Hommage

Hommage to Roland WAAST (1940–2022)

Roland WAAST, one of the main founders of our journal, died on the 11th of March 2022. Throughout his career, he was a researcher and then director of research at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD, formerly ORSTOM), a graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique de Paris, and he also had a degree in Sociology (Paris-Sorbonne). This already shows the originality of our friend: in France, engineers from the École Polytechnique (a military school founded by Napoleon) usually continue their studies in what the French call a ‘Grande Ecole’, that is, a high-level school specialising in a branch of engineering sciences (mining, bridges and roads, electricity, etc.). However, Roland had chosen sociology, the least prestigious of the disciplines, taught only at the university and, even today, such a choice of study is very rare. This unusual choice was confirmed when Roland Waast took the competitive examination for the recruitment of students for an organisation that was part of the French colonial apparatus and dedicated to scientific research in the colonial territories. ORSTOM was also the training ground for practically all French Africanist anthropology and many other disciplines. By force of history, it was an institute at the front of decolonisation. It was in the midst of this great political upheaval that he found himself in Madagascar in 1964, four years after its independence. He lived there for ten years with his family until 1973and experienced the reality of field sociology as well as the significance of the independence struggle. He formed strong friendships with young researchers who all made important contributions in their fields and were always at his side: Robert Cabanes, Bernard Schlemmer, Francis Gendreau and many more.

He directed the ORSTOM social science laboratory in Madagascar (1971–1973). His work was initially in rural sociology and contributed to the development of economic anthropology, with a particular interest in the articulation of lineage and peasant economies with the wage economy and the development of capitalism in Madagascar.

Back in France, like many other French colleagues who had sided with the Malagasy independence movement, Roland was banned from returning to the field. The director-general of ORSTOM said that these young researchers were unworthy of representing France abroad. It was then that Roland Waast took the astonishing decision to leave without salary, as a secondment to another organisation. But even more surprisingly, Roland chose to leave for Algeria, which became independent in 1962, after a long and bloody colonial war against France that deeply divided the whole of the French society. So, it is understandable that when Roland decided to go to Algiers and work in a public training organisation of the newly established Algerian state, this was not well received by the ORSTOM management. He lived there for six years from 1974 to 1980, during which time he was director of internships and research at the Institut de Planification et d’Économie Appliquée (ITPEA-Secrétariat d’État au plan) in Algiers. He worked mainly in sociology and health economics (drug policy, tensions around free medical care).

On his return to France, he decided to give priority to the career of his wife Monique, a medical doctor, who had obtained a post in Grenoble. But once again, history decided otherwise because, in 1981, François Mitterand won the elections. Under the leadership of Alain Ruellan, a soil scientist, a team of ORSTOM renovators was formed to define the future of their Institute. The years 1981–1984 were a revolution in scientific research in France, and Roland Waast, like many other researchers, played an active role. He was then President of the Technical Committee of Sociology (ORSTOM, Paris, 1980–1982), which was responsible for the recruitment, evaluation and promotion of researchers, and became Head of the Department ‘Conditions of independent development of countries and peoples’ (Paris, 1981–1986) of which he was the initiator. The tone was set: the Institute would be an instrument of the post-colonial era.

ORSTOM, which kept its strange and untranslatable acronym for a long time, was then called the Institute of Scientific Research for Development in Cooperation. The department headed by Roland was the most clearly positioned in favour of promoting social science research for development and opened up new fields (industrialisation processes, territory and networks, identity construction, political science) and new geographical areas (South and South-East Asia, Southern Africa). Thus, when the team of reformers was sent back to its laboratories, Roland had had time to form new research teams on these new themes, such as education and research, and in partnership with foreign colleagues, including those outside Africa. Even today, these countries are not only ‘fields’ for French research conducted at the IRD but are countries in which strong research partnerships have been established, as evidenced by the very existence of this journal STS.

