The Rise of National Research Infrastructure Policies: The Case of Sweden and Switzerland

Research infrastructures are facilities, resources and services that are used by different user communities to conduct research (Hallonsten 2018). There are many different types of research infrastructures focused on different domains of research (ibid.). More traditional understandings of research infrastructures include large facilities located on a single site, commonly used in e.g. particle physics or astronomy. Research infrastructures can also be distributed over several sites to achieve broad coverage for observation, or even be mobile, such as scientific vessels. More recently a new type of research infrastructures has emerged in the form of virtual or e-infrastructures. Research infrastructures are considered to be a major catalyst for publicly funded research and therefore play an important role in a national innovation system (OECD 2011). This explains why in recent years research infrastructures have received increased policy attention (ibid.). The growing complexity and costs of research infrastructures has led to an increasing need of coordination for priority-setting and funding decisions. In order to tackle the lack of coordination between national and European research policies, the European Research Area (ERA) initiative prioritized the stock-tracking of “material resources and facilities optimized at the European level” (EC 2000a, p. 9). Shortly after, EU authorities established the development and coordination of large-scale research infrastructures as a pillar of their ambition to improve coordination and collaboration in the areas of research and innovation in Europe. In 2002, the Competitiveness Council of the EU recommended the establishment of the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) “to support a coherent and strategy-led approach to policy making on RI in Europe” (ESFRI, 2016: 4) that supports in particular the development and monitoring of pan-European and global research infrastructures. The ESFRI is a self-regulated body composed of delegates from member states of the EU and associated countries, with a secretariat provided by the EC. The ESFRI published a first roadmap for European research infrastructures in 2006. Since then, it has become a key strategic document with several editions including one recently published in 2018. The specific roadmap category for research infrastructures quickly gained popularity internationally, and meanwhile such strategic prioritization exercises for research infrastructures are taking place or being developed in most European countries. The paper will elaborate on how such policies found their way into the national context of two specific countries with Sweden and Switzerland. They are considered as comparable but have very different systemic preconditions in view of the organization of their research landscape. The elaboration and comparison of these two cases will help to understand how these systemic preconditions influenced the implementation and design of the research infrastructure policies the two countries have today and how they meet the needs of different user communities and the increasingly diverse understanding of research infrastructures.