Universities call for next Horizon budget to be doubled

The body representing more than 870 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 49 European countries has joined a call for the budget of the European Union’s next research and innovation funding programme to be doubled to €200 billion (US$216.5 billion).

In a paper published on 8 April 2024, the European University Association (EUA) says the successor to the existing Horizon Europe research and innovation framework programme, which runs until 2027, needs more than a funding boost if Europe is to keep up with demands from increasingly knowledge-dependent economies and the scale of challenges facing the continent.

As well as calling for the budget of the successor to Horizon Europe to increase from its current level of €95.5 billion to €200 billion, the EUA report titled Paving the way for impactful European R&I, argues that the next seven-year research and innovation framework programme also needs a major overhaul to make sure it is fit for purpose.

The new programme, starting in 2028, will be Europe’s 10th research and innovation framework programme (known as FP10), and stakeholders such as the EUA are keen to ensure that EU policymakers “place R&I at the forefront of societal and scientific progress”.

They are also anxious to avoid the R&I budget having to fight off attempts to raid its funds as the EU tackles other priorities, as has happened before under Horizon Europe, and the EUA is calling for a “ring-fenced” doubling of the budget for the EU’s next R&I programme.

This echoes earlier demands from research stakeholders, such as the League of European Research-Intensive Universities; the Central European Universities and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities.

MEP support

A number of senior members of the European Parliament have already thrown their weight behind the call to double the R&I budget, including Dr Christian Ehler, who was one of the leading figures in the design and implementation of the EU’s earlier research and innovation programmes. He was rapporteur for both Horizon Europe and its predecessor, the Horizon 2020 programme.

Another supporter is Maria da Graça Carvalho, a Portuguese Member of the European Parliament and full professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon), who was a senior advisor of Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas, and is a former minister of environment and energy in Portugal.

However, while backing the call to double the EU’s R&I budget, Lidia Borrell-Damián, secretary general of Science Europe – which brings together national research funding agencies and prominent research performing organisations from 29 European countries – said it will be a struggle to get the full amount that European R&I urgently needs to keep up with the rest of the world.

“So, it is very good that MEPs start making noises about this figure now because the budget for the next Framework Programme should be around €200 billion, as the development and innovation landscape is becoming increasingly competitive and a widening gap is opening between Europe and its main global counterparts, particularly the United States and China,” Borrell-Damián told University World News.

Bridging the R&I divide

As well as a bigger budget, the priorities for the EUA include a more balanced mix of support for basic research, applied research and innovation, with the implied criticism that the growing focus on applied research and innovation in public R&I spending must not come at the cost of investments in basic research.

The EUA also wants more support for smaller collaborative research projects, fostering cross-border, inter-sectoral partnerships and knowledge exchange, which the EUA believes will significantly increase the programme’s impact.

The EUA is also calling for increased “targeted support to countries with lower R&I capacity” to bridge the R&I divide among European countries (notably between those in the more advanced research and development systems mainly found in north and western Europe and the newer member states of the EU) to “improve their national R&I systems and foster their participation in collaborative research projects”.

Europe’s research divide was highlighted by some of the reaction to the announcement that South Korea would be joining Horizon Europe as an associate member from next year, as University World News reported last month, with Marta Wróblewska, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland, saying the EU’s established scientific heavyweights “hoard most of the funding from Horizon Europe” and that letting countries like South Korea join Horizon risks making it even harder for European scientists from less scientifically advanced nations to get a share of the available funding.

Kamila Kozirog, a research and innovation policy analyst at the EUA, told University World News: “While there has been progress in bridging the R&I divide within the EU, significant disparities remain.

“Alongside boosting national R&I investments, FP10 should continue to support countries with lower R&I capacity to improve their national R&I systems, ultimately aiming to boost their participation in the programme.

“Europe cannot continue to depend solely on a few countries in its efforts to enhance R&I performance. To achieve this effectively, no country should be left behind.”

She also said: “Supporting R&I capacity in candidate countries before accession [to the EU] will equip them to better navigate the programme's complexity and competitiveness, while maintaining its excellence focus. This crucial support should be integrated into the pre-accession funding instrument.”

‘More than a funding mechanism’

The EUA paper on what it wants to see in the EU’s 10th R&I programme is the result of extensive feedback from its membership and comes as the European Commission is consulting interested parties on the next programme, with a provisional target for the commission to unveil its proposals for FP10 in the summer of 2025.

The EUA response was drawn up by a group of European university leaders and R&I experts led by Professor Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of Stockholm University, Sweden, and chair of the Nobel Foundation.

In the report’s preface, Widding said: “The European Union’s Framework Programme for Research & Innovation must be more than a funding mechanism. Rather, it should pave the way for Europe to be a forceful R&I agent – in excellence and impact, in cooperation and inclusion, and in addressing global challenges.”

One way of achieving those goals is for the European Commission, to “strengthen synergies” between funding instruments and programmes to eliminate possible overlaps between funding instruments and programmes, said the paper.

Not for the first time, the EUA says it wants the commission to “simplify the programme and its rules for participation” and suggests “responsible openness” should be “the default option” for global cooperation.

The next framework programme should also provide more opportunities for the engagement of citizens and society as a whole in the research process “to narrow the gap between science and society”, which the EUA says is “a key step in combating misinformation and disinformation, especially in a context of growing mistrust in science”.

Welcoming the publication, Paul Boyle, vice-president of the EUA, said: “The opportunities for FP10 to make a transformational difference to people’s lives across Europe are immense”, adding that the report’s detailed analysis identifies numerous suggestions that will help tomake the next programme even more successful than its predecessor.

* The European Commission’s final evaluation of the predecessor R&I framework programme, Horizon 2020, showed that EU spending on R&I has an important scientific, societal and economic impact. But it showed that current levels of EU investment in R&I are not ambitious enough. The first evaluation of the ongoing Horizon Europe programme indicates that to fund all high-quality proposals, an additional €34 billion would have been needed in 2021-2022, which the EUA argues backs up the call for the total budget of the programme to be doubled.

Nic Mitchell is a UK-based freelance journalist and PR consultant specialising in European and international higher education. He blogs at www.delacourcommunications.com