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A case for Global Research Compacts

Mark_Matthews.jpg

by Mark Matthews

This article was first published in Australian R&D Review, June 2009.

The Federal Budget’s launch of the transition to fully funded research has been strongly welcomed by the sector. It addresses a plethora of problems within Australia’s universities – broadly associated with the ‘politics of cross-subsidies’– which were caused by the chronic failure to cover the indirect costs of research. As these impediments diminish, it will be easier for our universities to develop and pursue distinctive missions. This will be further helped by a move to develop far better data on what it actually costs to do the different things that universities do. As a result it will be much easier for universities to plan and deliver rational resource allocations.

However, this has implications for another feature of the contemporary university research landscape: the transition to viewing international engagement as part of the core business of doing excellent research. No longer just an ‘optional extra’ to domestically-oriented research, it is now seen as a pre-requisite to delivering useful social, environmental and economic outcomes from our research.

Effective international work is a ‘productivity multiplier’ – it allows for economies of scale and scope to be exploited together with reduced duplication of efforts. This is particularly important when major global challenges exist for which urgent coordinated national responses are important.

As it is becoming easier for core research funding to support international cooperation, dedicated funding to support international research cooperation is being reduced. Researchers should therefore be given the ‘room to maneuver’ in quickly setting up cooperative links by using their core research funding – and to be far more relaxed about how much of their budget they spend on international cooperation. This is preferable to the additional red tape associated with ‘add-on’ funding for international engagement, which is often not fit for purpose because the lead times are too long and the synchronization with overseas funding rounds and procedures is poor.

International cooperation becomes ‘endogenous’ rather than ‘exogenous’. However, with the move to fully funded research this raises an interesting issue:
Cutting-edge research that is fully funded must provide adequate support for international engagement.

How can this be achieved in practice? The distinctive missions associated with Compacts, which the Government has proposed as a mechanism to provide universities with a more flexible and outcomes-oriented funding policy approach, may be helpful here – and not just within Australia. Globally, there is a growing challenge in developing and governing major multilateral research collaborations and perhaps there is a role for Global Compacts that intersect with more nationally focused Compacts. A Global Compact targeting a particular research objective would provide a mechanism via which an international network of universities and government agencies could support the (pooled) additional costs of mission-oriented research based upon international cooperation. In most cases, as current experience tells us, this sort of arrangement just needs to facilitate exploiting latent synergies between existing – already funded – research. Whilst a small amount of additional funding may be required, this effectively leverages existing funding in various countries and multilateral programmes.

Read the full article | More articles

22/06/2009

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