health, Annals Of Tropical Medicine And Parasitology

SPAIN(103)- GREECE(41): 9Articles related to Waste Water, Aquaculture, Water Supply

FRANCE(191)- BELGIUM(68): 39Articles related to Environment, Agronomy, Veterinary, Water

Japan(159)-China(210): 52

Articles related to Water, Environment, Plant

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.

mN

s

ss

l

d

l

lQ

1

2

2

Clustering by Country

Cluster # Country # Paper/country

C1 50 358.6

C2 43 131.5

C3 41 272.9

C4 29 130.3

Total 163 236.5

Countries in ClustersC1 Americas C2

Europe & Africa

C3 Asia-Pacific C4 Europe

Countrypapers

Countrypapers

Countrypapers

Countrypapers

1 USA 10899 6NETHERLANDS

1463 3 CANADA 2425 10 SWEDEN 810

2 ENGLAND 3926 9 INDIA 945 4 AUSTRALIA 2413 12 ITALY 729

7 CHINA 1050 14SWITZERLAND

600 5 GERMANY 1578 13SCOTLAND

610

8 FRANCE 956 15SOUTH AFRICA

576 11 JAPAN 796 21 DENMARK 334

33 ISRAEL 155 20 BELGIUM 342 16 BRAZIL 538 23 NORWAY 285

34 RUSSIA 144 25 KENYA 271 17NEW ZEALAND

527 24 FINLAND 276

36SOUTH KOREA

131 26 NIGERIA 233 18 SPAIN 516 38PORTUGAL

119

40 CHILE 108 27 TURKEY 228 19 MEXICO 346 39 IRELAND 109

55 GHANA 60 37 TANZANIA 130 22 AUSTRIA 292 43SINGAPORE

79

62NORTH IRELAND

53 41 ZIMBABWE 101 28 GREECE 205 44 POLAND 73

63 JORDAN 43 42BANGLADESH

91 29 TAIWAN 183 50COSTA RICA

64

64 BOLIVIA 43 45 ETHIOPIA 72 30 ARGENTINA 179 56 HUNGARY 58

69SAUDI ARABIA

32 54 CAMEROON 60 31 THAILAND 177 57 SLOVAKIA 57

78 LEBANON 25 59 UGANDA 57 32PHILIPPINES

157 76 ROMANIA 27

83 ECUADOR 22 60 COLOMBIA 53 35 INDONESIA 133 77 SLOVENIA 26

America

Asia + Oceania

Europe　+　Africa

Diffusion and sharing of knowledge and information might be limited to regional clusters.

Collaboration Networks in Sustainability Science (by Country)

Yarime, Kajikawa, and Takeda (2008)

Focused Areas of CountriesUSA 11013

Environmental Sciences 1898 -1.3%

Ecology 1351 2.0%

Environmental Studies 1096 -0.3%

Economics 929 2.0%

Planning & Development 573 0.3%

Forestry 498 0.2%

Water Resources 484 -1.7%

Engineering, Environmental 474 -1.1%

Agriculture, Multidisciplinary 472 -0.8%

Agronomy 434 -0.5%

Focused Areas of Countries

Japan 891

Environmental Sciences 127 -4.3%

Agronomy 67 3.1%

Agriculture, Multidisciplinary 62 1.9%

Ecology 60 -3.5%

Water Resources 57 0.3%

Engineering, Environmental 52 0.4%

Soil Science 50 1.7%

Energy & Fuels 47 1.7%

Environmental Studies 40 -5.7%

Economics 36 -2.3%

Focused Areas in International Collaboration

Subject AreaJapan-China

JapanChin

a

Water Resources 1420%

570.3

%117

3.5%

Environmental Sciences 13 6% 127

-4.3

%

3036.2

%

Ecology 9 7% 60

-3.5

%

1784.3

%

Plant Sciences 6 8% 25

-0.1

%

712.9

%

Soil Science 6 7% 501.7

%97

4.0%

Agriculture, Multidisciplinary

5 4% 621.9

%55

-0.6

%

Agronomy 5 5% 673.1

%47

-0.6

%

Geosciences, Multidisciplinary

5 7% 14

-0.4

%

56 3%

Agricultural Engineering 4 7% 110.5

%10

0.1%

Engineering, Civil 3 3% 250.4

%55

2.0%

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

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

(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

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

Issues for DiscussionSharing of experiences of international collaboration• Achievements, Possibilities• Difficulties, ChallengesAction 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