Bilateral Science Technology and Innovation partnerships between nations – What is in it for the research community?

Driven to foster and maintain their global innovation competitiveness in a world with rapid technological changes, many governments in established knowledge nations are targeting countries in emerging knowledge nations to tap into its Science Technology Innovation (STI) networks (Glänzel 2001; Hwang 2007). International research collaboration is a key component in such endeavour, sustained by the underpinning logic of the non-linear innovation policy approach (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1995; Wagner 2018). Thus, by launching bilateral and strategic partnerships governments aims to improve the ‘quality, scope and critical mass in STI by linking resources and knowledge with resources and knowledge in other countries’ (Boekholt et.al 2009). What is less clear though is how such policy tool taps into the realm of the researchers. State intervention striving to merge political and research agendas are constrained by multi-faced rationales and pitfalls of implementation. The majority of international research collaboration is performed by informal and inter-personal contacts in loosely structured and dynamic networks, and are not easily subjected to governance by means of hierarchal political control (Wagner 2006). There are several drivers for researchers to collaborate but political motives or the ‘national agenda’ is not one of those (see Wagner 2018a?). Furthermore, opportunities for individual researchers to influence the choice of research questions and research partners are considered essential for the quality and development of science (Broström 2012). At the same time, studies indicate that researchers are more likely to collaborate with partners in similar countries and environments (see Choi 2015). Besides, research and industrial partnerships seems to be far less common in cross-border settings than within a national context (Ponds 2008). This can be problematic since qualitative knowledge production related to societal challenges often requires a broad multi-stakeholders’ perspective from various contexts, incorporating STI networks between emerging knowledge and established knowledge nations (The Royal Society 2011). The impact and effectiveness of national bilateral STI collaborations are not commonly evaluated by policy makers (Fikkers and Horvart 2014) and the literature on Innovation and Science Diplomacy, does not lay much emphasis on how such top-down policies affect or interact with the bottom-up research-driven agenda of academics (e.g. Leijten 2017). Simultaneously studies on bilateral or multilateral research collaboration in academia most commonly takes a quantitative bibliometric approach, which does not lend itself very well to the provision of in-depth knowledge on how academia respond to such top down policy initiatives (e.g Choi et.al 2020; Glänzel 2001). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore what role strategic bilateral STI collaboration can have to foster research collaboration between well-established research nations and emerging research nations. To do that we perform a qualitative case study of the bilateral ‘Swedish-Brazilian strategic STI partnership’ which was initiated in 2009. Based on multiple methods including semi-structured interviews with researchers and funding agency officials, desk research on related websites, policy documents and research applications we address the following question: how can the ‘Swedish-Brazilian strategic STI partnership’ enable, support and increase attractiveness for Swedish based academics to engage in collaborative activities with Brazilian counterparts?