Cross-national cooperation and human mobility: An introduction

The article contains part of the results produced within the IGU Commission on Global Change and Human Mobility by a wide network of researchers from a hundred-odd countries on every continent. International collaboration in the social sciences is part of a tradition that began fifty years ago on the initiative of UNESCO. Cross-national cooperation projects are a basic prerequisite for the global spread of knowledge and innovation. Human mobility – an element of synergy and overlap between migration and tourism – is a key research theme for social scientists worldwide. People flows are both the cause and consequence of the flow of capital, goods and culture. The complexity of the phenomenon and the lack of data to adequately illustrate it require the “innovative” use of traditional statistical indicators.