Meeting expectations: on the challenges of collaborative research through European funding

Abstract

The development of large international research projects that gather diverse academics and researchers over a significant period of time is a relatively new phenomenon. Precisely what is new is not the fact of collaboration as such: it is rather the fact that collaboration is increasingly being incentivized (funded) and governed (controlled), through policy programmes, funding agencies and so on. This evolution has resulted in a double outcome. While the governing of research becomes apparent through the emergence of stringent policy-related expectations attached to such projects, the financial incentives have triggered the rise of new forms of organizations: large, international, temporary organizations or networks that collaboratively conduct research on precise themes deemed policy-relevant. In the literature, one finds several attempts to establish whether such collaborative research is more or less productive than solo research. Our argument in this chapter is that the question one should ask is not whether such or such a form of research organization is more or less productive, better or worse, than another. One should rather wonder how a given form of research organization works and responds to its external conditions of possibility. That is, how scientific research handles the expectations raised by its political environment through policy-makers and the like. We are thus particularly interested in the inside and the outside of large EU-funded research projects, which implies understanding the interaction between their internal functioning and the external (policy) demands they are supposed to respond to.