Governing Interdependence: An Adaptive Approach to Science and Technology Diplomacy

ABSTRACT Contemporary science and technology diplomacy often operates through leader‐centric, event‐driven, and weakly institutionalized arrangements, which are ill‐suited to domains marked by high interdependence, nonlinearity, and rapidly evolving knowledge. This article proposes Complex Adaptive Science and Technology Diplomacy (CASTD) not as a descriptive label for the field as a whole, but as a conditional analytical and institutional design framework for contexts in which conventional diplomatic instruments face structural limits. Rather than treating diplomacy as an episodic extension of foreign policy, the article suggests reconceiving it, under specific conditions of systemic risk and distributed authority, as a form of strategic infrastructure for governing uncertainty. Drawing on complexity science, polycentric governance, and critical perspectives on science diplomacy, the framework addresses persistent limitations in the literature, including conceptual ambiguity, technocratic depoliticization, and limited evaluability. CASTD identifies three interdependent capacities, adaptive governance, network orchestration, and integrative synthesis, and outlines how these can be operationalized through coordination architectures and structured learning processes. Illustrative cases indicate that durable cooperation depends less on episodic leadership than on reproducible and adaptable forms of coordination.