From 1987 onwards, Roland was a researcher and then head of the ‘Science Practices and Policies’ team, which became the ‘Science Technology and Development’ team of UR 105 (ORSTOM-IRD, 1987–2004). When he was head of the scientific department at ORSTOM, he initiated the research on the social studies of science, which thus became his field of specialisation. It should be noted that the first batch of researchers dedicated to the social studies of science was recruited in 1982 and 1983. The team formed by Yvon Chatelin (a soil scientist from ORSTOM converted to sociology and history of science), Rigas Arvanitis (the first ORSTOM recruitment specially for this sociology of science team), Jacques Gaillard (an agronomist who became a sociologist of science), Yves Goudineau (a sinologist who was the second recruitment specially for this team, and later an anthropologist in South-East Asia) and Roland Waast. Some years later, Jean-Baptiste Meyer, historian and sociologist of innovation, and Bernard Schlemmer, sociologist who had also been chief of staff at the newly created department, joined in.

An anecdote illustrates Roland Waast’s open-mindedness when he held the position of department director. At the time of the great debates in France on research reforms (1980–1982), Yvon Chatelin, after more than 20 years of fieldwork in Africa, had proposed to Roland the creation of a sociology of science team. He had just published his Doctoral thesis (« Doctorat d’Etat »), a work considered at the time to be the crowning achievement of a career rather than an initiation, on the epistemology of soil sciences. He was therefore an original researcher who found in Roland an attentive ear. Yvon Chatelin had just returned from a trip to the United States, where he had met Lawrence (Larry) Busch, who was then one of the very few American sociologists of science who had worked in Africa. On his return from the United States, Yvon proposed the creation of a sociology team dedicated to research on research. Larry who passed away two years ago had become a kind of guardian sociologist of our team.

Renamed Science Technology and Development, the team was soon joined by two historians of science: first Mina Kleiche-Dray, and then Frédéric Thomas, and Pénélope Larzillière, a political sociologist. Although not a member of the team, Luigi Rossi has been associated with several of Roland’s work in the field of scientometrics. It should be emphasised that the professional links in this team have always been warm bonds of friendship. The team became part of the ‘Savoirs et développement’ research group, successively directed by Bernard Schlemmer and Marie-France Lange, a research unit that had taken up the challenge of studying the continuum of knowledge from primary education to university cycles, from society to research organisations. This project has continued to the present day by joining the Centre Population et Développement (Ceped) with the support of its director Etienne Gérard, a sociologist of education.

But beyond the recruitments, it is important to remind that the scientific dynamics impelled by Roland Waast were not limited to creating this team. Indeed, Roland had imagined a major research programme on the emergence of scientific communities, on the conditions for exercising the scientific profession, on modes of scientific production and on science policies in the developing countries that we now call the Global South. He first set up the ALFONSO research network, a real incubator for research on the links between science and development in partnership with the South. So many researchers literally come from the four corners of the world: Algeria with Hocine Khelfaoui and Ali El-Kenz, Venezuela with Hebe Vessuri, Rafael Rengifo and Arnoldo Pirela, India with V.V. Krishna and Kapil Raj, the Middle East and Arab World with Sari Hanafi, Elisabeth Longuenesse and Anne-Marie Moulin, Colombia with Jorge Charum, Brazil with Antonio Botelho and Simon Schwartzman. These researchers, together with the members of his teamworking in Venezuela, Morocco, Mexico Colombia and Singapore, developed a common reflection which resulted in two meetings: in Paris in April 1990 and in Annaba (Algeria) in 1991 (Gaillard et al., 1997; El-Kenz & Waast, 2013).

In the pathway opened by this comparative programme, on the occasion of ORSTOM’s fiftieth anniversary in 1994, he was entrusted with the organisation of a major colloquium on the history and social studies of science and technology, entitled ‘Les Sciences hors d’Occident au 20° siècle’ (Sciences out of Occident in the 20th century), for which he edited seven volumes of articles that have often become important sources of reference (ORSTOM, 1995–1998). This colloquium was once again an opportunity to affirm the exit out from the colonial era and the development of national sciences; it was also an affirmation of the need for historical analysis: ‘First of all, we have to recognise the importance of historical insight into many current issues. The Colloquium showed that history is as effective as international comparatism in avoiding the pitfalls of common sense, hot controveries [sic] and ethocentric [sic] views’ (Waast, 1995, p. 23). Hence, the close link with historians such as Patrick Petitjean, Anne-Marie Moulin and Christophe Bonneuil. It was also in this great gathering of the best researchers in these fields that Roland Waast and V.V. Krishna conceived the journal Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal Devoted to the Developing World, published by SAGE-New Delhi, since 1996. Roland liked to recall that no publishing house in Europe was interested in this project and that thanks to V.V. Krishna, it became possible to realise it in India. Soon after the launch of this international journal in 1996, Nature 389, 145–146 (1997) observed ‘…despite its high standard of scholarship, the journal is designed to be accessible to a broad range of scientists working in R&D fields. It should be on the essential reading lists of all scientists with an interest in developing countries’. This observation not only enhanced the professional standing of the journal in the STS community in its formative years but in varying ways, aided its dissemination in the Global South all these years. With the collaboration of Roland Waast and his team at IRD, Paris, Science, Technology and Society rejuvenated as an international journal progressing from two to three issues per year since 2011 (currently from 2022 the journal further progressed to four issues per year). In 2013, the Paris foundation for the social sciences (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris) honoured the journal with Charles et Monique Morazé Award.

