Why this session matters to us
A session called “The Way Forward” is where a framework either commits to being measured or does not. The morning had handed this room an unusually specific brief. UNESCO’s first Global Report of the Science Decade, launched a few hours earlier in the same building, had found that 40% of the Decade’s endorsed initiatives named coordination, not funding, as their primary barrier, and that Africa holds under 10% of those initiatives against 17.5% of the world’s population. Two clean findings, both actionable, both published by the Decade about itself.
So the test for the closing plenary was narrow and fair: does it answer either one, and does it leave behind anything a person could check later? The answer to the first is partly. The answer to the second is no, and that is the more useful finding.
Three messages, and no text
It is worth being plain about what this session was, because the contrast with the rest of the UN’s July was stark. The day before, in New York, the HLPF closed by adopting a negotiated Ministerial Declaration by consensus after two recorded votes. There is a text, states own it, and anyone can hold them to it.
The Science Decade’s closing plenary was a six-person panel followed by the moderator’s summary. Nothing was adopted, nothing was negotiated, and no document exists. That is not a failing in itself. A science conference is not an intergovernmental negotiation and was never going to produce one; UNESCO convened a stocktake, not a drafting session. But it does mean the Decade’s next phase now rests on what the moderator called, accurately, “the three messages that I’m hearing”: put people at the centre, build institutions and partnerships, and anticipate. She closed on a phrase that captures the register the room chose.
Earlier she had summarised the panel’s conditions for success as “strong coordination, long-term partnerships, investment in scientific capacity and capability, support to young researchers and meaningful engagement from industry and private sector.” Every one of those is a direction. None of them is a deliverable, and none carries a date, an owner or a number.
The composition of the panel is worth recording alongside that. Of six seats, one went to UNESCO, one to a working scientist, and four to private capital and philanthropy: a Chinese display manufacturer, a Russian fertiliser producer, a Saudi education foundation and an Australian-listed miner. This was the panel assembled to answer a report that had just said the binding constraint was coordination rather than money.
The coordination answer: nominate a focal point
The Decade’s most senior scientist in the room did not dodge the report. Asked what mechanisms the Decade needs, Abou Amani, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Sciences a.i., named the gaps himself and put coordination first.
His mechanism was the National Focal Points Network: “the first thing to do moving forward is for government to nominate focal Points”, entities at country level charged with connecting every national science stakeholder, which UNESCO could then wire to each other. It is the right answer. It is also, precisely, the network that the IDSSD secretariat had declared “officially active” in the session that ended shortly before this one began, with somewhere around forty countries signed up against 79 countries where endorsed initiatives are already running. The coordination fix and the coordination problem are the same object at two different stages of assembly, and the closing plenary’s contribution was to ask governments, again, to join.
His second proposal is the one that should interest anyone who watches how institutions count. Researchers, he noted, “are uh evaluated based on number of publication”, and “we should also look at how to revisit such kind of way of evaluation”, weighting instead what a publication changed in people’s lives. That is a proposal to change the metric that governs scientific careers, made from the podium of the body that runs the Decade, and it went unremarked by the rest of the panel.
He also pitched the Decade’s endorsement label directly at the funders beside him, as a way to de-risk their money: the labelled projects have been through a selection process, so backing one is a safer bet. Hold that thought.
The Africa answer came from one seat
The report’s equity finding got exactly one substantive response, and it came from the only Africa-based panelist. Rajaa Cherkaoui El Moursli, the Moroccan nuclear physicist who helped bring her country into the ATLAS collaboration at CERN in 1996, argued the case from her own record: “when knowledge is shared, country with less resources can contribute to world class science.” Her commitment for 2033 was concrete and, unusually for the afternoon, already exists.
She undertook to work to expand ARISE, the African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence, an African Union and European Union flagship implemented by the African Academy of Sciences, where she is vice-president for Northern Africa on the governing council. She put it at 47 teams across 38 countries involving around 600 early- and mid-career researchers, figures that match the Academy’s own published numbers. Replicate that model in other regions, she argued, and Africa becomes a partner rather than a gap. Her framing of the stakes was that science must be “more interdisciplinary and more inclusive”, and that inclusion means women, young scientists and researchers from under-represented regions specifically.
UNESCO’s own answer to the Africa number, in this session, was open science: shared and open scientific infrastructure so that researchers “from the south” can reach equipment they will never own. “Democratizing the infrastructure when it come to doing science is something which we will need to promote,” Amani said. It is a real answer to a real barrier. It is not an answer to the finding that under 10% of the Decade’s initiatives are African, which is a question about where the Decade puts its own label, and that went unaddressed.
The Advisory Committee is in the title and was not in the room
The conference’s January provisional agenda pairs this plenary with a second item in the same slot: an IDSSD Advisory Committee Meeting (Working Dinner), marked “by invitation only”. Nothing of it appears in the webcast, and the July programme drops it. Whether it happened is not something the public record answers.
