Introduction

Governments and policy-makers in developing countries have over the last four decades invoked the injunction ‘science and technology for development’. The conviction that technology is one of the keys that unlocks the development door is based on the perception that the dramatic rise in the material prosperity, economic strength and political power of Western Europe, North America and Japan over the last one hundred years is due in no small measure to the conscious and systematic application of modern science and modern technology to the social processes of production, distribution, communication, organization and control. The translation of this perception into action has varied greatly from region to region in the Third World, depending on the varied outcomes of the historical impact of the West on the economies and societies of Africa, Asia and Latin America. More specifically, it has depended on the magnitude and character of a base in modern industry and infrastructure that these regions inherited at decolonization.