General discussion

I wanted to share that the presentation by Bill Clark and the corresponding materials were extremely relevant, helpfull and ttimely for us. We are in the process of conversion of our Center for Ecosystem Research into a Institute for social-ecological systems research. We could have concentrated on the mere administrative process but we decided to take advantage of the oportunity for a deep reflection. We have been having various discussion sessions with different working groups on the topic for the last 3 weeks and will be working on this till mid january. We are revising our conceptual framework, mission and objectives, and have assessed how much we have been able to reach our own goals. We are redesigning our organizational structure, our growth strategy, and refining our technological-participative science to action strategy. We have been discussing many of our limitations and the presentation by Bill helped us with the very clear and sharp presentation of those.

Comments from UNAM students:

Out of the Kerkhoff & Lebel paper (2007) we would like to highlight the following remark: the authors show that knowledge creation is not devoid of a social and institutional context, where power relationships between institutions and its different perspectives determine an important part of the international scientific agenda. The academic institutions of the developed world have their own perspective about how to make science, what are the relevant questions, how should they answer them, and those perspectives do not necessarily match the perspectives, interests and priorities of the developing world. However, the uneven relationship regarding access to funding, the prioritization of international agenda and the publishing at high impact scientific journals creates an unequitative representation of the science that it is been done in the world.