The European Research Council

摘要

This book tells the fascinating story of how the European Research Council (ERC) came about and how it established its practices in its early years. The ERC is in many ways an odd construction in the landscape of European Union (EU) research funding. Whereas the dominant principle in almost all other programs is to link funding explicitly to specific political goals and priorities, the ERC distributes its grants solely on the principle of scientific excellence. The ERC has furthermore succeeded in establishing itself as a European benchmark for scientific prestige and as a model for organizing research funding. For these reasons alone, a book that tells the ERC's story is more than welcome. Thomas Konig is particularly well placed to tell this story, having worked as scientific advisor to the former chair of the ERC, Helga Nowotny. For three years, he was in close daily contact with the EU and ERC bureaucracies, and participated in preparing Scientific Council'meetings. As he notes, this insider insight into the workings and everyday life of the ERC and the EU bureaucracy in which it is embedded, is crucial to understanding the early years of the ERC as it was becoming established. This privileged position also gave Konig access to important actors and documents, including a number of personal archives, which constitute the empirical material for the book. The book has nine chapters, starting with an Introduction, followed by chronological accounts of the history of the ERC in Chapters two to seven, and ending with a summary and postscript. The six chapters address three questions or processes pertaining to the formation of the ERC. The first two address the organization's prehistory, exploring how it advocated for a ERC, and built up alliances; the second two address struggles over the ERC's institutional arrangements; and the last two look at how institutional procedures for the assignment of large sums of public funding to research were established and legitimized. In the first chapter, Konig recounts the ERC's back-story from the late 1950s onward. He shows how the position of science and research in the EU's budget and politics changed, especially after the Lisbon treaty, and how these changes enabled well-connected actors that spanned the boundaries of science and politics to build alliances and promote the idea of an ERC. Chapter 3 analyzes how this idea was brought into political circles in the EU, and how a mix of national actors, EU bureaucrats and scientists mobilized and built up momentum through a series of meetings and conferences that tied ministers and EU institutions to the proposal. Here, Konig also discusses resistance on the part of certain countries to committing EU money to 'basic' research, notably how powerful concerns within the natural sciences regarding scientific autonomy and credibility had to be addressed before the proposal was adopted by the EU in the Seventh Framework Program. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to analyzing discussions and struggles over the ERC's institutional arrangements. A major question addressed here is how the ERC could simultaneously ensure institutional independence from the European Commission while still securing the commitment of the EU's institutions to the ERC in the long run. Here, Konig analyzes struggles between the members and chair of the ERC's first scientific council, and the EU bureaucracy, about how to set up an independent research funding agency that still conformed to explicit and implicit EU rules and norms. The two last chapters are devoted to the workings of the ERC in its early years, specifically to how particular institutional mechanisms, such as three-stage funding schemes and peer review systems, emerged as a means to uphold scientific credibility vis-a-vis the EU institutions. Konig furthermore accounts for the interdisciplinary organization of the council, and explains how an organizational model drawn from the biosciences became the model for the ERC. In the last chapter, Konig charts the impact of approximately the first ten years of the ERC, arguing that it has become an important mark of distinction in European science and a 'model' that other forms of research funding follow. The concluding chapter, entitled Summary, is more than just a summary-it draws out the main themes that run through the book, showing how excellence became the symbolic hallmark for the ERC in its struggle for autonomy from the EU commission, and for scientific credibility. The book is a detailed account of the establishment and institutional-ization of the ERC, and as such it is an important resource for researchers interested in understanding and explaining the struggles, dynamics and structures involved in European research funding, and the organization of scientific knowledge production. The author explicitly draws on his insight gained from working within the ERC, which naturally raises the question of whether it would be possible for someone wit