By the final day of a three-day course at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis outside Vienna in July, some of the people who had arrived in Laxenburg to study decision science were already making plans that had little to do with the course itself.
A researcher working on water diplomacy was discussing possible collaborations spanning the Nile Basin, Pakistan and the Middle East. A South African governance scholar was considering how systems mapping might be applied to research at home. Others were talking about joint papers, grants and future research partnerships. They had come from different countries and disciplines to learn methods for making decisions under uncertainty; some would leave with professional relationships that had not existed three days earlier.
“I think it’s the connections that we make outside of the actual course,” said Emma Zajdela, a Princeton researcher and Santa Fe Institute fellow who also works with the Malta Conferences Foundation on science diplomacy.
Laxenburg is an improbable place for this to happen. Though it is located near Vienna, the Austrian town is not a political capital or major university center. Its place on the science diplomacy map comes largely from IIASA, established there in 1972 as a joint East-West scientific initiative that allowed researchers separated by the Cold War to work together on problems that crossed political boundaries.
More than half a century later, the institution is trying to extend that role. At its Interaction Festival in June, IIASA leaders discussed strengthening its work as a convener, adviser and facilitator alongside its traditional production of scientific research. Susie Kitchens, its director of science diplomacy, described the challenge in terms that went beyond the quality of the science itself.
“Producing excellent research is not enough in order to impact policy,” she said.
A month later, the inaugural Raiffa Academy brought scientists, diplomats, policymakers and decision theorists from 17 countries to Laxenburg to work through problems involving scientific uncertainty, competing interests and negotiation. Organizers intend it to develop into a broader network connecting researchers, policymakers, diplomats and science advisers across disciplines and regions.
The participants also worked with methods developed through decades of research. One exercise used a simplified version of IIASA’s GAINS model, which has helped inform European air pollution agreements. Fabian Wagner, an IIASA researcher who led the exercise, cautioned against confusing the usefulness of a common analytical framework with scientific perfection.
“Everybody now understands that the GAINS model is not necessarily the most accurate model, nor is it maybe the most efficient model,” he said. “But it provides a common methodology that everybody can work with.”
Laxenburg illustrates how one institution can give an otherwise unlikely location international reach. What has accumulated there includes not only research but methods, professional relationships and people who carry both back into other institutions.
In Geneva, the process has unfolded across an entire city.
Its international ecosystem was assembled over generations by institutions established at different times for different purposes. Governments built permanent missions to participate in their work. Specialized diplomats, scientists, lawyers and technical experts followed, along with universities, nongovernmental organizations, professional associations and companies that developed relationships with the institutions and with one another.
Density matters when problems cross institutional boundaries. Artificial intelligence can involve telecommunications officials, standards specialists, technology companies, human rights experts and diplomats. Global health can involve trade rules, intellectual property, humanitarian response and data governance. Much of that expertise can be found within the same relatively compact international community.
New organizations inherit relationships that took others decades to build. When the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) Foundation was established in 2019, fits effort to connect emerging science with diplomacy began in a city where both communities were already unusually concentrated.
Some of the advantages are harder to identify than headquarters or conference centers. Specialists encounter one another repeatedly through negotiations, side events, universities and professional gatherings, sometimes while moving through several jobs and institutions without leaving the city. Knowledge about how an organization works, whom to call and where disagreements lie can remain within the larger community even as individual officials come and go.
Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines described the importance of those less formal conditions while speaking at the Raiffa Academy. Major policy outcomes, she said, often emerge through a sequence of smaller decisions rather than one decisive meeting, and effective negotiations can begin well before formal talks commence.
“The gap between analysis and decision is really not primarily technical but human,” Haines said. Trust, institutional incentives and environments where people can speak candidly, she argued, help determine whether rigorous analysis ultimately influences policy.
Brussels acquired its scientific community around another source of attraction: the political, financial and regulatory authority of the European Union.
European research programs gave universities and scientific organizations reason to follow decisions about funding and international cooperation. As the E.U.’s regulatory reach expanded into data, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and other technologies, companies and technical specialists had their own reasons to remain close to the policymaking process. National governments needed officials capable of following the scientific dimensions of European policy, while universities and research organizations built associations and representation around programs that could affect research well beyond Belgium.
The E.U.’s first science diplomacy framework made that relationship more explicit in 2026. Developed through a multi-year process involving scientists and diplomats, it linked international scientific cooperation with research security, economic interests, foreign policy and European values.
The routes taken by Brussels, Geneva and Laxenburg differ, but all benefited from time. Organizations established for one purpose attracted people and activities their founders did not necessarily anticipate, and those additions gave later institutions reasons to operate in the same places.
Newer initiatives are testing whether some of that process can be accelerated.
Québec has funded a network of university research chairs devoted to science diplomacy rather than waiting for a professional field to develop on its own. The chairs are intended to create expertise, train scientists to operate across institutional boundaries and establish international relationships. South Africa has taken another approach with the Science Diplomacy Capital for Africa in Pretoria, organizing scientific and diplomatic assets already present in the city around a more explicit role.
Governments can establish programs and put scientists and diplomats in the same room relatively quickly. Whether the relationships continue after the first grants, conferences and programs have ended takes longer to determine.
That question applies even to established institutions. The Raiffa Academy is intended to continue beyond its inaugural class, with organizers hoping future courses will expand participation and strengthen connections among people working in different countries and disciplines.
By the end of the first academy, Amir Albadvi, a professor at University Canada West in Vancouver who is also affiliated with Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, was already considering collaborations with people he had met in Laxenburg.
“I see different people in the area that at least I see that we can have joint paper together,” he said. “Each one has some sort of opportunity in terms of resources and also the possibilities of grants and research support.”