Information, regional integration and policy making in SADC

Regional integration issues featured strongly in a recent call by Professor Peter Katjavivi, Director General of the Namibian National Planning Commission, for improved dialogue between researchers and SADC governments: the call was made at a gathering of SADC universities hosted by the University of Namibia.

"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.