On 1 January this year, the UK became an associated country to Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship research scheme, and to the EU’s Earth observation programme Copernicus. Linda Hantrais and Anouska Nithyanandan consider the broader implications of association for the social and human sciences and review the preparations that UK social scientists should be making to re-establish their international reputation for research excellence post-Brexit.
Following the EU referendum and during the withdrawal negotiations, the UK research community remained confident that it would be granted at least associate status in the post-Brexit settlement. By 2018, fears were already being expressed by social and human scientists about reduced opportunities for UK participation in the new Horizon programme given its strong focus on Europe. These concerns intensified during the negotiations of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). They peaked as the UK moved into the implementation phase in January 2021, marred by the political wrangles over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which were reinforcing the burden of uncertainty.
The signing of the agreement on association on 7 September 2023 was greeted with general applause across the social sciences and humanities research communities. However, we argue that, even as associate members of the Horizon Europe research programme, social and human scientists might not automatically resume the success they had achieved as a full member of European research and innovation programmes. To re-establish their reputation for scientific excellence in the EU, they need to demonstrate their capacity to respond to new challenges and to seize new opportunities.
What associated country status means for UK entities
In the period between 2016 and 2020 while the Withdrawal Agreement was being negotiated, UK social scientists maintained their strong lead in terms of the number of award holders hosted and the amount of funding received from the European Research Council (ERC) in Horizon 2020. Year-on-year, UK social scientists regularly obtained more Starting (StG), Consolidator (CoG) and Advanced (AdG) Grants than their main rivals in Germany, France and the Netherlands; and they were often outperforming other UK sciences, implying that they would have more to lose when they were no longer a full member of the EU (see Fig:1).
Fig.1: Number of European Research Council awards by country and domain in 2018. Note: Data from ERC 2018, p.58 for StG & CoG; ERC 2019, p.29 for AdG.
In 2021, as Trade and Cooperation Agreement negotiations stalled, the UK disappeared from annual European charts. Limitations had been imposed not only on the ability of individual UK applicants to participate in, and lead, successful EU-funded framework programme projects but also on the eligibility of UK institutions to host researchers from EU member states who obtained ERC awards. Like other third country applicants, they were not entitled to benefit from EU endorsement or to receive funding from the EU unless they relocated to another member state. With the UK absent from the charts, the Netherlands and Germany had assumed the lead for the number of awards taken up by social scientists (see Figure 2).
Fig.2: Number of ERC awards by country and domain in 2021. Note: Data from ERC 2021, p.57 for StG; ERC 2022, p.60 for CoG & AdG. * In 2021, the UK was not eligible to take up awards in the UK with EU funding.
The ending of freedom of movement in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement substantially reduced both the number of undergraduates and postgraduates studying in UK universities and the number of researchers from member states taking up their EU awards in the UK. EU researchers were turning down Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) hosted by UK institutions because visa, healthcare and tuition costs would have eaten up too much of their grants. In addition, UK researchers were excluded from the negotiating table when decisions were being taken about the shape and content of future EU programmes and evaluation panels, areas where they had previously been particularly influential.
In readiness for an eventual change of status, UKRO, the Brussels UK Research Office supporting UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which was formed in 2018 from the merger of the UK’s nine research councils, sought to encourage university researchers to continue applying for EU funding for calls in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 Horizon 2020 work programmes. The UK government implemented a guarantee scheme enabling applicants who were positively evaluated by EU Commission panels to receive UK government funding for projects conducted in the UK.
The signing of the agreement on associated country status in September 2023, which came into effect on 1 January 2024, changed the conditions of access for UK applicants to Horizon Europe and Copernicus funding by granting applicants to calls in the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2024 onwards the same rights as EU participants, with very limited exceptions. These limitations affect access to the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and to programmes where eligibility for individual funding calls is restricted to member states or certain other countries under existing work programmes.
The Association Agreement differs from full membership conditions in that it makes provision for UK underperformance in the remaining years of Horizon Europe: the UK will be compensated if British scientists receive significantly less money in Horizon Europe than the UK government puts into the programme. Commentators less often mention that the UK will not, in the long run, be allowed to draw more funds from the EU than it contributes. A clawback mechanism “provides for an increase in the UK’s contribution if its receipts in grants exceed its financial contribution by more than eight per cent over two successive years”. This provision is designed to satisfy the European Parliament’s concern that the UK should no longer be permitted to benefit from any net transfers from the EU budget.
