Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 10, Issues 7–8, November–December 2007, Pages 668-684
Environmental Science & Policy

Understanding the North–South knowledge divide and its implications for policy: a quantitative analysis of the generation of scientific knowledge in the environmental sciences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2007.04.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The paper investigates the scientific knowledge divide in the environmental sciences between developed and developing countries and explores the implications and impacts on both science and policymaking. Quantitative data analysis of more than 6400 scientific papers published in 1993–2003 yield evidence for a growing divide in authorship, publication rates, and location of scientific research in nine environmental journals with high impact factor ratings. In addition to this severe imbalance in publication rates between developed and developing countries, we also find a research bias toward certain eco-climatic zones. More than 80% of papers are published in and about temperate and cold eco-climatic zones. Only 13% of the papers in our study are based on research in the dry sub-tropical and tropical zones, although these eco-climatic zones account for more than 52% of the world's land area. Based on these results, we discuss how the limited empirical source and focus of environmental research undermine the claims of universality of environmental science and what consequences this may have on policymaking processes at different levels. Finally, we briefly explore some short- and long-term strategies to address the knowledge divide.

Introduction

It is a well-known fact that the production of scientific knowledge in the environmental sciences is geographically and economically skewed (Bourdeau et al., 1989, Gutman, 1994, Lacher and Goldstein, 1997, Kandlikar and Sagar, 1999, Karlsson, 2002). Scientists and members of the international environmental policy arena often refer to the data gap, information gap or the knowledge divide between the North and the South, i.e., between developed and developing countries, with respect to the level of environmental data, indicators, research and scientific knowledge that are available and are being created (United Nations System-Wide Earthwatch, 2000; Commission on Sustainable Development, 2001, Karlsson, 2002). In this paper, we deliberately use the terms North and South to denote the so-called industrialized or ‘developed’ countries (OECD members), and the industrializing or ‘developing’ countries (non-OECD members), respectively. We use these terms to point out the geographical division created by these two categories, which corresponds approximately to temperate and colder eco-climatic zones that dominate the Northern hemisphere and the tropical and sub-tropical eco-climatic zones that dominate the Southern hemisphere.1

The approximate alignment of the environmental knowledge divide with eco-climatic zones has negative consequences for both science and policy, linked to the inappropriate transfer of knowledge from one climatic and/or socio-economic zone to another and the persistent lack of environmental information on some of the world's most biologically diverse, resource rich but economically poor countries. It is hence important to understand how this divide manifests itself in different environmental fields, to determine its magnitude and trends over time. Standard indicators of scientific knowledge production, such as data compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), while providing useful information on authorship, do not offer the possibility to identify in which eco-climatic zones the research has been carried out. This paper describes one approach to address this limitation.

The aim of this study is thus to quantify two aspects of the scientific environmental knowledge divide. First, we attempt to quantify the differences in publication rates of environmental science among countries by measuring the number of papers published in nine selected high-impact environmental science and technology journals as an indicator of a country's scientific capacity in the environmental field. Second, we investigate where the research is carried out, i.e., the countries, regions, and eco-climatic zones whose environmental aspects are being studied, which provides insight into how much scientific knowledge produced from different eco-climatic zones contributes to the ‘universal’ environmental scientific knowledge available.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. We begin by providing a condensed background on the status of measuring global scientific production with special emphasis on the environmental sciences. The next section outlines our methodology to quantify the divide between individual countries and zones in terms of the production of scientific environmental knowledge. Section 4 then examines the magnitude and spatial-temporal distribution of knowledge creation by author and location of research sites across countries, regions, and eco-climatic zones. In the following Sections 5 Searching for causal relationships, 6 Skewed and narrowly focused science, 7 Inappropriate national and global policy, we briefly discuss possible causes for the divide as well as the implications for the quality of environmental science and policy. The last section draws conclusions and explores some recommendations for how the knowledge divide can be reduced.

Section snippets

Background—a divided science world

The geographical pattern of the production of environmental science is closely related to and should be considered within the broader pattern of scientific knowledge production. There exists a well-documented disparity in the production of science and technologies among developed and developing countries (Serageldin, 1998, Arunachalam, 1999). Westholm et al. (2004) used data by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to show that developing countries

Measuring environmental science production

The present study represents a retrospective review for the last decade of the papers published in nine highly ranked international journals in the environmental sciences. There are a number of parameters that can be chosen to measure scientific knowledge production but the one measure that the scientific community itself uses in its internal quality control is the number of publications in international peer-reviewed journals. It is not only the number of publications which matter in this

Results

We begin with a brief overview of the general characteristics of the data we collected before focusing on the analysis of the magnitude and geographic distribution of environmental knowledge production. The basis of our analysis is a database containing 6441 scientific articles collected from nine journals covering the ISI categories of environmental science, biodiversity, and ecology, for the years 1993 (and 1995 for Global Change Biology)10

Searching for causal relationships

While the focus of this paper is on measuring the knowledge divide and exploring its implications for policy, the analysis is incomplete without considering the reasons behind the divide. Identifying some of the drivers of successful scientific knowledge production can give policymakers some options to build scientific research infrastructures and improve their productivity. We, therefore, selected a number of likely factors based on current scientific knowledge of the drivers of scientific

Skewed and narrowly focused science

A number of negative consequences arise for environmental science from both the significant divide in knowledge generation between countries and the divide in knowledge production between eco-climatic zones. In the following, we discuss some of those that we consider particularly important.

The overwhelming dominance in the nine top journals of first authors who are based in just a handful of countries in the North, the complete absence of first authors from a large number of countries in the

Inappropriate national and global policy

The very unequal and patchy pattern of knowledge generation in the global scientific community, as reflected by the publication patterns we have presented, not only has implications for academic research and education but also for the acceptance of knowledge that informs policymaking at the local, national, and global level (Forest, 2003). The general divide in scientific capacity has obvious impacts on the ability of countries to make social and economic progress with respect to

Conclusion and recommendations

The vast majority of research published in the nine leading environmental science journals we have examined is done by scientists in the North in socio-economic terms and in the environments of the North in eco-climatic terms. With some few country and regional exceptions the South is invisible both as knowledge producer in the environmental sciences and as the object of scientific investigation. The knowledge divide means that the world is divided into countries who dominate the production of

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the assistance provided by Karla Heister, librarian at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. We also thank the faculty at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for the valuable comments on the appropriate selection of journals to measure the knowledge divide in the environmental sciences. Finally, we are indebted to Simone Alcazar, Phillip Bourdeau, Arthur L.

Sylvia I. Karlsson is a research fellow of the Academy of Finland working at Finland Futures Research Centre in the Turku School of Economics. Before this she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research centers on multilevel governance for sustainable development with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge, values and institutions. Currently, her major project analyses the legitimacy and effectiveness of global environmental governance with

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    Sylvia I. Karlsson is a research fellow of the Academy of Finland working at Finland Futures Research Centre in the Turku School of Economics. Before this she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research centers on multilevel governance for sustainable development with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge, values and institutions. Currently, her major project analyses the legitimacy and effectiveness of global environmental governance with empirical focus on institutions addressing energy and climate change. She is a lead author of UNEP's Global Environment Outlook assessment, which is to be published in 2007.

    Tanja Srebotnjak is a post-doctoral research associate at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University, New Haven. Prior to her dissertation she was a statistician in the Environment Statistics Unit at the United Nations in New York. Her research interests have a public and environmental policy focus and concern the measurement of community vitality and environmental performance, specifically statistical aspects arising in the construction of composite indicators.

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