PROSPERA Project: Latest results

PROSPERA’s WP4 takes science funding institutions as its focus, looking across national contexts to consider broadly how post-growth innovation might be understood and pursued. This presentation focuses on data collected under WP4 to understand the U.S. science funding system, including interviews, site visits, and document analysis. It will include reflections on research design, adapting field work to context, stories and emergent themes from the data, as well as some preliminary ideas about how the case can contribute to theories of post-growth innovation.

In this talk, I will share my fieldwork data collected over the last 1 year as part of Work Package 4 of PROSPERA. I will try to situate the initial findings in the broader academic and policy discourse on economic growth and its relationship with S&T funding. I will use the opportunity to think critically and collectively about the emerging priorities in science funding, along with the critiques of the dominant models of science funding.

The relationship between economic growth and science funding is tenuous in India. The country has experienced higher GDP growth over the last 3 decades, yet the share of GDP allocated to R&D has remained at 0.7%. Although the amount available for science and technology increased due to the expansion of the size of the overall Indian economy. The prioritisation in S&T policies and other policies of the funding bodies shifted to using the language of innovation and industry-led growth; however, the industry-academia and government links remained shallow and patchy at best. Economic growth was used as an empty signifier for promising progress, development, and strategic scientific goals. Yet funding for science remained below par compared to other countries of a similar level of economic development. Interestingly, the critique of science funding in India was not aimed only at the economic growth model, which was not delivering on the promises. The different critiques of the current funding models were more divergent, calling for a well-being economy, science for delivering public goods and addressing local issues, higher prioritisation of social and environmental goals, and administrative reforms to ensure the effective use of available science funding for researchers. Several of these critiques share the concerns of the post-growth model of development, which emphasises on looking beyond capitalist growth models. However, the dominant policy models continue to use the language and tools of neoclassical economics to effectively deploy science and technology for economic growth. The dominant imagination aims for technological innovations, private capital-led economic growth, and a free-market economy to fulfil the dreams and necessities of the growing Indian economy.