Large Grant-Funded Research Centres and Concept Generation in Development Research

Abstract

Research centres are increasingly an integral part of the institutional and organisational infrastructure of knowledge production in development studies. However, whilst other components of the knowledge production have been problematised for their role in reproducing the hierarchies of the ‘global-north-dominated science and research ecosystem’ (Gebremariam, 2022), centres have received little direct attention. This paper identifies a new generation of large grant-funded research centres (LGRCs) as on object of study in themselves. These are large in terms of both ambitions and budgets, yet are distinguished from more permanent departments or institutes in their reliance on fixed-term grant funding. It unpicks how LGRC’s internal organisational dynamics and their location within the British and global political economies of development research encourage the dissemination of concepts coined by their Principal Investigators (PIs), through centre-branded grey literature. Whilst research grants commonly release scholars from contractual teaching and administration obligations, two case studies of LGRCs at a UK university show how this process of ‘buy-out’ can be conceived more broadly as a buy-out from peer-review, with consequences for maintaining what Hountoundji (1990, p. 6) calls ‘the North’s monopoly on theory’.