Delegated Co-ordination. The co-ordination function of intermediary organisations in the Austrian research funding system

Authors

  • Rupert Pichler Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.132.vol43iss4

Keywords:

Research policy, co-ordination, agencification

Abstract

Research policy is not only a horizontal issue that is prone to fragmentation but also provides an interface to research as an expert system. Therefore, research policy is used to negotiation processes with the various actors requiring both horizontal and vertical co-ordination. Within this frame intermediary organizations as typical research funding structures play a key role for the co-ordination of public policies and the research system. As a consequence, fragmentation at the political level may also be reflected at the intermediary level and cause equal fragmentation there. However, action at the intermediary level can yield positive co-ordination effects in case the implementation of research policy strategies falls within the realm of intermediary funding organizations. The example of the Austrian research funding agency demonstrates that barriers to co-ordination can be – at least partially – overcome by the creation of a multi-principal agency, feeding back positively also to co-ordination at political level. The specific set of instruments of a funding organization and possible imbalances among its principals present limitations to that form of co-ordination.

Author Biography

  • Rupert Pichler, Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie

    Dr. Rupert Pichler ist Leiter der Abteilung für Forschungs- und Technologieförderung im Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie. Studium der Geschichte und Fächerkombination in Innsbruck und Tübingen, Post-Graduate-Aufenthalte in Mailand und Minneapolis. Letzte Veröffentlichungen: gem. mit R. Hofer: Geschichte der kooperativen Forschung in Österreich. Die kooperativen Institute und ihre Dachorganisation zwischen Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik, Innsbruck: Studienverlag 2014; gem. mit E. Strimitzer: Ausgliederungen als Instrument eines modernen Verwaltungsmanagements: Grundlagen, Probleme, Praxis, in: E. Strimitzer u.a. (Hg.), Handbuch des modernen Verwaltungsmanagements, Wien: Linde 2013, S. 99–135; gem. mit M. Stampfer u. R. Hofer: The Making of Research Funding in Austria. Transition Politics and Institutional Development, 1945–2005, in: Science and Public Policy 37(2010), S. 765–780.

Downloads

Published

2014-09-01

Issue

Vol. 43 No. 4 (2014): Politics and public administration

Section

Research Article

License

The OZP is the authorized quarterly publication of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft (ÖGPW, Austrian Political Science Association)

The author of an article (in case of multiple authors: the corresponding author, responsible for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors) accepted to be published in the OZP hereby acknowledges the following Copyright Notice:

  1. The author retains the copyright to the article.
  2. It is the responsibility of the author, not of the OZP, to obtain permission to use any previously published and/or copyrighted material.
  3. Publication of a submitted text is dependent on positive results from the peer reviewing. In such a case, the OZP editors have the right to publish the text.
  4. In case of publication, the article will be assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) number.
  5. The author agrees to abide by an open access Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY nc) license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article in any non-commercial way, so long as appropriate credit is given to the author and source of the work. 
  6. The license ensures that the author’s article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. In order to facilitate distribution, the author agrees that the article, once published, will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the OZP.
  7. In addition, the author is encouraged to self-archive the article, once published, with reference to the place of the first publication.
  8. After the contribution appears in the OZP, it is still possible to publish it elsewhere with reference to the place of the first publication.
  9. The finished article, if published, will include a correspondence address (both postal and email) of the author.
  10. If written under the auspices of a grant from one or more funding agencies, such as FWF (Austrian Science Fund), ERC (European Research Council), and Horizon 2020 (EU Framework Programme), an article accepted for publication has to be deposited in an Open Access archive. The OZP’s archiving policy is compliant with these provisions. (In case the article derives on funding from a different source, the author is responsible to check compliance of provisions.)