Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192

www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc

From sector to networks: the Venezuelan

CONICIT research agendas
I. Avalos ∗, R. Rengifo
c/o Ignacio Avalos, Calle Auyantepuy, Edificio Comodoro, Piso 1, Apartamento 2,
Colinas de Bello Monte, Zona Postal 1050, Caracas, Venezuela

Abstract

Venezuela has a 40 year history of science and technology policy development. This history
demonstrates that science policy in all its aspects has traditionally been an issue for scientists.
In the 1990s, however, new approaches to science and technology policy formation attempted
to involve other social actors. This paper describes and places in context the “Research
Agendas” methodology created by the Venezuelan Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones
Cientı́ficas y Tecnológicas (CONICIT) (the Venezuelan National Council for Scientific and
Technological Research), an agency which in 2001 was renamed the Fondo Nacional de Cien-
cia, Tecnologı́a e Innovación (FONACIT). Opposing a heritage of extreme sectorization, the
Agendas process was inspired to work for network democratization in both the creation and
use of scientific and technological knowledge.
 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

1. A shift in science from sector to society

In the past, science was often supported by faith—faith that its unfettered pursuit
would naturally lead to technological innovation, which would in turn guarantee
economic growth and thereby social cohesion and peace. “What is good for science
is good for humanity,” was the uncritically accepted creed, with science being left
in scientific hands.
Such faith is now widely questioned and no longer sufficient to generate the level
of investment required by contemporary science and technology, especially from
public sources. Scientific and technological advances have contributed not only to

∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: iavalos@conicit.gov.ve (I. Avalos).

0160-791X/03/$ - see front matter  2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

doi:10.1016/S0160-791X(03)00026-5
184 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192

economic achievements but also to environmental deterioration, technological disas-

ters, and dangerous weapons developments—not to mention becoming compromised
by association with social inequality, exclusion, and increasing international asym-
metries in wealth and power. For many people, the link between science, technology,
and progress is fragile and contingent. Thus we need new guidelines for science as
a precondition for societal support.
Such was the background against which UNESCO organized the World Confer-
ence on Science, “Science for the 21st Century,” in Budapest in mid-1999. The
explicit aim of the conference was to develop a new relationship between science
and society, that is, a new “social contract” based on the assumption that science must
be subject to public debate [1–3]. At stake is the need for a democratic discussion of
priorities in science, the magnitude of science funding, its institutional structures,
and the use of its results, instead of having such issues simply decided in laboratories
and government corridors.
The Budapest Conference also called on scientists not to let their research be
oriented solely to military purposes or to the market, but to link their research more
broadly to general social interests. Scientific research should not be carried out in
isolated disciplines, each one more self-assured than another, but based on inter- and
transdisciplinary approaches that bring together the natural and the social sciences
as the unique means to both understand and change reality. Such a transformation
includes the hope that science can address the problems of the 21st century in ways
that more adequately advance the values of freedom and equality in human existence.
In Venezuela, as in much of the world, this new approach has yet to be fully
accepted. In fact, the persistent historical legacy is a conceptual mania for “dividing
into sectors,” drawing boundaries to delimit and turn reality into a department store.
“A place for everything and everything in its place,” is the operative motto. To mix
sectors, to pursue joint or common visions, to relate or to coordinate—traditionally
all have been rejected. Attempts to build relationships are commonly seen as
invasions, the dangerous mixing of different and autonomous domains. Education is
pursued as though unrelated to the world of work, agriculture as wholly distinct from
industrial manufacture, the university as foreign to corporations, and so on. As if with
a boundary-marking piece of chalk in hand, Venezuelans have reinforced whatever
separates instead of trying to unite, delimited functions instead of combining and
integrating them.
Indeed, throughout Venezuelan history, science and technology have been
presented as one of the well-delimitated and independent “sectors.” Science and
technology have constituted a little institutional corner within a larger society that
provides space for laboratories and research and development centers; the responsi-
bility of science is to produce knowledge, which is then picked up and independently
developed by technology into useful goods and services. The scientific-technological
sector, like all others, is properly self-governing and excludes non-scientists and non-
technologists, despite important needs to legitimize science and technology in public
eyes. Indeed, legitimization is pursued by separation or independence.
Venezuelan debates about science—which are not frequent—have taken place
almost solely within the boundaries of the scientific-technological sector. Histori-
 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192 185

cally, Venezuelan science and technology policy has been formulated within the
sector, by the sector, and for the sector. This approach presumes that the key to
resource allocation or to appropriate institutional organization rests solely with the
sector itself. Even social or environmental impacts caused by certain technologies
are often perceived as properly discussed within the scientific-technological sector
alone, along with any ethical reflections about scientific research and technologi-
cal innovation.
Discussions at the Budapest Conference suggested that we must start creating the
framework for a new social contract with science, one based not on sectors but on
networks. Today the essential questions are concerned with how to balance:

