Whither UNESCO? Science, Poverty, and Peace

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DATE: Friday, February 17, 2006
TIME: 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
LOCATION: St. Louis, Missouri
ORGANIZER: Irving Lerch, Americans for UNESCO

This meeting will be held as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri

SYNOPSIS:
This is a critical time for UNESCO. The basic science and engineering program is being reorganized, increasingly complex issues in biomedicine are being scrutinized, and the member states are ordering their priorities placing greater emphasis on the devolution of programs away from the center and onto offices in geographically dispersed regions. U.S. State Department officials are trying to find ways to coordinate the participation of civil society with the work of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. The organization is being asked to place greater weight on science and engineering in the service of UNESCO's cross-cutting goals: poverty, conflict reduction, and social justice. The framework for these great works is being redeveloped to achieve greater efficiencies with a view to obtaining lasting and substantial results. UNESCO institutes, such as the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, have become important resources for the global science and engineering enterprise to recruit and develop scholars from developing countries and integrate them into the intellectual life of the global science and engineering community. The purpose of this symposium is to track these changes and to determine how best to organize U.S. participation to achieve global and national objectives.