Sarah de Rijcke and Paul Wouters (CWTS) are partners in a new European consortium funded by the Swedisch Riksbankens Jubileumsfond:
Knowledge in science and policy. Creating an evidence base for converging modes of governance in policy and science (KNOWSCIENCE).
The project is coordinated by Merle Jacob (Lund University, Sweden). Other partners in the consortium are Dietmar Braun (Lausanne University, Switzerland), Tomas Hellström (Department of Business Administration, Lund University), Niilo Kauppi (CNRS, Strasbourg, France), Duncan Thomas & Maria Nedeva (Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, UK), and Rikard Stankiewitz (Lund University).
KNOWSCIENCE focuses on deepening our understanding of the interplay between policy instruments intended to govern the structural organization of higher education and research (HER) and the informal rules and processes that organizations have developed for ensuring the validity and quality of the knowledge they produce. KNOWSCIENCE refers to this as the interplay between structural and epistemic governance, and argue that an understanding of this relationship is necessary for building sustainable knowledge producing arrangements and institutions and securing society’s long-term knowledge provision.
The main research question guiding the project is 'how do policy and the science systems co-produce the conditions for sustainable knowledge provision?'
Specifically we ask:
- How are HER policy steering mechanisms enabled, disabled and transformed throughout the HER sector via the academic social system?
- What are the most significant unintended consequences of HER policy on the HER system? and
- What types of policy frameworks would be required to meet these challenges?
The announcement on the RJ website can be found here.