앫 research freedom with public responsibility

앫 access to results and benefits produced by science with the legitimate individual
interests of those who promote them
앫 redistribution with property rights
앫 economic growth with environmental balance
앫 market versus the so-called “non-market” demands
앫 the long term with the short term
앫 collective interests with private interests.

Going forward, what is required is to identify ways to allow these and other issues
to be understood as legitimate public concerns, subject to more than expert sector
management, thus establishing a space-collective analysis from different perspec-
tives: ethical, political, economic, and more. What is essentially involved today is a
democracy that can establish proper mechanisms to inform citizens and enable them
to bring their judgment to bear on the orientation and application of scientific and
technological developments and to choose what they consider appropriate.
But there are dangers in the pursuit of knowledge democratization. On the one
hand, the subordination of knowledge to democratic appropriation and socially pro-
ductive use necessarily involves diverse forms of knowledge—from mythological
knowledge and skill to religious visions and philosophy. In a democratic knowledge
society, all forms of knowledge become increasingly important. On the other hand,
given the prestige of science with its omniscient pretension of privileged access to
nature (and thereby to the funds that finance knowledge), there is a tendency to have
all other types of knowledge appropriated by or turned into science.
Despite objections especially by scientists, the democratization of scientific knowl-
edge finds support in the practices of science itself. One of the strongest warrants
for the truth or certainty of science rests with peer-to-peer dialogue, looking for
evidence and argument that satisfies a socially shared consensus. Moreover,
researchers today (and probably more in the future) seek to prove their propositions
not only in the academic space provided by publication, but they also want to trans-
late their ideas for university managers, the public, and international funding agenc-
ies, especially in Latin America. Science must have meaning for a complex web of
interests with diverse powers, from students to unions to indigenous communities.
In such a new social contract, science no longer takes place only in the laboratory
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with contingent implications for economics and politics, but it ultimately depends
on a legitimating insertion into social networks, on a reunion with the agora.

2. From government sponsorship to public responsibility

The issue of the democratization of science in Venezuela is intimately tied up

with the history and work on the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas y
Tecnológicas (Venezuelan National Council for Scientific and Technological
Research) (CONICIT). Established in 1967, CONICIT was initially simply an auton-
omous institute whose object was to encourage and inventory national scientific and
technological development activities. In 1984 its functions were considerably
expanded, and it was given responsibilities for planning and promotion. Within two
years a number of regional centers were created to promote scientific and technologi-
cal development, centers which in 1990 became a series of Fundaciones para el
Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnologı́a (FUNDACITIES). A “rethinking of CON-
ICIT” was initiated in 1994, which eventually led to its transformation in 2001 to
the Fondo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologı́a e Innovación (FONACIT) and its place-
ment within a new national Ministry of Science and Technology.
Throughout its history the formal aim of CONICIT has been to shape the direction
and use of scientific research. However, its more concrete purpose, which must be
considered in order to assess its real impact, was to create a scientific infrastructure
that was proportionate to Venezuela’s size. This was believed necessary in order to
produce societal benefits according to what is commonly known as the “linear model
of innovation.” Such a strategy was certainly part of the “modernization project” of
the Venezuelan elite—a strategy that reflected a relatively rich society with progress-
ive pretensions. Resource allocations for research were seen as expenditures rather
than investments. They were perceived more as an ideological luxury than as political
convictions linked to a real socioeconomic plan.
In practice, scientific activity had a sense of itself as autonomous, since as the
linear model would have it, application is a practically automatic and inexorable by-
product. Scientific researchers were responsible for doing their jobs correctly, and
all CONICIT had to do was provide the resources to make this possible, usually by
various subsidies. The science-society contract was thus applied under the principle
of “sponsorship.” The social use that might be made of knowledge was not con-
sidered a proper concern of scientists. Venezuelan scientific research was thus an
activity carried out by scientists following their own objectives. This idea was main-
tained even when the research was described as applied.
In parallel and as a consequence, the criterion of peer review was central for
deciding what one had to do or what could be done. Peer review was also the basic
method for evaluating, recognizing, and rewarding performance and results, with
these results revealed almost exclusively by scientific publication. A kind of
“accountability among colleagues” was established that left no place for external
judges or the opinions of “non-peers,” that is, people who might bring a social evalu-
ation to bear on what things should or could have been done. Thus there was a kind
 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192 187

