One way of establishing whether the World Conference on Science was a worthwhile event is to ask delegates whether they would go to another such gathering. In a straw poll conducted shortly after the end of the meeting, all of those questioned — from both rich and poor countries — replied without hesitation that they would.

Indeed, Lieutenant General Muhammad Noor Uddin Khan, minister for science in Bangladesh, said that such meetings should be held more often “and not every 20 years”. Even members of the US delegation, often among the most sceptical participants, agreed that the conference had been worthwhile.

US officials singled out for particular praise the fact that an international meeting of this kind had been organized jointly with a non-governmental organization, the International Council for Science (ICSU). “This has not happened before,” said one official. “It shows that civil society can become part of the United Nations system. It's a new way of doing business. It could be a model for future meetings.”

For delegates from the developing countries, the conference provided the rare opportunity of direct access to key policy-makers and heads of funding agencies from developed countries, as well as some insight into the unfamiliar world of international diplomacy. At the same time, however, there were some inevitable disappointments.

The delegation from Bangladesh, for example, in common with those from many developing countries, returned home disappointed at the lack of agreement on a new global fund for science. Many delegates from poor countries had come to Budapest genuinely believing that such a fund might be agreed upon.

Some delegations from developing countries also voiced criticism of what they considered to be inadequate preparation for the conference. They expressed concern at the absence of official preparatory meetings, usually an important feature of UN conferences.

Such meetings provide countries with a formal mechanism to comment on draft documents. Perhaps more importantly, they are occasions on which groups of countries can forge alliances around common demands. Indeed, it is often at preparatory meetings that the seeds of potential conflict with the developed world are first sown.

But the conference itself passed off relatively cordially. One reason was the absence of a strong developing country alliance. Perhaps another reason, according to a delegate from Senegal, was that many developing country delegates — who were drawn mainly from science ministries — had never been to an international meeting of this type, and therefore lacked the requisite diplomatic lobbying and language skills.

Full text: http://helix.nature.com/wcs/1news/02-1b.html