Knowledge Governance between Chile and Germany
A binational, interdisciplinary working group examining how knowledge production is being transformed by technological change and growing pressure on universities to demonstrate social utility — and what this means for research cultures, knowledge communication, and science governance. The science systems of Germany and Chile face these challenges in comparable but distinct ways, making their comparison analytically productive and globally relevant.
About the Working Group
In recent years, knowledge production has changed significantly. Technological innovation, including AI and digital infrastructures, is transforming how science is conducted, evaluated, and communicated. Universities face growing pressure to demonstrate social utility, justify public investment, and respond to political scrutiny and shifting priorities. These changes defy the institutional logics, governance structures, and legitimacy of research systems in Germany, Chile, and beyond.
Despite universities being assessed for centuries, evaluation has taken a different shape, becoming a central mechanism of university governance. As states and funders try to define what counts as useful science, evaluation frameworks — and their effects on researchers' values, integrity, and careers — become crucial objects of inquiry. Researchers and institutions also navigate public distrust, territorial disconnection, and the challenging translation of knowledge across social and political boundaries. Meanwhile, autonomy, science diplomacy, and international collaboration face mounting pressure in a polarized geopolitical environment.
Chile and Germany offer complementary cases. Germany combines an internationally influential research system with sophisticated traditions of science policy and governance, while confronting technological change, academic precarity, open science mandates, and the strategic repositioning of scientific collaboration. Chile recently created a Ministry of Science, reflecting ambitious commitments to knowledge governance, while facing persistent asymmetries across fields, institutions, and regions, low public investment, and tensions between global and local expectations of territorial relevance and public value.
The WG brings together scholars from partner universities to develop a binational research agenda, joint publications, funding concept notes, and a science communication initiative through comparative binational dialogue and sustained collaboration. Conceived as a generative starting point, the Forum session will serve as the inaugural meeting of a sustained binational research network — with particular attention to early- and mid-career researchers for whom structured international networks are most formative and hardest to access independently.
Germany operates an internationally influential research system with well-developed traditions in science policy, research governance, and science–society interface institutions. Yet it faces increasing difficulties: technological transformation, open science and responsible assessment frameworks, academic precarity, political scrutiny, and a geopolitical environment in which scientific collaboration is increasingly treated as a strategic and security-sensitive domain.
Chile's research system has undergone institutional reform, creating a dedicated Ministry of Science and a national research agency. These changes aimed at stronger public commitment to knowledge governance. At the same time, the system continues to face asymmetries across fields, institutions, and regions; comparatively low public investment; and tensions between global academic standards and local expectations of territorial relevance and public value.
The Chile–Germany pairing is analytically productive, not merely illustrative. Both systems confront analogous challenges from structurally different positions, generating comparative frameworks relevant to research systems globally — especially where crises of integrity, communication, governance, and legitimacy are active, visible, and politically consequential.
Cross-Disciplinary Design
The crisis of science–society relations cannot be understood, let alone addressed, from within a single discipline. Integrity failures require sociological and philosophical diagnosis; governance responses require political science and policy analysis; communication breakdowns require communication research and STS; the AI transformation of research requires technology assessment and computational expertise; and the Latin American and Global South dimensions require historians and epistemologists who can situate these challenges in their specific structural contexts.
This WG is designed from the outset as a genuinely interdisciplinary space — not one in which disciplines present their findings in parallel, but one in which cross-disciplinary synthesis produces concepts, comparative cases, and research designs that no single field could generate alone. The Forum session format — working sessions, thematic roundtables, comparative case mapping — is built to produce this synthesis.
Research Themes
Evaluation is one of the central mechanisms through which governance in universities is achieved. When states and funders increasingly seek to define what useful science is, what dominant logics are enacted through evaluation frameworks — and what are the consequences for research cultures, epistemic values, and academic careers?
How are universities and researchers navigating distrust, territorial disconnection, and the challenge of translating knowledge across social, linguistic, and political boundaries — including in Latin American contexts where research institutions may be perceived as extractive or disconnected?
How are research systems navigating the dual pressure of technological change — including the rapid adoption of AI — and growing political demands for demonstrable social utility? How does science governance respond when the boundaries between scientific autonomy and political utility are actively contested?
