Science and Technology in
United States Foreign Affairs

Copyright © 1999
by Robert G. Morris


CHAPTER 13.  Action Spreads to Other International Forums
 

"Avoid trivia."
George C. Marshall


This chapter focuses on S&T development issues at the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC), UNCTAD IV and the Organization of American States (OAS).

CIEC (1975-7)
The United States, of course, was not the only country seeking new answers to old questions and trying to practice flexible diplomacy.  France also took steps to reverse the deterioration of north-south relations that had typified the 1974 UN sessions.  In his first year in office, France's President Giscard d'Estaing suggested calling a small conference of industrialized and developing countries to try to break the impasse between energy producers and consumers intensified by the OPEC oil price increase of 1973.

After initial disagreement on its scope, participants decided that ministers of twenty-seven countries would convene a Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) in Paris in December 1975 (see also chapter 20).5  Eight of the countries (G-8) would be from the industrially-developed "north" and nineteen (G-19) from the undeveloped "south."6  They planned to meet again in about twelve months' time to review the results achieved by four commissions dealing with energy, development, raw materials and finance.  At this first ministerial meeting U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger launched a second salvo of U.S. technological initiatives in the series started in September (Appendix B).

UNCTAD IV
At the time of the early CIEC meetings another team at the State Department was gearing up for UNCTAD IV, the fourth high-level meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development.  Personnel from AID and other implementing agencies had complained that they had been inadequately consulted before the UN and CIEC meetings on the information center and the international industrialization institute.  Agency criticism had also been pronounced after the proposals for cooperative S&T programs with the Soviet Union in 1974-6 and with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel during 1974 had caught them unaware.  Nevertheless, Secretary Kissinger pulled out most of the remaining stops at Nairobi and proposed the longest list of initiatives yet, with even more items than at New York or Paris, and with little more warning (Appendix B).

Kissinger was taken at his word when UNCTAD IV included many of the U.S. proposals on education and research in its final resolution 87 on the transfer of technology.  Two companion resolutions dealt with the code of conduct and patents.  Fulfillment of the terms of these consensus resolutions meant addition of new items to the file of S&T commitments by the United States.

The immediate task after Nairobi was to make good specific promises: to convene the founders meeting for the industrialization institute in the fall and to describe the energy institute and technology corps in more detail at CIEC.  AID naturally fell heir to some traditional development projects in nutrition, food and health.  State's Economic and Business Affairs Bureau continued its struggle with the code of conduct and patents.  The industrialization institute initiative, because of its size and prominence (and its early support by AID), went to a special office under the Administrator of AID.  The information center was in the hands of an advisory group at State (Chapter 12).  The rest of the projects had no home.  Nor was there any clear authority to see that all the projects were assigned a home and implemented.

As the summer of 1976 approached, the State Department faced that problem.  Future UN meetings would question progress on U.S. initiatives.  CIEC's moment of truth was to be in December.  (It was actually delayed until May-June 1977.)  The Organization of American States (OAS) would tackle some of the of the same S&T issues.  The United States had gained considerable political advantage by showing new interest in LDCs and offering to share its know-how.  But the question was whether this gain would be held by action.  Even more importantly, would at least some of the programs have the desired effect of improving the lot of the LDCs?

Meeting of the Organization of American States (1976)
Even as the new interagency working group on technology was being formed, far more meticulous preparations for S&T issues at OAS were underway in 1976 than was the case for UNCTAD IV or the 1974 OAS meeting in Atlanta.  The State Department's Bureau of Inter-American Affairs convened yet another advisory group from concerned bureaus, AID and other agencies.  For the first time since the preparations for the new dialogue in 1974 a group other than the department's policy and planning staff made the main recommendations for initiatives in science and technology.  This made sense because the staff, while brilliant, was poorly positioned for follow-through.  The new dialogue's concept of a U.S. "focal point" for guidance on technology transfer was resurrected.  Other initiatives were solicited.  All were vetted first by the advisory group.  The National Academy of SciencesNational Academy of Sciences:new dialogue National Academy of Sciencesnew dialogue National Academy of Sciencesnew dialogue National Academy of Sciencesnew dialogue National Academy of Sciencesnew dialogue  obtained outside opinions from industry and academia.

When Kissinger addressed the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) at Santiago in June 1976 he included in the technology section of his speech initiatives that had received the seal of approval of this group (Appendix B).  This time he did not take the Washington agencies by surprise.

Planning by the OES Bureau at State
Kissinger's compartmentalized managerial style and the State Department's traditional preference for policy over operations complicated picking up the initiatives strewn about in New York, Paris and Santiago and assembling them into a coherent program.  Most of the State Department was not only poorly informed about the secretary's initiatives in advance -- or after -- but also thinly staffed to implement them.  Nor could AID take over all the initiatives.

