Science, Technology, Autonomy, and Dependence: A Framework for International Debate

In the past 30 years, the role of science and technology in the international system has changed markedly. Science and technology have emerged as primary instruments of power and social control, with the major industrialized countries, especially the superpowers, relying more and more on science and technology as a means of maintaining their dominance in that system. Notwithstanding beachheads of technological competence and scientific excellence in the Third World, the technological gap between the North and the South has widened during this period because of the near-monopoly that a few industrialized countries have acquired on the generation and productive use of new technology based on modern science. Development strategies, relying on importation of capital-intensive, socially inappropriate, environmentally destructive Western technologies, cannot but lead to a massive global equity crisis in the 1980s. These technologies have been at the heart of the accelerating de-industrialization of the Third World by the First and Second Worlds on a scale far beyond what occurred in historical colonialism. The critical need is to focus the debate, at the forthcoming world conferences dealing with science, technology and development, on these underlying issues, leading to the formulation of concrete action proposals at the national and international levels which will effectively promote the technological autonomy of the Third World. While we cannot be certain that greater autonomy will lead to greater equity, few Southern countries can go very far in meeting the minimum material needs of most, not to speak all, of their people without a greatly strengthened autonomous capacity for creating, acquiring, adapting and using technology to solve their own urgent economic and social problems.