Guiding Questions
The following questions are transversal to the three research pillars and do not exhaust the intellectual scope of the Working Group. They are offered as shared anchors for dialogue — not as boundaries for participation. The Forum sessions are explicitly designed to welcome new contributions, complementary perspectives, and empirical concerns that participants bring from their own disciplinary and geographical contexts.
How are integrity crises — from retractions and paper mills to reproducibility failures — reshaping research cultures and institutional credibility in Chile and Germany, and what do divergences reveal about systemic and contextual factors?
Evaluation is a central mechanism of university governance. When states and funders increasingly seek to define what useful science is, what dominant logics are enacted through evaluation frameworks — and what are the consequences for researchers' epistemic values, practices, and career trajectories?
How can knowledge communication practices rebuild trust among communities that perceive researchers as disconnected, extractive, or politically complicit — including in socio-environmental contexts specific to Chile and other Latin American cases?
When political actors selectively suppress or instrumentalize scientific evidence, what forms of institutional and communicative resistance are available to research communities, and how do these differ between recently reformed systems and established ones?
How is technological change — including the rapid adoption of AI in research workflows — reshaping knowledge production, and what governance frameworks are needed to ensure these transformations serve the social value and accessibility of science?
What forms of science diplomacy and international cooperation remain viable — and normatively desirable — under conditions of geopolitical competition, knowledge nationalism, and post-pandemic institutional fragility?
Group Design Principles
The WG integrates perspectives from both countries through a structured comparative format designed to move participants from parallel presentation to collaborative synthesis — working sessions, thematic roundtables, and a roadmap discussion. Two pre-Forum virtual sessions will establish shared thematic anchors. Six commitments structure the group's composition.
The Team
Bárbara Silva is a historian specializing in the history of science and technology in Chile and contemporary Latin America, with a global perspective. Her research integrates the scientific, political, and cultural dimensions of processes associated with astronomical development, solar energy, seismology, and water governance, situating them within the dynamics of science diplomacy and international scientific collaboration during the twentieth century.
She is President of STAND (Commission of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy) of the DHST, and Chile's representative to the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST). She currently leads two ANID-Fondecyt projects on Cold War scientific collaboration and hydrological internationalism in Chile, and is General Representative of SKLAC (Forum for Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean) of the History of Science Society (HSS).
Kathia Serrano-Velarde is Professor of Political Sociology at the Max Weber Institute of Sociology at Heidelberg University, where she has held a chair since 2014. She is an organization and political sociologist working on the transformation of the European education and science sector. Her research addresses the governance of academic work, the organization of scientific careers, and the narratives through which institutions create and legitimize their order.
Her empirical work includes a comparative investigation of cross-sectoral knowledge transfers in French, British, and German universities, and a longitudinal qualitative study on the rationalization of academic grant-writing in Germany from 1975 to 2005. Her PhD (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2007) examined the emergence of a German market for quality assurance agencies — situating evaluation as a political and organizational phenomenon from the outset. She brings to this WG a sustained analytical interest in how governance mechanisms shape what science is produced, by whom, and under what conditions.
Potential Participants
The researchers listed below have been identified as potential participants on the basis of their research profiles and their complementarity with the WG's three pillars. A number of invitations are already underway; others are identified but pending first contact. The group is designed with explicit attention to gender balance, career stage diversity, and symmetric binational representation — and actively includes doctoral researchers.
Program & Timeline
Planned Outputs
The Forum session will produce a Comparative Research Agenda — a shared map identifying empirical cases, complementary methods, and fundable collaborative designs across the three pillars, built collectively during the working sessions in Santiago. This agenda is the generative foundation from which all subsequent deliverables flow. The joint publications, policy documents, funding applications, and public engagement initiatives listed below are its concrete expressions — outputs that can only be produced because the Forum created the shared analytical ground and the working relationships to support them.
Open Access Reading List
Sustainable Development Goals
Join the Working Group
We welcome scholars whose work engages — from any disciplinary vantage point — with knowledge governance, science communication, research integrity, open science, AI and epistemic authority, technology assessment, or the sustainability of research. Early- and mid-career researchers, and doctoral students, are especially encouraged to reach out.
Working Group submitted to the 3rd Chile–Germany Academic Forum, Santiago, April 5–7, 2027. A new initiative — founded in 2027 as the inaugural meeting of a sustained binational research network on science, society, and knowledge governance.