Con l'avvento di Xi Jinping, l'accesso alla Cina sta diventando sempre più limitato per una serie di ragioni. Ma c'è un gap profondo di conoscenze. Noi occidentali abbiamo pochissimi supporti utili per sviluppare le necessarie competenze che ci consentono di affrontare (e superare) la complessa sfida geopolitica che ci attende
G Iuvinale
Un nuovo rapporto pubblicato dal think tank australiano ASPI, a firma di Samantha Hoffman, evidenzia l'importanza di produrre ricerche ed analisi sulla Cina per i decisori
politici. Questa ricerca viene definita dall'autrice come un lavoro che dovrebbe guidare l'azione politica, influenzare il processo decisionale (o entrambi).
È il tipo di ricerca - totalmente assente in Italia - che i gruppi di esperti cercano di fare, colmando il divario tra il mondo accademico e i funzionari pubblici che si occupano di politica.
Il documento si concentra su due risultati chiave:
C'è una distinzione tra condurre ricerche rilevanti per le politiche con il processo di divulgazione in un modo che modellerà e influenzerà efficacemente il processo politico da parte di determinati politici e decisori. In pratica, la differenza tra i due non è sempre chiaramente compresa e forse non chiaramente insegnata.
C'è una formazione limitata che prepara la comunità analitica cinese ad affrontare le sfide della produzione di ricerca per le politiche in condizioni di accesso limitato alla Cina. I ricercatori hanno bisogno di maggiore supporto per navigare nell'ambiente di ricerca e colmare le lacune in termini di competenze.
Executive summary
This brief report explores the challenge of producing policy-relevant China research and analysis. Policy-relevant research is defined as work that drives action, affects decision-making, or both. It’s the kind of research think tanks seek to do, bridging the gap between academia and civil servants who work on policy. Before Covid-19 travel restrictions inhibited access to China, the Chinese Government’s tightening controls on information and heavier visa screening made access to China increasingly difficult for researchers. Gaining safe access has also been a growing problem. With risks such as arbitrary detention rising, many researchers, particularly from countries with increasingly adversarial relations with China, are concerned about being caught in the crossfire. These changes in access to China will affect governments’ ability to use open-source research to support policy development. China analysts will need to develop means of obtaining reliable information from outside China. One response to this problem is to improve knowledge sharing about conducting open-source research among China researchers and analysts globally. In 2021, with that aim in mind, ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) held a series of private virtual training seminars for early-career researchers and analysts who work on issues related to China and technology policy. Participants were drawn from both Europe and Latin America. Participants’ insights on education, training and research challenges in China studies indicated that there are several difficulties researchers encounter in their efforts to produce policy-relevant China research. We conducted follow-on research to explore those issues further, including one-to-one interviews and private workshops and discussion groups with additional researchers in academia and think tanks, civil society actors and current and former government officials. This paper attempts to synthesise those discussions, which were understandably complex, and highlight common themes and problems they called into focus while also contributing to discussions on how the field can advance under the current circumstances. This paper focuses on two key findings: 1. There’s a distinction between conducting policy-relevant research and the process of disseminating it in a way that will effectively shape and influence the policy process in particular places by particular policy- and decision-makers. In practice, the difference between the two isn’t always clearly understood and perhaps not clearly taught. 2. There’s limited training that prepares the China analytical community to deal with the challenges of producing policy-relevant research under conditions of restricted access to China. Researchers require more support in navigating the research environment and filling skill-set gaps
Comentários