Interview with Alexandre Hobeika
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| Number of Parts | 45 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/66774 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2022 | |
| Production Place | Wageningen |
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00:00
Computer animationMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:08
My name is Alexandre Baker, I'm a researcher in political science at CIRAN. And so two, three sentences about this study. Well, first, so we made a study on the management
00:23
of COVID-19 and the relationship between decision makers and scientists in this context, in Finland and France in particular. The first main idea is that big systemic crises like are political in nature, because everything is uncertain in such context. Usually scientists
00:41
think of themselves as being non-political, but at the same time they have a key role to play in such crises. And so maybe the key idea that we take out from the study is that we need to better prepare the collaboration between scientists and decision makers for crisis time. Well, Finland and France are interesting cases because they have some similarities and some
01:04
apparent stark differences. Well, these are two wealthy European democratic countries in which public health is an important issue. At the same time, there has been this image of Finland having
01:20
managed to crisis well, and France, on the other hand, having experienced many more cases and many more visible public controversies was seen as more complicated. Actually, it was interesting to find similarities in the issues encountered in the two countries
01:41
in terms of relationship between scientists and decision makers. Well, that's an interesting question. I think that we may find the same issues in systemic crises that are really big problems that are quite new, like COVID. And we will find the most similarities in
02:08
which democratic countries probably, because the state has a lot of capacities for public action and is sensitive to the same kind of debates. In the two cases that we mentioned, well,
02:24
in Uganda, they will have less capacity for public action, the state is much poorer, and monkey pox doesn't have the same effect as COVID had or Ebola can have in some contexts.
02:40
It's less disruptive, so we will see different things. But I can think that we could also take the questions around that is, you know, in this study, we've been focusing on Western countries and what restaurants can be learned, but we can also accept the fact that in Western countries,
03:06
we have been quite bad at learning lessons. And it could also be interesting to try to learn lessons from what they have been doing in African countries, for Ebola, for instance, or rather than trying to do the other way around. Yeah, it's quite simple. It stems from the idea
03:27
that the goal we have in the project is to help change things and make things better for the future. And we, as scientists, social scientists, do not have political legitimacy to decide what needs to be done in the future. But the actors have more capacity and
03:45
expertise also in their work than us. And so the idea is that change has to come from the actors themselves. And to do that, we started by trying to understand their issues,
04:02
what makes sense for them, and to provide opportunities to reflect on their experiences. So that's the main idea of the practical approach. The actors are the center and we are here to help them express what they want to express and take some time, take some distance
04:23
to reflect on them and help them to express solutions because that's the most efficient from our point of view. So very practically, the next steps are quite simple while writing papers and producing them.
04:43
But beyond that, we are continuing the feedback and discussions with actors in the two countries, in Finland and France. So we present and we collect feedback and we do something again. And more broadly, what we want to achieve is the following. Basically,
05:05
everybody agrees on the main lines of what should be done in the future. When I say everybody, I refer to WHO, the other UN agencies, the World Board of Education, one and a half, the G20 team, independent panel for review, the Landsat Commission.
05:22
Everybody says that there should be more cross-sectoral cooperation, more equity, more inclusion. In practice, it's not completely clear what is being done in this direction. Some things are being done, but with quite a limited scope. And I think what we can do at our humble scale is to
05:46
push for the discussions to continue about the subjects and to go further. So concretely, we are devising our strategies and collaborating with colleagues from other projects who have come to the same conclusions or the same view and strategies to keep these
06:09
discussions going among the relevant actors. So in a way, it's some advocacy to continue discussing about what we all agree should be done, but that could be easily forgotten
06:21
because political priorities shift quite rapidly.