MOST is a research programme, designed by UNESCO, to promote international comparative social science research. Its primary emphasis is to support large-scale, long-term autonomous research and to transfer the relevant findings and data to decision-makers. MOST also publishes state of the art reports that assess existing information on specific topics. The overall long-term objective of MOST is to establish sustainable links between the scientific and policy communities and to emphasize the relevance of social science research for policy-formulation.
Current foci of research include:
- Multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies: religious rights; linguistic rights
- Cities as arenas of accelerated social transformations
- Coping locally and regionally with economic, technological and environmental transformations
- Capacity-building
WWW site includes series of Best Practice guides (short descriptions of development projects), working papers series.