of appropriation of one type of public policy, namely, science policy, by one social
group, the scientific community—despite the elaboration of four national plans, writ-
ten down by different governments, which hoped to establish priorities indicating
what sort of science the country required. We witness, then, a policy largely coming
from and addressed to scientists, with the support and acquiescence of the state, in
accordance with an agreement that might be envied by other sectors as well. In
different ways and to different degrees all special groups aspire to “colonize” pub-
lic policies.
But contrary to the above image, the new model for scientific and technological
knowledge production rests on a belief that research is justified within a use and
application context constituted by institutional networks made up of heterogeneous
organizations and with flexible multi- or interdisciplinary exchanges. Thus new forms
for organizing the innovation process are updateable and can reach critical mass in
rapidly changing fields. The proposal is that through cooperation and association it
must be possible to realize the indispensable complementarity of knowledge and
practice while dealing with the growing costs of research and, of course, the complex
process that implies the application and marketing of whatever products result.
The concept of a national system of innovation describes this approach, which
assumes the conjunction of public and private bodies (research centers, financial
institutions, consulting and engineering companies, manufacturers of equipment and
intermediary items, raw material suppliers, governmental agencies and even clients)
that share capacities and different resources in order to participate in the processes
of creating, copying, adapting, using, and disseminating knowledge and technology.
Thus the scientific and technological capacity of a country is not the simple sum-
mation of capacities that are present in each company or laboratory. This capacity
depends on the existence of a pluralistic coordination scheme equipped with formal
and informal functional mechanisms linking public, private, national, and foreign
organizations and fostering connections between science, technology, production,
and demand, so as to acquire, change, and disseminate knowledge and innovations.
These are the “innovation networks” whose coordination and orientation is thought
to be largely self-regulating. At the same time, these networks must respond to the
agencies and public policies under the normative guidance of a national system of
innovation.

3. The Research Agendas process

Against this background, a new Research Agendas program or methodology was

initiated by CONICIT in 1996, and is being continued to some extent by FONACIT.
The Research Agendas process represents a new approach to science and technology
policy elaboration in the Venezuelan context. What follows is a brief description of
this methodology or process of public policy formation, including its conceptual and
mechanical aspects, with further reference to its corresponding cultural and insti-
tutional context. (As an aside, at this point it might be appropriate to abandon the
phrase “science and technology” in order to talk about policies, activities, or insti-
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tutions associated with innovation. “Science and technology” tends to recall the sec-
tor mentality, which restricts the interaction of multiple talents and initiatives.
Although the classic coupling will continue to be invoked because of its discursive
convenience, from here on what is really being referred to is knowledge, technology,
and innovation.)

3.1. Concept

The Agendas process was designed as an instrument to connect research, knowl-

edge, and technology to the needs and opportunities of society. Its methodology
should be understood as an interactive public policy based on the coordination of
various social agents around common problems, supported by the legitimacy and
autonomy of diverse participant interests, and oriented toward positive negotiation
approaches. It presupposes participation as a replacement for bureaucratic or techno-
cratic decision making about the direction of research and the use of results. The
Agendas process further assumed that decisions cannot be imposed as pre-established
and finished, but that they arise as a result of the interactions of institutions participat-
ing in the process and are thus able to be reconsidered.
Essentially, the Agendas process implies networks of actors who define problem
networks to be considered by knowledge networks (not exclusively of scientific
research, unless this is understood as something broader than usual). A dynamic is
thus generated by the characteristics that define its specificity: the social origin of a
question, the negotiated projects in cooperation, integrated means of evaluation based
on criteria that go beyond the purely scientific or technical merit for the selection
of projects. Additionally, the Agendas process is a way to establish objectives and
priorities, an inverse social strategy and negotiation, and a work style. It is based
on communication, confidence, cooperation, and co-financing, on transparent rules
with shared benefits and risks, on decentralization and participation and, finally, on
the orientation (and social evaluation) of the results.

