ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Politics of Big Science: Competition, Consensus-building and Cooperation in the Square Kilometre Array (1980s-2025)

• In Event: Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 4

English Abstract

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) offers a compelling case study for rethinking science diplomacy as a process not only of cooperation but also of competition, negotiation, and institutional adaptation. Emerging from the radio astronomy community (bottom-up) in the late 1980s as a grassroots initiative, the SKA’s evolution over subsequent decades reveals how science diplomacy is entangled with geopolitical interests and national ambitions. Between 2002 and 2012, the contest to host the SKA’s core sites between South Africa and Australia became a protracted episode of competitive diplomacy that, while delaying the project and causing internal tension, also elevated its international profile and secured greater political and financial investment. Later, from 2006 to 2015, a second phase of competition, this time for the project’s HQ (eventually sited in Jodrell Bank, Manchester), exposed tensions within European partners and fuelled perceptions of unequal influence. The US withdrawal from the SKA in 2010, officially due to budgetary and strategic misalignment, further highlights how differing national science cultures and governance structures shape the possibilities and limits of transnational cooperation.
By situating the SKA within a longer lineage of large-scale scientific collaborations, from CERN to contemporary “big science” infrastructures, and investigating the relations between Global North and Global South players in big science science diplomacy, this paper argues that moments of disruption and contestation are not exceptions but constitutive features of science diplomacy. The SKA’s history thus illuminates how crises of competition can paradoxically generate new modes of collaboration, funding, and identity within global science. The paper also interrogates the role of international organisations and platforms such as the OECD and European Commission in the transition from bottom-up scientific collaboration to intergovernmental science diplomacy. In doing so, the paper will investigate significant moments of science diplomacy throughout the SKA’s development, drawing on archival materials and interview data.

Author

• Alice Naisbitt, University of Manchester