The brunt of the task of making sure that the government as a whole if not just the Department would follow through on the new commitments finally fell almost by default to two State Department bureaus: Economic and Business Affairs (EB) for the ones with a pronounced economic content, and Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) for the ones closer to science and technology.

1974 was the year that the congressional reorganization of science and technology at the State Department went into effect, when OES succeeded the old SCI bureau -- The Bureau of International Scientific and Technological Affairs.  While the United States was trying to seize the initiative on S&T issues in north-south relations, the chief S&T arm of the State Department was not only undergoing reorganization, but its leadership was changed three times.7  The OES bureau and its collaborators did, nevertheless, succeed in designing a plausible information center for presentation at the thirtieth general assembly.

The uncertainties in OES were matched in other agencies.  Because State couldn't hope to fund or staff all the new initiatives, and AID was largely restrained from doing so, some implementation fell to agencies having international S&T programs, like Agriculture, Health and Human Services (HHS, then HEW) and NSF.  Yet for the sake of efficiency the overall direction of programs in support of the initiatives should have been the responsibility of one lead agency, and a strong case could be made for the Department of State.  Since then, Title V of the 1979 Foreign Relations Authorization Act has made the case more explicit.  State and the agencies wrestled to find satisfactory arrangements throughout the short life of the initiatives but never did.

The task the agencies faced was formidable: to implement or demonstrate support for an information center, an international industrialization institute, a UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development, appropriate technology and an international energy institute, all discussed at the seventh special session, and a technology corps proposed at CIEC.  At the same time, State was preparing for the fourth plenary session of UNCTAD in Nairobi, set for May 1976, while dispatching delegations monthly to the four CIEC commission meetings in Paris.

Drawing on its experience giving substance to the proposal for an information center, State (OES) then prepared for the S&T issues to be taken up by the CIEC development commission (including S&T cooperation, brain drain and R&D targets) by convening another informal advisory group.  This new group also produced a paper that analyzed factors contributing to the success of technology transfer and means of promoting it.

Scientists had advised the State Department before on nuclear and environmental issues, development and the exchange of specialists.  The Economic and Business Affairs Bureau had made good use of outside expertise when working on multinational corporation guidelines at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and on the preliminary phases of the UNCTAD code of conduct.  Tapping this expertise had been institutionalized in the form of the Advisory Committee on Transnational Corporations, set up in 1975.  The Department has also had from time to time an advisory panel of scientists to contribute expertise on subjects like technology exports, uranium enrichment, remote sensing and weather modification.  This panel fell out of use under Kissinger, who had his own academic and industrial contacts.  These interagency advisory groups, perhaps with some private sector participation, like the one convened by OES in 1975 to design the information center (Chapter 12), were models for new groups then needed.  Panels performed four useful tasks:

1) they exchanged information between foreign service generalists, government experts and the private sector;
2) they involved the agencies that would implement the initiatives in the foreign affairs process;
3) they gave substance to hastily drawn "political" proposals; and
4) they set the stage for problem identification and advance planning rather than reflexive response to external challenges.

The advisory group's paper on technology transfer mentioned above had no chance against the political document filed by LDCs at CIEC (Chapter 20).  The latter was little more that a restatement of the science portion of the unrealistic February 1976 Manila Declaration of G-77 ministers.  It shrilly called for a binding code of conduct for technology transfer, a revision of the Paris Convention, compensation for the brain drain, targets for R&D budgets in developed countries applied to development problems and unrestricted access to technology.  With this paper the G-19 subgroup of the G-77 meeting at CIEC rejected any opportunity for progress outside the UN framework and rebuffed serious efforts at accommodation by the United States and its CIEC partners.  CIEC became a scaled-down United Nations, with the same disadvantages of paralysis as the full-scale organization.  The U.S. working group paper was nevertheless a conscientious effort.

Implementation Mechanisms
The OES Bureau and the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs decided to make formal the collective U.S. government response to its own S&T initiatives and commitments.  They formed the Interagency Working Group on Technology, an officially designated subgroup of the Under Secretaries Committee on North-South Policy.

This Committee was until 1977 a primary means of settling inter-agency policy on many issues.  It was made up of officers second or third in command at key departments and chaired by State.  It could set up working groups like the one on technology.  Its purpose was to monitor implementation of all U.S. initiatives at the United Nations.  The S&T initiatives were then to be broken out separately.  The new subgroup did not meet, however, until after UNCTAD IV (May 1976) and the OAS sessions (June 1976) were over.  The implementation mechanism made essentially no impact on design or execution of U.S. policy before those meetings.

