RESTRICTIVE ABUNDANCE AND GENERATIVE SCARCITY: NORTH-SOUTH ASYMMETRIES IN INNOVATION ENVIRONMENTS
ASSIMETRIAS NORTE-SUL EM AMBIENTES DE INOVAÇÃO
Keywords:
bibliometrics, scientific communication, information policy, informational asymmetry, information sovereigntyAbstract
Research on innovation-promoting environments has grown sharply over the past decade, yet this growth is not neutral regarding the circulation of knowledge. From the standpoint of the political economy of information and epistemic sovereignty, this paper analyses how scientific knowledge about such environments is produced, indexed and made visible by the hegemonic publishing circuit. The aim is to expose the North-South asymmetries inscribed in the field and to discuss their effects on information sovereignty in peripheral contexts. The procedures combined a systematic review following PRISMA 2020 with bibliometric analysis of a corpus of 61 peer-reviewed articles indexed in prestigious international databases, a delimitation deliberately taken as the object of analysis. Results indicate growing theoretical convergence among knowledge management, absorptive capacity and sociotechnical dynamics, with full integration in more than two thirds of the corpus, alongside a strong geographical concentration in Europe and Asia and severe underrepresentation of the Global South. We conclude that the mainstream map reproduces, within science, asymmetries analogous to those innovation environments claim to fight in their territories, and that information sovereignty requires recognising the epistemic diversity of the South as a strength, moving beyond the notion of frugal absorptive capacity.