Windhoek — The Director General of the National Planning Commission this week expressed the hope that an action plan will emerge from a three-day seminar in the capital that will encourage a partnership that will generate empirical evidence on which to plan social interventions, which in return will be empirically validated for impact.

Professor Peter Katjavivi was the guest speaker at the seminar that brought together several deans of Human and Social Sciences from universities in the Southern African Region. The seminar was held at UNAM.

"The seminar will also provide a starting point for Social and Human Sciences faculties in member countries to sharpen their research and operational agenda, based on the identified role of Social and Human Sciences in national development," Katjavivi said.

He shared some views on the important role of the Human and Social Sciences in policy making and implementation in the development arena, particularly the role of research in the social sciences in informing the process of policy formulation.

"Empirical social science research can support government accountability and transparency by providing the evidence on which policies are made and the impact of public policies evaluated. We are moving now to the era of evidence-based policy making and implementation," he said.

In his view, one of the challenges is the need to investigate the obstacles to social science research knowledge utilization by African governments, including the attitudes of policy makers to the use of research results, in order to improve the quality of decision making.

"There is a need to investigate the skills among government planners to absorb and make sense of research reports and findings. Equally important is the need to investigate the way social science researchers carry out research and, indeed, the relevance of their research, with specific reference to policy making, but also with reference to its relevance to the national development agenda of Southern African countries," the former vice-chancellor of UNAM asserted.

If social science researchers live in their own world - the so-called ivory tower - and carry out research to develop knowledge that is not relevant to the issues of the day, it is quite likely that their credibility and standing among policy makers and politicians will be low.

"Certainly in Namibia there are short-term and long-term government policy documents such as Namibia's Vision 2030, and National Development Plan 3 (NDP3), which have many policy areas with clear research implications. Thus, it is no excuse to say the social scientists do not know under what guidelines policy makers are operating," he said.

We therefore need an ongoing dialogue, in our respective countries, between social science researchers and policy makers, in order to develop a common understanding of the priority areas and develop strategies for social science research production, which is mutually beneficial.

"Such a dialogue or forum would address several issues that hamper the exchange of ideas and knowledge among social scientists and policy makers and prevent cooperation between these two players in the national development process," he said.

On the one hand policy makers have difficulties in accessing reliable, relevant and efficient information based on empirical social science research.

"Quite often one may find contradictory evidence being provided that leaves the policy maker in a dilemma as to which line of thinking is actually correct," he cautioned.

On the other hand, social science researchers may point to the low funding for research in our countries and other difficulties of doing research on public policies, including a somewhat hostile environment when it comes to accessing some categories of government data, where rules of confidentiality predominate even for some essentially harmless types of information.

"This can be the culture of government information systems in some of our ministries and departments, and we need to revisit it in order to create an environment of a free flow of information. Continuing dialogue is one way forward to create mutual trust and responsibility," he said, calling for a common agenda between social science researchers and policy makers in Southern Africa, in order to strengthen the framework of evidence based policy making and also relevance in social science research.

"This will bring about improved strategic thinking that will inform policies and accelerated national development programming. Since some of the delegates to this seminar are from other countries of Southern Africa, the issue of regional integration is also an important one - because that is one way of countering some of the negative outcomes of globalization," he said.

Policy making also takes place at the regional level, and has a bearing on national policies.

"Social Science research in Southern Africa, therefore, should also focus on issues of regional integration to resolve some of the problems and issues concerned with the creation of common markets - SACU, SADC, COMESA and, finally, an AU-wide common market. However, empirical research is needed into issues such as competitiveness, migration and free movement of people, and of course what we witnessed a few months ago, xenophobia and intolerance of immigrants," he said.

"Our universities, which can play the neutral and objective role of researchers, have to help policy makers face the challenges ahead by carrying out research and generating empirical data on the process of regional integration. This will help us to increase our capacity to foresee what might happen in the future and put in place relevant policies to deal with integrating our countries into a successful economic block," he said.

"In this way we can stand up to the challenge from other parts of the world that are now fully integrated, into economic blocks, such as the EU, ASEAN, and North America. Africa needs to act fast, otherwise we shall wake up to discover that we have missed the boat and been left behind by the rest of the world," he concluded.