INGSA2024 in Kigali Rwanda

INGSA2024 in Kigali Rwanda – marking a new and transformative chapter in governmental science advice.

Koi Tū is home to the secretariat of the International Network for Governmental Science Advice (INGSA), which is a New Zealand-based international organisation co-founded in 2014 by Sir Peter Gluckman in his role of Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. 

The INGSA secretariat is headed up by Koi Tu’s Dr Kristiann Allen, whose own experience as a ‘pracademic’ in national, subnational and multilateral science policy contexts informs her transdisciplinary work and capacity building activities national and globally.

INGSA is the world’s largest community of practice for institutional and individual capacity building at the interface between science, societies and policy. At the time of its establishment, the main goal of the network was to provide a platform to help enhance the conditions for evidence-informed policy making at all levels of governance, especially as the Sustainability Agenda was just getting underway.  The fast-changing contexts of the past decade however, have meant that INGSA too has evolved to better account for, and support, new modalities of evidence-informed policy making and new demands for transformative change.

Marking its 10^th Anniversary, INGSA’s 5^th biennial global conference was held in Kigali Rwanda in May. Following successful global conferences in Auckland, Brussels, Tokyo and Montreal, INGSA2024 was the network’s first conference in the global south. In partnership with the Fonds de Recherche de Quebec, the Government of Rwanda and international parnters, the Kigali conference brought together science advisors, policy practitioners, heads of academies, science diplomats, elected officials and meta-science scholars from more than 65 countries in a rich program on the theme of ‘The Transformation Imperative: Expanded Evidence for Inclusive Policies in Diverse Contexts.’ 

Conference talks and panels prioritised face-to-face interaction, with many speakers also contributing Viewpoints essays to an open-access companion document which can be read as a snapshot of the field today.  It complements the growing library of open-access resources in the INGSA Knowledge Hub.  Videos from the conference will be available through INGSA’s Horizon’s video series.

For more information about INGSA and the work it does globally visit www.ingsa.org and join this free network or email info@ingsa.org