3.2. Creation

According to the Agendas process, scientific research should be funded not in

response to an individual grant proposal from some specialized scientific group but
in response to a larger agenda. The Agendas process implies delimitation of a social
space in which different actors identify and demand answers-solutions-support from
socially produced knowledge (by inter- and transdisciplinary networks of institutions
and individuals), starting with the convergence of inter-institutional resources and
capacities, and incorporating the application context of the ultimate users-benefici-
aries-clients networks. Values that go hand in hand with the Agendas process thus
include cooperation, transparent commitment around legitimate multiple interests,
links to national modernization objectives, equity, productivity, democratization, and
environmental sustainability, among others. Moreover, the social space associated
with the Agendas process is an emotional space or mood in which heterogeneous
 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192 189

aspects converge into learning and creative problem solving, lubricating the complex
negotiation process that agenda creation necessarily involves.
Specific agenda proposals can have diverse origins and justifications. An agenda
might originate in a state decision about a strategic topic, derive from coordinated
processes in the public sector in conjunction with other institutions, or, without
exhausting the variety, emerge from the initiative of researchers, consultants, busi-
ness people, organized communities, social development organizations, public
agents, etc. No matter what the origins, however, agenda creation requires establish-
ment of a network that articulates resources and capacities, defines objectives, cri-
teria, rules, specific demands, projects of research, technological development, sys-
tematic learning and adaptation, innovative organizational designs, projects for
human capital training, information-communication systems, etc. The point of the
Agendas process is to set up a dynamic that goes beyond simple grant proposal
statements specifying more and more narrow research projects to be assessed by
technical peer review, and to open up the science development process to as wide
a spectrum of actors as possible.

3.3. Negotiation and monitoring

Once formulated, an agenda request is in turn evaluated by the different participat-

ing actors who meet and negotiate to confirm a network of objectives and responsi-
bilities, and a shared game plan. Identified needs are translated into concrete
demands, which are organized as areas for project development to be publicly bid
upon. Associations and strategic alliances are established for co-financing and moni-
toring. The evaluation phase aims to improve and systematize an agenda request
according to public needs and social opportunities. Evaluation entails the inclusion,
in synergy with the classic criterion of academic quality, of other criteria such as
pertinence, opportunity, and feasibility. At the same time, both peer (scientists and
specialists) and non-peer (professional experts in fields related fundamentally to the
application context of knowledge and technology) evaluators are involved.
Finally, monitoring mechanisms are established with the participation of end user
or beneficiary networks in order to guarantee the use and transparency of the
obtained results.
By just such diverse means the Agendas process aspires to incorporate the “appli-
cation context,” that is, the users-beneficiaries-clients networks as co-specifiers and
co-validators of this process.

3.4. Role of the state

The state can play a role in the Agendas process, that is, in the formulation of an
agenda request, at various levels: as primary initiator and co-inspirer around prob-
lems, questions, national emergencies; as promoter and/or co-financier of the knowl-
edge networks and projects derived from this initiative; as a disseminating institution;
as provider or lubricator of social and technical networks that demand knowledge,
capacities, specialized information, etc.; as interlocutor in national coordinated pro-
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cesses, since it is a source of strategic vision and specialized prospective. The state
may also function as a node that serves as initial network support, which, in time,
becomes coordinated with other network members.

3.5. Electronic agendas

The creation and development of the Agendas process obviously has considerable
transaction costs. As indicated, the development of an agenda request necessarily
demands complex negotiations that take time and a variety of resources. Thus mech-
anisms are required to stimulate the coordination process among the different com-
mitted partners. Good information flow among these partners is essential to reduce
transaction costs. Thus it would be useful to define and design an instrument that
provides structured information to Agendas process participants in order to increase
efficiency. The use of information and communication technologies in this way
would be of fundamental importance, but the effectiveness would depend on such
a system being truly user friendly.

