Charge of empire building is unfair to global challenge hubs

Research partnerships with the global south will be an alliance of equals, not an exercise in neo-colonialism, says Ray Kent.

The announcement that UK Research and Innovation is to invest more than £200 million in a programme to build partnerships in research with low and middle-income countries was never going to pass unnoticed, especially in the febrile atmosphere of Brexit. Hence, a relatively low-key government press release on 10 December 2018 describing 12 UKRI Global Interdisciplinary Research Hubs funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) was met with criticism from some quarters.

Even the normally measured James Wilsdon, a professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, was reported by the BBC as saying that UKRI should be focusing on the challenges of leaving the European Union, rather than “throwing its PR weight behind potentially unhelpful ‘Empire 2.0’ narratives about the future of the UK’s collaboration with the rest of the world”.