Knowledge for People, the Planet, Peace and Prosperity: Portugal and Europe in the international context and the challenges for a transformative agenda for science and innovation

More than 60 years after the “Human Pyramid” by French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, the contemporary analysis of Joseph Henrich, or the studies of racial justice and critical thinking by Jamie Berthe, among many other authors, suggest that social and political experimentation, as well as artistic experimentation, increasingly invites us to experiment with new participatory movements of collaborative innovation of a transdisciplinary nature. It also requires learning to face the challenges of systematically expanding the social base of support for knowledge, as well as the necessary reinforcement that the growing specialization of the top of scientific knowledge demands.

But it also requires complementing these processes, orthogonal to each other, with the reinforcement of interface activities and institutions, densifying and diversifying the institutional environment that stimulates the social construction of knowledge. It also requires ensuring open and free participation by all in the development process itself and not just watching any imposed form of development.

In other words, it requires understanding, stimulating and ensuring the continuous and systematic transformation of the human pyramid.

The analysis includes a discussion of the process that led to overcoming the chronic delay in scientific capacity in Portugal in the first decade of the 21st century, after global spending on R&D finally exceeded 1% of GDP. It then addresses the process that made it possible to achieve the European population qualification targets in the second decade of this century, namely in the period 2019-2020, after we managed to have more than half of 20-year-olds studying in higher education. These processes are discussed in association with the collective effort to reduce public debt, together with increased investment in R&D and the increase in the number of researchers in the public and private sectors, which significantly exceeded the European average and reached one of the highest concentrations in Europe.