Knowledge in science and policy: creating an evidence base for converging modes of governance in policy and science (KNOWSCIENCE)
Sweden currently devotes about 2% of GDP (SEK 74.1 billion, 2013 figures) to higher education and research (HER). How does this expenditure translate into ensuring the long term provision of knowledge in Sweden? What type of mechanisms and tools do HER stakeholders and policymakers use and need to ensure the sustainability of HER systems? This project seeks to answer these questions by investigating how the policy and science systems co-produce conditions for sustainable knowledge provision. We will describe and analyse the interplay between policy instruments for governing HER, and the informal rules and processes developed for ensuring the validity and quality of knowledge produced in HER. Our research is organized around three key functional areas through which governance of HER is conducted: (i) priority setting, (ii)funding instruments, and (iii)evaluation. Our research plan aims to realize three ambitions: (i) building capacity in research on HER; (ii) developing useful knowledge for policy, in dialogue with HER stakeholders, and (iii) advancing the frontier of knowledge about the governance of HER.
Final report
Project Development
KNOWSCIENCE focused on three moments in the cycle of governance of research: priority setting, evaluation and funding instruments. KNOWSCIENCE began in January 2016 and concluded in December 2021. The project team consisted of three research groups from Lund, Manchester and Leiden respectively and two individual professors (Niilo Kauppi, Dietmar Braun) from University of Strasbourg and Lausanne respectively. In 2018, the group recruited a postdoc who was located at Chamers university. Since 2016 the entire project met regularly annually, and different constellations of the teams met more regularly depending on the flow of the research work. The Manchester team organised two meetings both in the UK and these meetings included a number of other researchers in the field but who were not in KNOWSCIENCE. In Lund, the project had an open-door policy to all researchers in the vicinity who wished to participate in our meetings and seminars. Several visiting doctoral students became regular members of the seminar, and we had an active side-line discussion about collaboration with non-academic actors and university-industry collaboration as a by product of these interactions. Göktepe-Hultén’s publications and one in R&D management with Karolin Sjöö are some outcomes of this discussion. It is a line of research that links to issues taken up by two other projects in the programme i.e. that led by Professor Mckelvey and the other by Docent Anna Jonsson.
Both the Leiden and Manchester teams collaborated with Norwegian researchers in RQUEST, a Norwegian project that is closely related to the KNOWSCIENCE. As a result of Duncan Thomas’ re-location from Manchester to the Research Policy Group in Aarhus, the second phase of KNOWSCIENCE included a collaboration with Aarhus University. One of the Leiden researchers (S. de Rijcke) was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The onset of COVID in the Spring of 2020 has meant that the regular biweekly seminar that was a purely Lund event expanded to include the entire KNOWSCIENCE team and a number of other international colleagues. The group developed a number of stakeholder collaborations as a result of the project most notably with Trafikverket, and the Norwegian Research Council. We also began to collaborate with the Technical University in Munich and we renewed our links to the innovation studies community through participation in the network around the former Linnaeus Centre of Excellence at Lund University (CIRCLE). Professors Wouters and Jacob were members of the European Union Working Group on Indicators for Open Science and Professor Hellström was a member of the international panel that evaluated the Centres of Excellence Funding in Norway.
Summary of main results
The most significant of our research findings about the impact of research funding is that funding does have epistemic effects and that similar funding instruments may afford different types of epistemic effects depending on other characteristics in the research environment such as institutional funding, research leadership, etc. Similar funding instruments may therefore have different impacts in different contexts. Likewise, we found that funding instruments can be treated as modular devices that allow funders to add or subtract different types of modalities to accentuate or attenuate different aspects. For example, the excellence funding instruments may be used to promote interdisciplinary research with several principal investigators collaborating around a particular theme. Alternatively, the excellence funding instrument can be used to target individual PIs who wish to build a group around them to develop a particular line of research.
Our work on priority setting has been focused primarily on implementation or what we have dubbed street level priority setting. The global commitment to use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and/or Grand Challenges to set priorities for higher education and research has initiated unprecedented international coordination of priorities. But what happens when funders have to create funding calls and instruments to steer research and higher education to fulfil these priorities? Using the energy and food sectors as our empirical referents, we found that organizational routines and capabilities as well as the existing capacities in the research performing sector exert powerful influences on how priorities get translated into instruments and calls.
The research theme evaluation included three subthemes, two of which were focused on higher education: these were the project on university rankings led by Niilo Kauppi and the work on Edtech led by Thomas and Nedeva. The initial premise of the research that EDTECH presented a game changing challenge to brick-and-mortar universities was turned on its head by the pandemic as digital education rapidly became integrated into the central delivery model for higher education. There is now a wealth of information out there on the challenges and opportunities of the digital classroom that would be a good topic for future research.