Re-establishing the reputation of social and human scientists in the EU
When the UK was reinstated in the charts for 2023 awards to be taken up in 2024 under the Association Agreement, first results for UK participation in Pillar II of Horizon Europe showed that the number of awards granted to the UK had fallen to half the rate it had been under Horizon 2020.
Data for 2023/24 ERC awards (see Figure 3) indicate that UK social sciences were still trailing the Netherlands and Germany but were regaining ground for Advanced Grants. Compared to numbers and levels of awards funded by life sciences and for physics and engineering panels, social scientists largely remain the poor relation.
Figure 3: Number of ERC awards by country and domain in 2023. Note: Data from ERC 2023, p.53 for StG & CoG; ERC Advanced Grants 2023 for AdG.
Under Horizon 2020, between 2014 and 2020, UK-based organisations took part in 31% of MSCA projects; they represented 15% of all participations, received €1.16 billion and attracted nearly 67,000 researchers. Data for 2023 suggest that the UK still had a long way to go to re-establish its reputation for hosting MSCA awards: with 5 projects, the UK was in seventh position together with Portugal, whereas Germany and Spain had 19 projects each, France 17, the Netherlands 12, Belgium 11, Italy 10 and Denmark 7. Almost 60% of the projects selected were in physics and engineering, around 25% in life sciences, and fewer than 10% in social sciences.
Challenges and opportunities for UK social scientists in Horizon Europe
The advent of Horizon 2020 (FP8, 2014−20) had created challenges reminiscent of those encountered in earlier framework programmes and in the UK when it was developing the 2017 Industrial Strategy. During the years of uncertainty when the UK was negotiating association with the EU, the European Commission was reviewing its funding strategy to accommodate global societal challenges.
The need for interdisciplinary approaches had been flagged in the programme for Horizon Europe (FP9, 2021−27). In 2019, Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, the then President of the European Research Council, lent his support to interdisciplinarity as a “challenging obligation”. Bourguignon highlighted the provision of interdisciplinary training for researchers in all disciplines and of evaluation panels containing the expertise required to assess interdisciplinary proposals.
Looking forward to Horizon Europe, the European Commission’s final monitoring report of the integration of social sciences and humanities in global societal challenges targeted in Horizon 2020 concluded that “effective social integration is a clear requirement also under the 9th Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, intended to support the coming societal and technological transformations in Europe”.
Following a review of the disciplinary distribution of ERC award holders in Horizon 2020, and in response to questions about interdisciplinarity in Horizon Europe 2024 calls in September 2023, the ERC’s Scientific Council confirmed that it was continuously reviewing its panel structure. The aim of the restructuring is to promote a whole science approach, to strengthen the focus on frontier research and emerging scientific areas, while taking account of the evolving nature of disciplines and encouraging a wide breadth of viewpoints within panels.
A new panel has been created (SH8 Studies of cultures and arts), and the remit of some other social sciences and humanities panels has already been revised for 2024 calls. Full details of the new panel structure for all the sciences indicate that small changes were being introduced in the life sciences to clarify connections with human organisms and activities. No changes were considered necessary in physical and engineering sciences.
Although most of the cross-panel linkages remain within the confines of the three broad ERC panel groupings, applicants are invited to indicate if they believe that their proposals are of “cross-panel nature (within or across research domains)”. In the context of their remit to support interdisciplinary collaborative research, in May 2023 UKRI introduced a more ambitious cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme, designed to unlock “breakthrough interdisciplinary ideas that transcend, combine or significantly span disciplines [across the sciences]”.
Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) topics are likely to remain in the front line of research into global societal and technological challenges. Social scientists everywhere risk being relegated to their earlier secondary role in competition with other disciplines unless they respond proactively to today’s challenges by learning to work with STEM disciplines on equal terms, and by exploiting opportunities to become a critical component in the development of international interdisciplinary collaborations.
This post first appeared on the LSE European Politics and Policy Blog.
The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science for providing data on recent trends, in particular Crispin Williams for the data analyses.
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