Science and technology in the global South

Science and technology are important for the global South. Scientific insights and technologies can for instance help to solve some of the harshest problems faced by poor people in the developing countries of the global South. One common reasoning is that if technologies have proven their worth in industrialized countries, like the Netherlands, then why could they not be used to solve similar problems in countries in the global South, like India? However, it is not always that simple. Oftentimes technologies that function perfectly well in one country unequivocally fail once brought to another country, even when the problems the technology is supposed to solve are similar. Research in STS has been helpful in understanding why you cannot always take a technology from one place, put it in another place, and expect it to work the same way. STS has taught that technologies only function as a part of a particular context and that context may be very different from one geographical location to another. Hence if we want technologies to work in the global South, it is important to attend to the local context. We illustrate this by giving two examples of technologies that did not function the way they were expected to after bringing them to the global South: genetically modified cotton, and bicycles