Governance of Science and EU Control Regimes – Why the European Research Council is a Problem to the Commission

In 2017, the European Research Council (ERC) celebrates its ten year’s anniversary of funding high-quality, science-driven research. The ERC is widely perceived as a “success story”, yet a closer look on its institutionalization process and on its operations reveals a unique and problematic governance structure. As a “compound” of two legal entities, the ERC consists of an independent expert group, the Scientific Council, that sets the “scientific strategy”, and an Executive Agency, which is destined to carry the administrative work. Neither does “the ERC” enjoy such institutional independence that some national research councils have, e.g. the German Research Foundation or the US National Science Foundation, nor can it be equally compared with other tightly controlled Executive Agencies led by the Commission. Its uniqueness and constantly strained setup results from the fact that the ERC equilibrates principles of scientific self-reliance with specific intra-organizational interests of the Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation (DG R&I). It results in two areas of controversy within the ERC: Organizationally, the two entities understand their mission differently, with the Scientific Council following the principle of a fiduciary while the Executive Agency very much resembles an agent according the traditional principal-agent-model. And discursively, under the label of “frontier research”, the ERC is struggling to prove that it actively contributes to the production of utilizable results for economic growth, while actually building its reputation on funding scientists doing “basic” research along their academic excellence. By investigating the two areas of controversy and the temporal compromises, we argue that they are actually result of two larger, and intertwining, if not conflating social expectations, namely the anticipation to foster innovativeness versus the suspicion of being fiscally irresponsible, both hitting on the ERC’s parental organization, namely the European Commission as the EU’s main legislative and executive institution.