From a legal and regulatory standpoint, however, BRICS is considered to be an informal forum, with no common rules or regulations. Indeed, studies of BRICS have identified regulatory inconsistencies as a problem in science and technology. Moreover, productive cooperation between the BRICS countries is being hampered by the use of different languages, divergent levels of funding, and a general diversity of interests in the sector. Although the group has now been in existence for 13 years, analysts are still emphasizing the need to select the most promising areas of priority research to be developed for the benefit of all BRICS countries while promoting educational and scientific mobility and boosting the research capacities of member states. It will be increasingly difficult to reconcile the various interests of the new countries, as they are more heterogeneous both in their levels of economic development and in their scientific and technological capacity. Nevertheless, the BRICS+ platform could serve as a catalyst for new “paired” links.

Irina Dezhina is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, USA, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. She has over 30 years of research and consulting experience in science policy in post-Soviet Russia, Russian technology and innovation policy. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the Institute of National Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences (1992), and her D.Sc. in Economics from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences (2007), Moscow, Russia. 

Her recent publications include “Russia’s Science Policy, 2018-2022: Mixed Signals”, Social Sciences, 2023, 54(3), and “The Impact of Sanctions on Highly Productive Russian Scientists”, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2023, 12 (co-authored with A. Nefedova).