Future work
In the wake of our research in KNOWSCIENCE, we have developed an interest in digging deeper into the potential epistemic impacts of funding by investigating the role of funding in promoting groundbreaking research in the humanities and social sciences. While KNOWSCIENCE employed a uniformly qualitative approach, we have decided to use a mixed method approach in the future and will collaborate with bibliometricians to investigate the problem of how the governance of research affects the humanities and social sciences. We believe this blend of qualitative and quantitative work coupled with a focus on a selected number of disciplines will provide a robust base for future research as well as yield insights that could assist funders in targeting their support for humanities and social science research.
KNOWSCIENCE focused on three moments in the cycle of governance of research: priority setting, evaluation and funding instruments. KNOWSCIENCE began in January 2016 and concluded in December 2021. The project team consisted of three research groups from Lund, Manchester and Leiden respectively and two individual professors (Niilo Kauppi, Dietmar Braun) from University of Strasbourg and Lausanne respectively. In 2018, the group recruited a postdoc who was located at Chamers university. Since 2016 the entire project met regularly annually, and different constellations of the teams met more regularly depending on the flow of the research work. The Manchester team organised two meetings both in the UK and these meetings included a number of other researchers in the field but who were not in KNOWSCIENCE. In Lund, the project had an open-door policy to all researchers in the vicinity who wished to participate in our meetings and seminars. Several visiting doctoral students became regular members of the seminar, and we had an active side-line discussion about collaboration with non-academic actors and university-industry collaboration as a by product of these interactions. Göktepe-Hultén’s publications and one in R&D management with Karolin Sjöö are some outcomes of this discussion. It is a line of research that links to issues taken up by two other projects in the programme i.e. that led by Professor Mckelvey and the other by Docent Anna Jonsson.
Both the Leiden and Manchester teams collaborated with Norwegian researchers in RQUEST, a Norwegian project that is closely related to the KNOWSCIENCE. As a result of Duncan Thomas’ re-location from Manchester to the Research Policy Group in Aarhus, the second phase of KNOWSCIENCE included a collaboration with Aarhus University. One of the Leiden researchers (S. de Rijcke) was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The onset of COVID in the Spring of 2020 has meant that the regular biweekly seminar that was a purely Lund event expanded to include the entire KNOWSCIENCE team and a number of other international colleagues. The group developed a number of stakeholder collaborations as a result of the project most notably with Trafikverket, and the Norwegian Research Council. We also began to collaborate with the Technical University in Munich and we renewed our links to the innovation studies community through participation in the network around the former Linnaeus Centre of Excellence at Lund University (CIRCLE). Professors Wouters and Jacob were members of the European Union Working Group on Indicators for Open Science and Professor Hellström was a member of the international panel that evaluated the Centres of Excellence Funding in Norway.
Summary of main results
The most significant of our research findings about the impact of research funding is that funding does have epistemic effects and that similar funding instruments may afford different types of epistemic effects depending on other characteristics in the research environment such as institutional funding, research leadership, etc. Similar funding instruments may therefore have different impacts in different contexts. Likewise, we found that funding instruments can be treated as modular devices that allow funders to add or subtract different types of modalities to accentuate or attenuate different aspects. For example, the excellence funding instruments may be used to promote interdisciplinary research with several principal investigators collaborating around a particular theme. Alternatively, the excellence funding instrument can be used to target individual PIs who wish to build a group around them to develop a particular line of research.
Our work on priority setting has been focused primarily on implementation or what we have dubbed street level priority setting. The global commitment to use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and/or Grand Challenges to set priorities for higher education and research has initiated unprecedented international coordination of priorities. But what happens when funders have to create funding calls and instruments to steer research and higher education to fulfil these priorities? Using the energy and food sectors as our empirical referents, we found that organizational routines and capabilities as well as the existing capacities in the research performing sector exert powerful influences on how priorities get translated into instruments and calls.
The research theme evaluation included three subthemes, two of which were focused on higher education: these were the project on university rankings led by Niilo Kauppi and the work on Edtech led by Thomas and Nedeva. The initial premise of the research that EDTECH presented a game changing challenge to brick-and-mortar universities was turned on its head by the pandemic as digital education rapidly became integrated into the central delivery model for higher education. There is now a wealth of information out there on the challenges and opportunities of the digital classroom that would be a good topic for future research.
Future work
In the wake of our research in KNOWSCIENCE, we have developed an interest in digging deeper into the potential epistemic impacts of funding by investigating the role of funding in promoting groundbreaking research in the humanities and social sciences. While KNOWSCIENCE employed a uniformly qualitative approach, we have decided to use a mixed method approach in the future and will collaborate with bibliometricians to investigate the problem of how the governance of research affects the humanities and social sciences. We believe this blend of qualitative and quantitative work coupled with a focus on a selected number of disciplines will provide a robust base for future research as well as yield insights that could assist funders in targeting their support for humanities and social science research.