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Promoting Research in Social Sciences in Peru

Image: Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo's (GRADE)

The Global Development Network partners Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo's (GRADE) hosted their international conference 'How to promote research in the social sciences in Peru?' on 11-12 June in Lima. Social science researchers in Latin America have found little support from the State agencies since most State-enabled research funding is earmarked for "hard sciences" and industries linked with the increase of productivity. The purpose of the conference was to discuss how best could research in the social sciences be promoted to the government. While the focus was on Peru, lessons derived from the conference were relevant for other countries in the Latin American region.

GDN focused on how a country learns about its research systems, and the need to base policies that aim to strengthen the research system on evidence, while presenting implications of the Doing Research program in Peru, drawing on studies in Bolivia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nigeria, and the eleven-country pilot. GDN's Doing Research program builds on the current discourse on knowledge systems and puts forward a full-fledged definition of what a research system is, operationalizing it to investigate the national environment for social science research in three main dimenions – context, actors, and systemic failures. Know more about the program, and watch this film about the Doing Research pilot in Peru.

The conference brought together academic and government actors from Peru, and the science councils of Canada, Chile, Mexico, Panama and Paraguay, and was jointly organized by GRADE, the national science agency of Peru (CONCYTEC), On Think Tanks (OTT) and the Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social (CIES).