-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Inga Ulnicane, Towards strengthening European scientific elite?, Science and Public Policy, Volume 44, Issue 4, August 2017, Pages 580–582, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scx005
- Share Icon Share
Extract
While the scientific community has already for centuries collaborated across borders, science policy and funding are predominantly decided at a national level. Over the past decades, European-level science policy and funding mechanisms have developed, supporting collaboration and competition beyond the national level. A new book edited by Wedlin and Nedeva analyzes the recent expansion of the European Union’s (EU) science policy. It builds on the authors’ earlier work on organization and integration of European science (e.g. Luukkonen and Nedeva 2010; Nedeva 2013) and brings together contributions from political science, sociology of science, and organization studies.
In Chapter 2, Nedeva and Wedlin elaborate their earlier idea on transformation from ‘Science in Europe’ to ‘European Science’ (Nedeva and Stampfer 2012). They interpret this change as a transition between two relatively stable and persistent stages of science support at the European level. According to them, previous stage ‘Science in Europe’ was defined by rationales of complementarity, support for applied research, and organizations enabling mobility and coordinating national research effort. The key characteristics of a new stage of ‘European Science’, by contrast, is rationale incorporating competition, support for basic research, and establishment of the European Research Council (ERC). This conceptualization captures some crucial changes in European science policy with the new stage largely incorporating the old one as well (e.g. today EU funds both basic and applied research) and the key characteristics of the new stage mainly relating to one institution, the ERC.