What the Advisory Committee is, though, is published, and it matters more than its billing suggests. It has five members, chaired by Quarraisha Abdool Karim of CAPRISA in South Africa, and UNESCO gives its remit in one line: it “provides expert advice, review Decade Project proposals, and offer guidance on scientific and ethical matters.” Read that against Amani’s sales pitch. The Advisory Committee is the body that vets the proposals that become the endorsed initiatives; the endorsed initiatives are the 397 that the Global Report counts; and the label those reviews confer is what UNESCO is now offering private funders as a de-risking seal. The Decade’s expert governance body is a quality gate on inputs. Nothing in its remit covers whether a labelled project worked.
One member of it was on this panel: Cherkaoui El Moursli. That is not a coincidence worth much on its own, but it is the only visible thread between the session titled after the Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee itself.
The one countable thing anyone proposed
It came last, from the philanthropy. Nada Alneafa, speaking for the Abdullah Al Fozan Foundation for Education, UNESCO’s partner on the UNESCO-Al Fozan International Prize for the Promotion of Young Scientists in STEM, opened with “We cannot solve tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s support models” and closed with the only sentence all afternoon that would let someone check the Decade’s work.
She also made the session’s only proposal that cites the Global Report by name. “In response to the recommendations of the global report launched at this conference, particularly the need for stronger international coordination”, the foundation would work with UNESCO and interested partners “to explore the creation of a global young scientists’ partnership platform” that “could strengthen coordination, expand research mobility, improve access to laboratories and international research networks”. She said the foundation is preparing a substantial contribution to the Decade’s implementation, without naming a figure, and was careful that this was not a takeover: “no single organisation can achieve the ambition” of the Decade.
The moderator heard the measurement point and said so, noting the panel “should also have concrete objectives such as a number of young scientists trained.” Then the session ended. Nobody adopted the question, nobody was assigned it, and the platform remains something to explore.
Our read
The Decade runs 2024 to 2033. It is two years in, it has just published its first stocktake, and its closing plenary named no next milestone of any kind: no second Global Report, no mid-Decade checkpoint, no next conference, no date. The only year spoken aloud was 2033, which is the finish line, not a checkpoint. For a body whose own report says its problem is coordination, the absence of a scheduled next beat is not a detail. A coordination deficit is precisely the kind of problem that gets fixed by a date in a calendar that forces people back into a room.
The session did answer its brief in the way it understood it. It consolidated the messages and pointed at practical directions, and the directions were sensible: focal points, science-policy platforms, long-term rather than project-cycle money, a serious argument about changing how researchers are evaluated. Several panelists made real commitments of their own. But every one of those commitments belongs to whoever made it, and the Decade acquired no instrument for knowing whether any of them happened.
Which leaves the afternoon’s sharpest line sitting where it landed, unclaimed. Alneafa asked every organisation in the room to be able to answer, by 2033, how many young scientists it had helped succeed. It is a good question. It is answerable, it is comparable across institutions, and it is the sort of thing a Decade could actually report. It was asked by a donor, of a room, with nobody obliged to reply, and the distance between that and a Ministerial Declaration adopted by consensus in New York the previous morning is the distance worth sitting with. Two UN bodies closed a week apart. One produced a text its members are stuck with. The other produced three messages.
Why it matters for the SDGs
The Science Decade is an SDG 17 instrument in almost every respect: partnership, capacity-building, technology transfer, and the flow of scientific knowledge to the countries with the least of it. Amani put the point himself, that the Decade exists so that “whatever science we are doing” helps accelerate the seventeen Goals rather than sitting beside them. That is the right ambition and it is the reason the accountability question bites. Target 17.6 and target 17.16 are about cooperation and multi-stakeholder partnership, and the honest reading of this plenary is that the Decade has plenty of both and no way to score either.
There is also a direct read across to 17.18, the disaggregated-data target that runs through everything we cover. The Decade can currently report how many initiatives carry its label and how many countries have nominated a focal point. It cannot report what any of it changed, and its one expert body is chartered to review proposals rather than results. The Global Report was candid about that gap in the morning. By the evening, the way forward past it was still a set of directions.
Watch & read
- The report this session was answering: the IDSSD Global Report launch, the same morning, where the 40% coordination finding and the Africa gap were published.
- The coordination machinery itself: National Implementation of the IDSSD, the focal points session that ran immediately before this one and declared the network active.
- How the conference opened, and the measurement bar it set for itself: the opening and ministerial dialogue, science diplomacy in action, and the Day 1 closing plenary.
- The contrast case, one day earlier in New York: the HLPF’s closing and the Ministerial Declaration, a negotiated outcome adopted by consensus after two recorded votes.
- IDSSD governance, UNESCO, which publishes the Advisory Committee’s remit and its five members.
- Full IDSSD Global Conference 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated transcript of the UNESCO webcast and should be read as close paraphrase. Speaker labels are not reliable across this recording, so speakers are named only where the content makes the attribution unambiguous; others are cited by role. Figures are as speakers stated them and were not independently verified except where this page says otherwise; non-English passages are summarised, not quoted. This session closed the main two-day programme, not the conference: Day 3 on 17 July carried partner-led thematic events and the formal closing, which are not covered here.