Organizing the Distribution of Funding for Research and Innovation

Abstract

Research funding is one of the major intersections where science meets politics. Over the past decades, this intersection has seen a plethora of concepts, instruments, programs, and actors. This is true for any national "innovation system" in Europe as well as for the European Union as a whole. The EU in particular has been increasing its spending for research, development and innovation significantly since 2000. European nation-states, at the same time, compete to get into the list of "innovation leaders", which requires to distribute more and more public funds for fostering innovation, but also to make sure that this is done in a more efficient way. Behind these policy goals lie - often unacknowledged - huge organisational challenges. How to deal with dual legitimacy issues such as fairness in allocation of funding and efficiency in carrying out the decision-making process? What are thresholds of "efficiency" in terms of size of programs, instruments, agencies? What is the influence of actors such as legislatures (parliaments), scientific organisations, and audit courts? This panel outline proposes to continue the work started with the panel on research executive agencies at ECPR 2017 in Oslo. In particular, it aims to bring together scholars looking at innovation systems from an organisational perspective. We invite contributions on case studies, such as semi-independent agencies tasked with carrying out the allocation of funding at national level as well as European examples. Also, we look for studies on national innovation systems, and in particular studies that take a comparative perspective.