Following the innovative work, mixing disciplines, history and the present time, Roland developed numerous works of evaluation of research programmes and scientific policies, notably in Africa: evaluation of the French research funding fund for development, definition of strategies of international research funding agencies, then an evaluation work of the Science Technology and Development Programme of the European Commission (6th PCRD). With Jacques Gaillard and several members of the ALFONSO network and beyond, he carried out a state of science in Africa with national surveys in 15 countries (1998–2001). At that time, he established a partnership that lasted for many years with Johann Mouton and Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) in South Africa. These collaborations are still ongoing, as shown in this special issue on the State of Science, Technology and Innovation in Africa, co-edited by Jacques Gaillard and Johann Mouton, both of whom were actively involved in the very first work coordinated by Roland Waast and Jacques Gaillard on research in Africa. With CREST, a method has been refined, making it possible to grasp the complexity of an emerging research system. Tools such as bibliometrics, strongly supported by field surveys, made it possible to describe the orientations of these systems.

After that, Roland Waast, with the support of his team and in particular Mina Kleiche-Dray and Jacques Gaillard, led the evaluation of the Moroccan research system, which is now a model of its kind. With Denis Vidal, he also carried out an evaluation of social science collaborations in India. He participated in the work carried out in the framework of the EU twinning programmes with Morocco (led by Jacques Gaillard and Rafael Rodriguez), and in the ESTIME project (a state of Science and Technology in the Southern Mediterranean Countries) coordinated by Rigas Arvanitis, which he helped to design and promote with the European Commission.

His research work was always done in close contact with the wide network of persons that we are mentioning here, and many more, never as an isolated researcher and never by imposing a theoretical appraisal before first observing the actual situation. He was a practical theorist, paying particular attention to people, individuals and figures (his favourite word, he used to underline it!) that belong to social groups, and paying close attention to institutions and the people who created or transformed them. He was always seeking the key players in any social context. He also had a political view of forces in a research community and was actively fighting the colonial experience: collectively, those of us who worked with him were bringing to life a larger project of Roland’s, which consisted of showing that we needed science to get out of colonialism, debate to get out of authoritarianism, historical awareness to build development strategies. He had formulated the idea of a social inscription of science, or a social contract that is drawn among researchers and political leaders.

Roland Waast was not a conventional researcher. Publishing in the best journals was not his priority, and he published little in English. He was also happy to collaborate in writing, sharing his ideas with his co-authors with modesty and generosity. He sought above all to advise young researchers, participating in many training courses and directing doctorates on these subjects. He addressed researchers as well as decision-makers. He was a member of the ‘PRAD Committee’ (Franco-Moroccan cooperation in agricultural research), the Scientific Committee on Sociology of the CNRS (1983–1987), expert with the National Evaluation Committee of French Universities (1994–1997), member of the Scientific Council of the French Observatory of Science and Technology, member of the Ethics Committee of the French Institute for Agronomic Research in Development (CIRAD), and was awarded the Legion of Honour. An extraordinary researcher and thinker, he left a bibliography that is also extraordinary.

He left two daughters (Laure and Claire) and a son (Denis), and eight grandchildren who have all testified to the kindness and immense value of the love of such a generous father and grandfather. Roland Waast, as his colleagues and friends also know, was a generous and optimistic person who knew how to encourage goodwill. His kind smile and intelligence will be missed by many.