Science & Technology

For every pound that the UK contributes to the European Union science fund, it gets back £1.40. Why? Because the European Union invests into science projects “on the basis of scientific excellence”. And British scientists are among the best in the world. As Michael Brooks pointed out in his weekly science column for the New […]

As the climate continues to change at alarming rates, many have lost faith in traditional international approaches to address the issue. As a result, climate policy innovation and associated experimentation are en vogue.[1] The thinking goes that if old approaches are perceived to be failing, we need new and innovative ones. The hope is that […]

Changing working conditions at European universities are studied in a recent book ‘Academic Work and Careers in Europe – Trends, Challenges, Perspectives’, edited by Tatiana Fumasoli, Gaële Goastellec and Barbara Kehm. Tatiana Fumasoli tells about the main findings presented in the book.   Q1: What have been the rationales and origins of this book? The […]

Inga Ulnicane and Meng-Hsuan Chou What are the boundaries of the Europe of Knowledge? Does a specific conceptualisation of scientific excellence lead to a more divided Europe of Knowledge? How are diverse aims of research policy such as economic competitiveness, societal relevance and research excellence reconciled? Do universities increasingly behave like private companies? These are […]

Anete Vītola In my paper, “Innovation policy mix in a multi-level context: The case of the Baltic Sea Region countries”, I analyze how multi-level innovation policy mixes function in the six countries of the Baltic Sea Region – Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The paper summarizes findings of my PhD thesis research on […]

Emilia Primeri In a funding and policy context as deeply changed as the European one, the opening of national research programs has become an important instrument for national governments and funding agencies to increase international collaboration and to improve the quality and efficiency of scientific research. The opening of national research programs refers to the […]

  Today, writing in the Daily Express newspaper, columnist James Delingpole shockingly compares the European Union to Nazi Germany. He claimed that a “faceless commissar in Brussels” was deciding to ban every-day consumer products for no good reason. The newspaper asks its readers to play a new Christmas game called, “EU Ban Bingo” to “guess […]

With the first ten months of 2014 being the warmest January-October period since records started in 1880, many hope that the current climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru will lay the groundwork for a global climate deal in Paris in December 2015. In this context, on October 24 the European Council announced that the twenty-eight […]

Darius Ornston The shift to innovation-based competition has rekindled interest in the political economy of cooperation. Scholarly literature frequently characterizes innovation as an interactive process. New technologies, business models and social practices are rarely developed in isolation, but emerge within a dense network of enterprises, sub-contractors, end users and knowledge-generating institutions. But while scholars of […]

Lorna Ryan In a recent paper, ‘Governance of EU research policy: Charting forms of scientific democracy in the European Research Area’ (Science and Public Policy 2014), I explore, prompted by Alan Irwin’s work (2001), how the ‘scientific citizen’ is constructed within current policy and decision making processes’.  The paper is based on my efforts to […]