The global shift to competitive research funding

Most middle- and low-income countries use block grants – direct institutional allocations – to fund research. But some appear to be shifting towards more competitive funding that enables governments to steer the research system more directly and increase publication rates.

A solid research agency structure is a prerequisite, however, and gains from competitive funding should be balanced against the higher costs involved, Merle Jacob, UNESCO chair and director of the Research Policy Unit at Lund University in Sweden, told the IHERD experts meeting in Marseille last month.

Jacob wrote a paper titled “Research Funding Instruments and Modalities: Implications for developing countries” for the OECD’s IHERD – Innovation, Higher Education and Research for Development – programme, and presented it at the meeting.

“Block grants are the cheapest form of allocation and they have the advantage of allowing better institutional planning. They also allow institutional autonomy to research performers and may function as a necessary corrective to steering.

“This corrective is functional as it is difficult for planners to foresee all kinds of research competences that may be required in the future. The block grant is also a good instrument for promoting bottom-up input,” Jacob pointed out.

The move to competitive funding

The study drew on the OECD’s innovation strategy and an issue paper for IHERD that identified increased national interest in the past two decades in performance-based research funding, including in developing nations.

But research was “expensive and uncertain” and it was important to have a range of information on the effective steering and funding of research.

“The initial logic underlying science policy dictated that competitively allocated funding would focus on strategic priorities, collaboration and so on, while block grant funding would be used to promote capacity building and basic research. This logic also fitted with the linear model of innovation that was the dominant orthodoxy.”

Many developed countries had subsequently reduced the portion of R&D funding allocated in block grants for various reasons, especially the desire “to steer research funding more directly and to couple public research to specific societal objectives”.

Some had retained direct institutional allocations but made some portions of this funding performance sensitive. “Thus far, most of these seem directed at increasing publication output as, despite the prevalence of rhetoric about relevance and social impact, bibliometric measures still dominate impact evaluations of research.”

The most radical version of this model, Jacob said, was the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, a large and costly two-year national peer review exercise that decided funding on the basis of institutional performance in the exercise.

While it was unclear whether increased publication was worth the costs involved, this was “certainly the most effective way to direct the research community’s attention towards publication”.

This could be an important investment for countries with little or no publishing tradition, Jacob argued, as increasing publication is a prerequisite for accessing international networks.

India had been very successful in leveraging access to scientific infrastructure in other countries as a means of building national capacity, partly through a combination of investments in local capacity and the use of bilateral and internationalisation schemes.

Issues such as access to large research infrastructures were also partly determined by scientific performance, but should not be confused with increasing the social accountability of science. “In fact, there is reason to believe that integration into international markets for science may best be pursued selectively and not promoted as a countrywide strategy.

“One rationale for this is that, in many instances, the focus on publication in international journals and excellence comes at the expense of research on local issues. This trade-off may be observed in all countries, but resource constraints may imply that it is more intensely felt in middle- and low-income countries,” wrote Jacob.

Gains from competitive funding should be weighed against the increased administrative costs of running the system, the level of knowledge required and the amount of coordination needed – many of which were not obvious.

For instance, research agency structure was a prerequisite for competitive allocation of funds. Indeed one indicator of the maturity of a research system, Jacob explained, was the diversity of arrangements for competitively allocating research funding.

Examples from the BRICS

Competitive allocation of funding had several advantages for research agencies and ministries, argued Jacob. One was that it allowed targeting of research funding to objectives. Another was that since peer review was the usual mode of evaluation, “focus on competitive allocation should lead to improved performance”.

Two good examples of this in the BRICS were Russia and South Africa, which were using competitive-based funding to revitalise their scientific bases.

The instruments used were large grants targeted at excellent individuals and open to nationals and foreign scientists – the South African Research Chair scheme and Russia’s mega-grants, which award €360,000 (US$480,000) for two years with possible extension for a further two years. The European Research Council adopts a similar approach.

“These awards are necessarily large because they are aimed at top performers globally and they need to include the possibility of relocating key team members, equipment and so on,” Jacob found.

They offered “possibilities for fast-forwarding capacity development”, but may be unaffordable for the poorest countries unless restricted to a few key areas of investment.

Many countries might justifiably fear losing the people they invested in. “This is always a risk and there are no ready solutions.” However, if investment in a top researcher led to building a team that included locals, some or all may be encouraged to stay.

“The larger the number of such investments, the less vulnerable future investments become as capacity increases. In other words, the traditional prerequisites for capacity building remain, even at this level of investment.”