Designing Funding Programs for Research Collaborations in Asymmetrical Settings - Choices and Tensions in Sustaining Scientific Research with African Partners in the Field of Renewable Energies

National and regional European research funding agencies are sustaining scientific cooperation with African collaborators since many decades. The motivations for this engagement are divers, overlapping and sometimes competing; they include contributions to long-standing research partnerships established during colonialism and the support of capacity-building for many parts of scientific systems as part of a developmental approach. Furthermore, public and private funding agencies want to participate in realizing global development agendas such as the SDGs. But funding agencies and in public cases their governmental principals also seek to strengthen national and regional influence and competitiveness in emerging markets. Driven by these motivations, funders and science policy-makers balance between different policy goals and administrative frameworks, establish and adapt evaluation and monitoring mechanisms, cooperate with aligned development agencies and increasingly cooperate bi- or even multilaterally to fund research networks. This paper adds to the renewed debate on dynamic and complex funding arrangements (Gläser and Laudel 2016) by focusing on the development of funding programs with specific foci on Africa and renewable energy research. Original analysis of program characteristics and interviews with stakeholders of five European countries reveals how public and private funders are shaping the framework for international research collaborations in asymmetric settings and what policy choices they make to mitigate conflicts and to implement mechanisms of fairness and integrity. This approach eventually contributes to the discussions of research executive agencies as organizations with different resources. Limits of funder's choices are apparent where they themselves become agents of diffusing dominant models and epistemologies of research management and research topics. Moreover, funding agencies rarely can outweigh structural effects of global economic disparities, which, for example, provide fewer opportunities for African stakeholders to significantly increase national and regional research resources and thus become less dependent on international funding.