4. Institutional context: the obstacles

The Agendas process has had to emerge into and against the social fabric of
Venezuela, with its distinctive cultural guidelines, attitudes, recurrent behaviors, rep-
resentations, assessment orientations, symbols, and rhetoric. Some features of Vene-
zuelan culture facilitate this process, such as easy communication at the personal
level, a basic democratic orientation, and little gender discrimination. Cultural
obstacles include low levels of education, a weak work ethic, externally oriented
action, and social distrust.
To attempt an inventory of the assets and liabilities of Venezuela in relation to
the Agendas process is not to resort to any racial or biologically based characteriz-
ation. Instead, we refer simply to historically and socially embedded attitudes and
behaviors that may well be difficult to change but are not in principle unchangeable.
Consider the example of trust. There is considerable scholarship to document the
central importance of trust for a well-functioning society [4]. The performance of
societies where trust is culturally a well-rooted value is quite different from societies
where it is not. But social capital, of which trust is part, is something developed and
conserved over a long period of time, not something that arrives suddenly or is easily
promulgated by some official decree. Trust lubricates social relationships, making
them easier and considerably reducing the need for detailed public or private contrac-
tual rules that would attempt to box in human behavior, even when we know from
long experience that this is an impossible task. In other words, as the economist
would say, distrust increases transaction costs. Distrust is thus not a good platform
on which to establish the kinds of networks required by the Agendas process.
Another obstacle to the Agendas process, endemic to Venezuela, is that organiza-
tions do not foster easy and open relationships with each other. Personal relationships
are easy, but organizational or institutional relationships are not—a heritage passed
 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192 191

along from the sector mentality. (Cause and effect are not easy to distinguish here.)
Organizations work to separate and isolate themselves from each other. Each solves
problems in its own way. Venezuelan institutions have little interest in collaboration,
and so-called “strategic associations” are not yet a common conviction, although this
is completely integrated into the modernizing rhetoric of the country.
Some observers have also described Venezuela as a “frayed” society, perhaps with
some exaggeration, but nevertheless pointing to something real. Venezuelan values,
organizational structures, rules, and habits often seem to lack strength and continuity.
One might cite, in this respect, the work of the Venezuelan dramatist José Ignacio
Cabrujas, who uses the phrase “a culture of camp” to describe a society marked by
the ephemeral, where almost everything is done “meanwhile” or “just in case.” Cab-
rujas used the metaphor of the hotel to indicate that Venezuelans seem to behave
as guests who have little to do with each other, who barely establish community
links, and who consider the hotel no more than an occasional meeting place.
Another cultural weakness is the Venezuelan system of collective sanctioning,
which is not always adequate even for the punishment of crimes, much less for those
who act in bad faith. We are cautious because we do not feel there are institutions
that can protect us against abuses and traps. It is our defense mechanism against an
inefficient and abusive judicial system, a reaction to the possibility of harm, which
can seldom be redressed by socially available means.

5. Conclusion

In summary, the institutional route of the Agendas process was complex and
became almost unavoidably involved in the paradox of change: the more successful
the Agendas process was, the more problems it caused. Conflicts between the plural
logic of agendas requests and standard administrative procedures—a familiar experi-
ence at CONICIT and in all Venezuelan institutions linked to the Agendas process—
resulted in wasted time, intensified negotiations, and often redefined processes. In a
certain sense, the Agendas process functioned to disseminate institutional cultures
that were fundamentally at odds with the logic of the state. Using a pedagogical
exaggeration, we might say that the Agendas process needed to create its own action
space, teaching users, suppliers, and partners a more flexible and open administrative
and organizational culture. Indeed, the Agendas process was at its heart a mechanism
for learning, for creating a new democratic technical culture for the social appropri-
ation of knowledge. Therefore, conflicts with existing stereotypes, hierarchies, and
authorities in diverse social spaces were simply unavoidable.

References

[1] World Conference on Science. Introductory Note to the Science Agenda-Framework for Action.
1999a. See UNESCO website: ⬍⬍ www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/intro—framework.htm⬎⬎.
[2] World Conference on Science. Science Agenda-Framework for Action. 1999b. See UNESCO website:
⬍⬍www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/framework.htm⬎⬎.
192 I. Avalos, R. Rengifo / Technology in Society 25 (2003) 183–192

[3] World Conference on Science. Declaration on science and the uses of scientific knowledge. 1999c.
See UNESCO website: ⬍⬍www.unesco.org/science/wcs/eng/declaration—e.htm⬎⬎.
[4] Fukuyama F. Trust: social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Ignacio Avalos is a sociologist at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. He has been President
of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas y Tecnológicas (CONICIT), and of the Venezuelan
Consejo Nacional de Educación Superior (CONADES). He has authored a number of books including Diagnós-
tico de la actividad de investigación y desarrollo (1980, with D. Arnao and others), La planificación ilusoria
(1980, with M. Antonorsi), Estudio de la capacidad tecnológica de industria manufacturera (1994, with H.
Viana and others), and Biotecnologı́a e industria (1990).

Rafael Rengifo is a sociological researcher in the Center for Development Studies at the Universidad Central
de Venezuela. His focus is organizational behavior and innovation policies. In these areas, he has published
books and articles in national and international journals.