Great Potential and Danger in New Science Funding Strategy 

NZAS Co-Presidents Lucy Stewart and Troy Baisden comment on the new strategy for research funding^[1] announced today.

“There is great potential in the science funding reform announced today. The announcements create a more strategic science funding system that better resembles successful systems in successful small nations. It has a high level structure and a matrix of considerations that will help ground it in achieving what we need as a nation.

Yet there are some things that can go wrong, and have gone wrong with past reforms. 

First, the four Pillars may provide too much simplicity to ensure all needs are met. Two of the four pillars are focused on research related to the ‘economy’, when we know much research is not easily categorised in this way. Lack of clarity on where and how natural hazards research will be funded is an obvious example. 

The new Research Funding New Zealand agency is yet to be built, but the Government is already planning the disestablishment of the two most competent funding bodies, Marsden and Health Research Council. Their strengths could be lost into a larger bureaucracy. The newly created Public Research Organisations might be best placed to set strategy, and it is worth remembering this recommendation of the 2010 reform felt promising but was abandoned in a partially implemented state.

We have also learned from past reforms that the biggest danger to successful systems is building more layers of management. As a company, Boeing ran into trouble making good planes when it sidelined its aeronautical engineers from top management. Successful science systems have strategies run by scientists who know science and who it delivers to, and who are not sidelined by managers and bureaucrats. Yet that’s what has happened in our current system - and the new system retains this potential.

The acid test may be simple. Scientists, business, politicians and the public would all like to see more useful science versus less bureaucracy. Our system rates as one of the worst in the world in terms of the ratio of funding that actually goes to science versus management and bureaucracy. Will we see any improvement, or will we continue to underfund the actual research this new agency is intended to support?” 

See our PDF version on our Press Releases page.

^[1] Cabinet documents available at https://www.mbie.govt.nz/about/open-government-and-official-information/release-of-information/cabinet-papers-and-minutes