Research Executive Agencies – Between Independent Organizations and Governments

Abstract

On national but also on EU level the number of research executive agencies, responsible for the implementation of great research and innovation programs like Horizon 2020 are growing and become an integral part of the landscape of research programme implementation but also have their say in the development and the agenda setting process of new research foci and programme structures. So far their role and practices have been widely under-researched and little is known about their inherent social orders, their entanglements with research communities and their interdependences with national governments or the European Commission. As intermediary organizations research executive agencies are more and more collecting a valuable base of knowledge about the processes surrounding research and innovation programmes, they are at the same time competitors, which are partly government institutions, partly independent enterprises, these situations raise questions for legitimacy of this kind of knowledge governance and who has access to the resulting knowledge base?