NORTH-SOUTH CENTRE - ETH - North-South Centre North-South ...

means sacrificing certain career perspectives while still
maintaining one’s personal career, then I think it is justified.
However, sometimes one could also first focus on disciplinary
qualifications and later expand into other fields such
as R4D – a sequential approach. In my view, there is a tradeoff
between pursuing a career in R4D and trying to get rapid
achievements in one’s own professional career.
Isabel Guenther: I am not so sure if there is always a tradeoff.
I agree that first one should pursue the questions that
one finds interesting and relevant. But, I think there are
always cases where a certain research topic is more fashionable,
resulting in impressive publication lists, while other
topics do not bring the fastest rewards. However, this is
nothing specific for R4D, but it is true for any discipline. I
do not agree that one necessarily has to make a trade-off
between R4D and a career in science.
Bassirou Bonfoh: At the NCCR North-South, we are building
the capacity of a new generation of scientists who are doing
R4D. To get into R4D you have to prove that you have done
basic research. Jumping directly into R4D is very difficult if
you are not specialised before broadening your view by involving
other disciplines or society in your research.
Urs Wiesmann: Nevertheless, it is very interesting that at
your university you try to include courses in transdisciplinarity
and interdisciplinary methodology. Parallel to the
disciplinary education, you can build a foundation for R4D.
An additional important tension exists between conventional
research and R4D. In conventional research, you get
more famous the more general and the more generally applicable
your result is. In contrast, R4D is then relevant when
it is contextualised. The links between poverty and global
market, or biodiversity and climate change appear in each
context differently. The subsequent problems are different
– related to different value systems and different stakes.
Barbara Becker: In a way it comes back to what you said
earlier about disciplinary research that has to be embedded
in a larger programme in order to put it into perspective.
For example, doctoral theses answer limited questions,
leading to an academic degree. They usually consist of
rather narrow disciplinary research not covering the
entire continuum. In addition, doctoral theses in R4D are
often highly demanding because they involve field research
under very difficult conditions – compared to the lab situation
at the university. This could be another trade-off. In
addition, because our university environment or our research
community does not award interdisciplinary
research or impact generation – as has been said before –
I wonder how one can influence this award system, the
Isabel Guenther
Isabel Guenther is Assistant Professor for Development
Economics at the NADEL, ETH Zurich. She had previously been
research associate at the Faculty of Development Economics
of the University of Goettingen and at the Harvard School
of Public Health. Her main research interest is in empirical
microeconomics with a particular focus on measurement
of poverty under uncertainty, health and population
economics, economics of water and sanitation, and the
effectiveness of development aid. Isabel Guenther has
carried out most of her research in Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso,
Ethiopia, and South Africa.
See more information on NADEL on p. 90
criteria by which you judge quality of research.
Isabel Guenther: With regard to interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity
is not that somebody engages in various disciplines.
But, you learn how to look at a problem from several
perspectives, how to work and discuss with people from
other disciplines, how to understand other disciplines and
trying to take them into account. Barbara also mentioned
the challenge of doing research involving fieldwork in developing
countries, which is much more time-consuming than
doing other kinds of research. I think that this is a problem if
research is only measured in how many papers one is producing
in the short-term. In my eyes, the quality of research is
not only defined by how many papers one is writing.
Bassirou Bonfoh: In our evaluation system, an African evaluation
system of academics, we have different kind of indicators
for evaluating the quality of research: The publications,
the number of projects you can mobilise, and newly introduced
“fiches techniques”, as we call them in French. If you
want to transfer your research findings to the community
or a single user, you can develop a leaflet that could be used
for sensitisation or information of the research users. Such
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Research for development