Organizing the competition in public research funding: The case of EU Framework Programs.

During the 20th century, competition has become one of the most widespread mechanisms for the allocation of research funding in most advanced countries with the institutionalization of competitive grant systems. This “new funding climate” has been fostered by a series of drivers, such as the increase in research costs, the globalization of higher education and the development of what is referred to as “knowledge economy”. In parallel, new policy rationales have diffused, such as New Public Management, which foresaw the adoption in the public sector of management practices derived from the private economy, and in which “competitive” and performance-based allocation of public funds play a central role. Economic theories tend to consider competition as a given phenomenon that occurs in contexts of high demand for relatively scarce resources. Competition rules are perceived as exogenous to market dynamics. We consider such approaches as problematic for the understanding of competition, as they generally poorly address the social structures and regulatory environment inherent to competitive arenas. Sociological theories of competition focus on how competition is shaped by processes of social interaction within socially-constructed arenas where actors with varying resources seek strategic advantages. However, sociological approaches tend to disregard that competition for research funding comes in a highly regulated environment where the state and/or research funding organizations play a central and asymmetric role as organizers of competition. Such regulatory environments can create, constrain, shape, enable, define, and empower both collective and individual actors. Variations in both the regulatory environments and the social structure of these arenas are expected to deeply influence how competition works, its outcomes and whether it contributes to the achievement of policy goals. In this paper, we combine elements of both public policy and sociological approaches to advance the understanding of the role of entities organizing competition and the extent to which they are able to shape it considering strategic responses. We will focus on the organization and institutionalization of competition by the European Commission within its European Framework programs for research and innovation (EU-FPs). In the last decades, EU-FPs have been consistently coined into a rhetoric of competition established through rigorous evaluation and high selectivity. Although there is extensive literature on the outcomes of EU-FPs, the very organization and maintenance of this competition remain to be explored. To this aim, we propose to analyze mechanisms through which public regulation affects competition in public funding; explore how these mechanisms affect the construction of competition as enacted by actors in the field and observe how core dimensions such as scarcity and desire are constructed; and study implications for the outcomes of competition as related also to the intended policy goals. We investigate these questions through contrastive case studies of competition within EU-FPs, namely the European Research Council individual grants and collaborative actions addressing topics and so-called “societal challenges” defined by the European Commission.