Late final month the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) relaunched the Science and Innovation Network (SIN) because the Science, Technology and Innovation Network (STN).
As properly as bringing ‘technology’ into the community’s title, the change displays wider pressures on the UK to compete and collaborate in a quickly altering world science and tech panorama.
SIN was first created in the 2000’s and is made up of UK diplomats posted overseas and different specialists employed domestically who work on the intersection between science and diplomacy. The community was one of many first concerted efforts by a authorities to set up a cadre of specialists targeted inside embassies and consulates on science and innovation work. Widely cited as a best-in-class instance of how to do ‘science diplomacy’, at the moment the community is a few 130 folks robust and based mostly throughout 65 places.
The press release for the relaunch final month famous that the community had a Star Trek-esq mission to ‘forge deeper international partnerships on science and technology, and seek new opportunities for British sci-tech pioneers’, all in help of the Labour authorities’s Plan for Change. So, will the brand new community boldly go in search of latest applied sciences? Or is the change only a new title for the prevailing work selling UK science and tech to a global viewers, offering perception on science and tech tendencies, and facilitating future collaborations for the UK?
The reply is probably going a little bit of each. The FCDO and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (the 2 ministerial departments that co-own the community) mentioned that the relaunch ‘recognises the huge role technologies like AI, quantum and engineering biology can play in global growth’. That is undeniably true. But expertise and science have at all times been two sides of the identical innovation coin and there was at all times a little bit of a silent ‘T’ in the best way SIN operated, so the brand new title maybe merely higher displays the rising significance of diplomacy in supporting every thing from probably the most primary elementary science to its most superior technological functions.
Science and Tech Diplomacy
It is not only the community that’s altering. Science and tech are having an ever-greater influence on each the myriad points diplomats want to work on and on how diplomacy itself is carried out. That means the UK, and the remainder of the world, want to shift how they strategy the apply of science diplomacy.
Science diplomacy has a protracted historical past, and the UK has been an lively participant all through that point. Examples of ‘scidip’ stretch from monitor 2 dialogues between UK, US and Russian nuclear scientists in the course of the Cold War, to the position eminent scientists – and Fellows of the Royal Society – Dorothy and Joseph Needham performed in normalising the post-WWII UK-China relationship by means of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office.
Today, science diplomacy is practiced in tumultuous geopolitical circumstances. Responding to this new local weather, the Royal Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have simply printed a brand new report, Science Diplomacy in an Era of Disruption, which displays on how science is ever extra central to international coverage, and how the present political local weather due to this fact requires a sensible and clear-eyed strategy to the apply of science diplomacy. Similarly, the EU has proposed their very own European Framework for Science Diplomacy, and UNESCO are holding a Global Ministerial Dialogue on science diplomacy.
So, What Now?
In this ‘era of disruption’ there are two key challenges that the diplomats in the relaunched Science and Technology Network will want to grapple with. First, is the rise of non-state actors who are actually main gamers in fields as soon as reserved just for nation states. How, for instance, ought to we type multilateral agreements round the usage of AI when the important thing actors are actually multilateral firms relatively than particular person nations? How too ought to diplomats reply to companies who management applied sciences vital to a rustic’s means to wage struggle or to defend itself?
Second, the community’s diplomats will want to navigate the more and more advanced and interconnected relationship between nationwide safety and scientific cooperation. Previously, the thought of a ‘dual use’ expertise, one with each civil and army functions, was comparatively simple to outline and management, with clearly articulated exclusions for primary science to permit free worldwide collaboration with a variety of companions.
Today, that binary has virtually fully damaged down, and it’s more and more onerous to discover any expertise that isn’t not less than doubtlessly twin use. The STN groups world wide will seemingly discover themselves torn between ministers who’re eager to discover new technological partnerships and long-standing export management restrictions that are firmly set towards such concepts. The Twentieth-century legislative frameworks governing scientific cooperation are principally black and white instruments more and more requested to regulate a really greyscale set of circumstances.
The launch of STN is a constructive transfer. The ministerial and diplomatic ambition for the UK to play a number one position in world science is clearly there. But ambition alone won’t be sufficient to see the UK succeed. To guarantee STN is correctly outfitted to construct the partnerships the UK wants, HMG can even want to assume onerous in regards to the home and worldwide legislative frameworks and make certain they, like STN, mirror a Twenty first-century view of science and expertise.
© Ian Wiggins, 2025, printed by RUSI with permission of the writer.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the writer’s, and don’t characterize these of RUSI or every other establishment.
For phrases of use, see Website Ts&Cs of Use.
Have an thought for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a brief pitch to [email protected] and we’ll get again to you if it suits into our analysis pursuits.View full guidelines for contributors.