The next Framework Programme should trust researchers more, say Robin Gadbled and Silvia Gómez Recio
Projects are an essential part of EU Framework Programmes for research and innovation. In particular, top-down projects have become the tool of choice for the EU’s research policymakers. When important challenges are identified around issues such as health, food security, digital and green transitions, and strategic autonomy, resources have gone to projects based on competitive calls for proposals aimed at tackling them.
Such an approach is notably adopted in the current Strategic Planning of Horizon Europe, as well as under its second pillar.
Projects are not bad things in themselves. They offer funding for three to five years—sometimes less—to work on subjects either defined, top-down, in advance, or from bottom-up proposals from applicants. A series of conditions, milestones and deliverables are meant to ensure that outcomes meet expectations and show value for money.
Because they are relatively short term, new projects regularly replace old ones. This should open the way to new entrants and keep everyone on their toes, striving for competitiveness. Projects also offer reactivity, allowing topics to be singled out for attention, depending on societal needs and political choices.
But there can be too much of a good thing, particularly if projects—especially top-down ones—become a mindset rather than a tool. One issue is that project mentality is based on an assumption that policymakers can and should direct researchers using taxpayers’ money to tackle the small and great challenges of our time. But we cannot know what knowledge will come in handy when society faces a new development or unforeseen crisis.
Research topics pursued by researchers themselves, in a bottom-up fashion, often also target these challenges effectively. The response to the pandemic drew from a deep well of knowledge ranging—in the words of former European Research Council president Jean-Pierre Bourguignon—“from cell biology to disease modelling, from diagnosis tools to the impact of home schooling, from host-pathogen interactions to crisis management”.
Limits of foresight
It is hard to believe any policymaker could have anticipated and mandated the need for all this knowledge through a portfolio, however broad, of top-down project assignments. This is especially true of the underpinning scientific theories, models and principles. Instead, these resources were accumulated through curiosity-driven research that could be repurposed when needed, sometimes decades later.
By trying to channel research and innovation towards specific goals over short periods, an overreliance on projects may also destabilise research systems. With short-term, competitive projects come short-term, unreliable funding streams, for institutions and researchers alike.
The tilt to project funding has seen it assume a dangerously large place in university budgets. This creates financial uncertainties at many levels within institutions and limits their ability to develop coherent strategies for human resources. Researchers hired on short-term, focused project contracts may not get the chance to develop skills and experience in other areas, such as teaching, and so struggle to find stability or progress in their careers.
Just as worryingly, project mentality may also distort approaches to tackling long-term needs in research systems. Some of these needs require true system change, such as the reform of research and academic assessment, the general take-up of open science or the fight against brain drain within and beyond Europe.
Such challenges are not a set of deliverables to be produced in a couple of years. Targeted and flexible actions, possibly through projects, must be accompanied by stable strategies, commitments and resources over the long term.
As policymakers begin to reflect on the features of the next Framework Programme for research and innovation, which will take the place of Horizon Europe from 2028, they should keep in mind the outsized role that projects have assumed, and their limitations and alternatives.
First, policy should place more trust in researchers to detect, define and offer solutions to the challenges of our time. Rather than defaulting to a top-down approach to the way research should tackle societal problems, we should think of new ways of channelling, aggregating and repurposing the results of curiosity-driven research for policy aims.
Second, new mechanisms are needed to replace and repair the effects of project-based funding for university budgets, human resources strategies and research careers.
Third, the project mentality of shorter-term milestones and deliverables should not replace long-lasting political and financial commitment to change needed at all levels of the research system.
Robin Gadbled is a policy officer at the Young European Research Universities Network. Silvia Gómez Recio is secretary general of Yerun
This article also appeared in Research Europe