The Total Program of Initiatives
The OAS meeting saw the end of the series of U.S. S&T initiatives proposed beginning in 1974.  Only the final results of CIEC, due in December, were not in.  Then came another period of figuring out exactly what all the United States had promised and how it was going to deliver it.  (Appendix B.)  This was the responsibility of the Interagency Technology Group at its first meeting in September 1976 with Frederick IrvingIrving Irving Irving Irving Irving , Assistant Secretary of State for OES, chairman.  A former ambassador to Iceland (and future ambassador to Jamaica), Irving had come back to Washington in the spring of 1976 to head the science bureau.  He put things very clearly to the first meeting of the group in September saying in effect: "These initiatives have been announced by the Secretary of State.  We may or may not have been consulted.  We may or may not agree that they will all work.  But they are now U.S. policy.  We will all work to put them into effect."

Irving established three subgroups under the guidance of OES, AID and EB to monitor progress on all the projects involved and to report back to the group.  He appointed a special body to plan the U.S. national meeting to prepare for the U.N. Conference on Science and Technology for Development; it met in November 1976 at State.

AID had already set up its special group to put the industrialization institute on the rails, first of all by holding the founders meeting Kissinger had promised at UNCTAD IV.  UNIDO was worried about competition, LDCs were skeptical of U.S. motives and developed countries persistently failed to understand the explanations the U.S. repeated about how the institute would work.  The AID establishment except for Administrator Daniel Parker remained generally unreceptive if not hostile to the concept.  When Parker left after the change of administrations in 1977, AID abandoned the idea altogether.

A more basic difficulty was AID's congressional mandate to concentrate on the poorest of the poor; many less-poor countries had the most to gain from the new initiatives, but they were excluded from AID's program.  Nor was AID alone in having a restricted mandate.  Other departments and agencies have limited authority or precedent to operate internationally.

Nevertheless, the OES-led Interagency Technology Group made a significant start not only in backing up the Secretary of State but also in institutionalizing science and technology in foreign affairs.  Using firm guidance, Irving was carrying the day.  He smoothed the ruffled feathers of the proud agencies that were to carry out the work under State's nervous eye.  State's other bureaus began to respect OES under the foreign service officer at its head.  Relations with the Under Secretaries were better than ever.  As much as science confused the Department of State, and foreign affairs confused the science agencies, links were being forged in a chain of genuine and unprecedented cooperation.

CIEC Concludes (1977)
Senior officials from capitals met in Paris in July 1976 to review progress at the supposed half-way point of CIEC.  They signaled the end of the analytical phase and the beginning of a second phase of serious negotiation designed to present results to ministers when they reconvened in December.  The four commissions then met in July, September, October and November.  Transfer of technology and industrialization were on the development commission's agenda for October.  The developed countries were able to agree on a joint text on technology transfer and they returned in November with modest hopes of achieving a common text with the developing countries on at least some items.

The U.S. presidential election in November 1976 confused the CIEC, prevented progress at the November meeting and caused postponement of the ministers' December reunion until May 1977.  The nineteen LDC members of CIEC obviously hoped for a better outcome under the new Carter administration in the United States.
In the end the conference made no breakthroughs on the key issues of debt, energy, raw materials and official development assistance.  LDCs put all their effort into these subjects, ignoring any opportunity for modest but tangible progress on science.  The long months of discussion of science and technology resulted in just three short sections in the final communiquÈ in which participating countries:

--agreed to pursue revision of the Paris Convention along the lines proposed at UNCTAD IV,
--reconfirmed their support of UNCTAD resolutions  87(IV) on the technology transfer code of conduct and the strengthening of LDC technological  capacity and
--agreed on the importance of the 1979 UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development.

From the standpoint of science and technology for development, the work during the eighteen months of CIEC made no progress whatever over that little made at UNCTAD IV.

Lost Chances:  Science Initiatives Abandoned
Of the twenty-odd S&T programs proposed or supported by the United States between the beginning of the new dialogue in 1974 and the end of CIEC in 1977 (Appendix B), none survived on the basis of U.S. efforts.  A handful for which the driving force came from elsewhere -- such as the code of conduct negotiations at UNCTAD and the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development -- remained active.  Despite the encouraging progress made by the Interagency Technology Group, the United States abandoned or neglected all plans and intentions to follow through on the 1974-7 S&T initiatives.

Nor did the 1979 UN Conference on S&T for Development (UNCSTD) revive any of these plans.  A U.S. initiative related to the international industrialization institute, newly called the institute for scientific and technological cooperation (ISTC)Institute for scientific and technological cooperation (ISTC), was presented at UNCSTD but died for lack of funding from Congress after the conference, as described in the following chapter.8

The reasons lie in the lack of enthusiasm and even disdain on the part of the LDCs and their unwillingness to settle for anything but the big financial items; disappointment on the part of the U.S. S&T personnel who had worked so hard to be innovative and forthcoming and perhaps even a feeling of "what's the use?"; continued bureaucratic unfamiliarity with the subjects and thin staffing and turnover within the U.S. government; and the new administration in 1977 that in the time-honored American political way assured that history would start all over again.

End of chapter 13.


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