A Science Diplomacy for Barcelona: Global Cities Take the Lead
By Alexis Roig
A new global order is emerging around cities and their markets, rather than nation-states and their borders. Big cities are economic, political and innovation powerhouses discreetly transforming the international scene, becoming legitimate geopolitical actors and increasingly bypassing nation-states to bring global public policy closer to local citizens.
By 2025, the 600 largest urban economies in the world will produce 65% of global economic growth. By 2050, nearly 70% of the world population will be urban. Cities have become the early adopters of emerging technologies, testbeds for global social changes and autonomous diplomatic players.
For the last centuries, nation-states have deployed diplomatic networks in order to establish a dialogue with other countries, have a voice in multilateral institutions, negotiate international agreements, gather intelligence, influence foreign audiences and avoid armed conflicts. Today, the current global context is driving cities to apply a similar approach. Just as it happened during the Renaissance, with autonomous cities like Ghent, Bruges, Florence, Venice and Antwerp, which redefined the international legal framework and set the stage for transnational credit and innovative trading networks, contemporary global cities are uniquely suited to translate their knowledge, resilience and productivity into global progress. The future of multilateralism is metropolitan.
We are witnessing every day how cities gain power and influence on the geopolitical stage when national governments withdraw from their global responsibilities. When President Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement last year, over 50 major cities from the US pledged to stay committed to the climate accord vowing to do their part in cutting greenhouse emissions.
Similarly, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (the world’s largest trading block and a global leader in scientific excellence) while London citizens voted to remain, and thousands recently protested over the Brexit, demanding a second voting.
On the last weeks we have also seen how Austria, Hungary and the US backed out of the United Nations global compact on migration. However, thousands have recently marched in New York and Barcelona, global cities with high percentage of foreign-born citizens, in support of migration and welcoming refugees.
TOWARDS A CITY-LED SCIENCE DIPLOMACY
The global challenges that cities are dealing with, from climate change to health, migrations, water and food security, together with rapid developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, internet of things, robotics and gene editing, raise fundamental issues as to the future of public policy and global governance.
The world around us is changing faster than ever and we face challenges that didn’t exist just a few years ago. Figuring out how we work together to manage this new scenario is not something that we can leave solely to national governments. Cities must take the lead.
The idea of science and technology in foreign affairs and global governance –the idea of science diplomacy– is emerging around the world. And cities cannot fall behind. If cities are already pursuing their own forms of diplomacy, are home of most of the scientific institutions and are already the size, in terms of population and economic weight, of many medium-sized countries, it is just about time that they become leading actors in science diplomacy. Major global metropolises with solid science and technology ecosystems cannot turn a blind eye to the current global challenges. They are critical in implementing the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, turning it from a global vision into a tangible reality. It is time for a city-led science diplomacy.
SCITECH DIPLOHUB: BARCELONA TAKES THE LEAD
In this exciting context, Barcelona has become the world’s first city to announce a science and technology diplomacy strategy.
The Mediterranean city launched on November 6th, 2018, SciTech DiploHub, the Barcelona Science and Technology Diplomacy Hub, a non-profit, non-partisan, civil initiative led by an interdisciplinary group of scientists, engineers and foreign affairs professionals, aimed at raising the role of science and technology in geopolitics and making Barcelona an influential global player in tackling humanity’s grand challenges through science and technology.
A first-of-its-kind public-private partnership that brings together the leading research centers, universities, think tanks, startups, big corporations, nonprofits and public institutions in the city, that will use Barcelona as a laboratory for solutions to challenges that respond to a global logic but are manifested at a local level in areas as diverse as energy transition, inequality, global health, the refugee crisis, bioethics, cybersecurity and the impact of artificial intelligence in human rights.
The launch event unveiled the details of the science diplomacy action plan for Barcelona. These include: bringing together embassies, international organizations and the city’s innovation ecosystem to enhance collaborative projects; empower the global diaspora of scientists and technology experts educated in Barcelona; and act as a think tank where scientific expertise can be harnessed in support of evidence-based policy. The plan also foresees a series of open events on issues such as global health challenges, the role of universities in the migratory crisis or the impact of artificial intelligence in democracy, as well as a pioneering summer school on science and technology diplomacy. Finally, SciTech DiploHub, which is already in conversations with international organizations in other global cities, aims to recruit, train and send abroad a first batch of science envoys: prominent professionals in science and technology that will be in charge of working for Barcelona’s innovation ecosystem in other global leading cities.
SciTech DiploHub also presented “The Barcelona Manifesto for a City-led Science and Technology Diplomacy” signed by over 150 world-class professionals, including: university deans, research center directors, former Spanish ministers, former Catalan ministers, former Barcelona mayors, CEOs of leading startups, directors of think tanks, business organizations, and the city’s top scientists, engineers and international relations professionals both at home and abroad.
The Barcelona Manifesto stands for the crucial role of science and technology as tools to build strategic leverage in diplomacy and international affairs and how global cities must take the initiative in implementing their own effective, comprehensive and positive science and technology diplomacy strategies.
PAVING THE WAY FOR OTHER GLOBAL CITIES
From a foreign affairs perspective, the Catalan city is the world’s 3rd non-state capital in terms of consular representation, with over one hundred diplomatic missions. It also hosts the headquarters of the Union for the Mediterranean, which gathers 43 countries from Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, and it is home of regional offices of relevant international organizations such as the WHO Office for Health Systems Strengthening (WHO/Europe), the UN-HABITAT City Resilience Profiling Programme (UN-HABITAT/CRPP), the Global Water Operator’s Partnerships Alliance (UN-HABITAT/GWOPA) and the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM), hosts the global headquarters of the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI) and the European Forest Institute (EFI) and is home of numerous global NGOs and institutes working in international affairs. At the same time, it is one of the leading cities in global municipalism and hosts the headquarters of the main international networks of cities such as United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Metropolis and MedCities.
With world-class research institutions, facilities such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the ALBA Synchrotron or the National Genome Analysis Center, a sound startup ecosystem (third most preferred location for founders according to Atomico) and one of the most internationalized higher education systems in Europe, Barcelona is among the top innovative hubs worldwide. It is also one of the most renowned Smart Cities and a fast-growing cluster in biotech and IT.
These unique strengths make Barcelona the natural fit to lead this new wave of city-led science diplomacy and aims to pave the way to many more cities to come. With this goal into mind, SciTech DiploHub is launching a Global Alliance for City-led Science Diplomacy in 2019 that will aim at bringing together major metropolises and international organizations in science advise and foreign affairs in order to position cities as legitimate actors in science diplomacy, run pilot projects, and exchange best practices.
About the author:
Alexis Roig is CEO of SciTech DiploHub, Professor at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and has over 10 years’ experience as senior advisor on science diplomacy for ministries of Foreign Affairs, Science, Research and Education across Asia and Europe.
Follow Alexis Roig on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexisroig/
Follow SciTech DiploHub on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SciTechDiploHub/
Note: This piece might include content partly based on excerpts from the following research paper originally produced by the author for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research: Roig, Alexis (2018). Towards a city-led Science Diplomacy: The rise of cities in a multilateral world and their role in a science-driven global governance. UNITAR.
