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Sun 24 Jul, 2011 09:31 am
Context:
Over the past 50 years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has partered with the global scientifi c community to pioneer many innovations that have fueled major successes: a new vaccine delivery approach that ensured global smallpox eradication; oral rehydration solutions that prevented diarrheal diseases from rapidly killing millions of
children; and new strains of wheat and rice that ushered in the Green Revolution, preventing widespread starvation and poverty. In recent decades, budget cuts and shifting mandates pulled the agency’s focus away from emphasizing science and technology. Today, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and I are working to recapture this legacy in science and techology, recognizing the power that breakthroughs have to transform insurmountable development challenges into solvable problems.
A mandate can be a command, in the sense that the members of an agency are required to work in a certain way, or toward a certain goal. However, mandate is often also used to describe the exegencies of practical politics. A mandate might arise from the attitude of voters; a mandate might arise from engagement with other nations on the international scene. It is in this latter sense that mandate is used here. Essentially, the author is saying that political ideology in the past altered the direction in which U.S. A.I.D. was expected to move, that practical politics in the conservative climate after 1980 shifted the focus of AID from science and technology to "politically correct" action from a conservative standpoint. The author is saying that AID is now moving back into science and technology under the influence of Mr. Obama and Miss Clinton. This is something you cannot get from simply reading the piece, because the author is assuming that readers will understand the political background without being obliged to rehearse it.
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