Ideas and instruments in public research funding

"Public research funding (PRF) should be allocated in one way or in another. This happens through specific policies in which the choice of how to allocate public funding depends on two main components: the underlying ideas, in terms of beliefs regarding goals and how to reach them, and the types of instruments adopted, which are intended to be effective in reaching the expected goals. Thus, to better understand how PRF evolves over time and how it works, it is analytically relevant to analyse PRF based on both an ideational and an instrumental perspec- tive. The ideational perspective can better indicate why PRF instruments are chosen, while an instrumental perspective can better indicate how PRF is organized and whether and how it is truly as effective as expected. Furthermore, by linking ideational and instrumental analyses, the world of PRF can be better presented because it is possible to understand the reciprocal influence between ideas and instruments. It is not necessarily the case, as the institutional perspective teaches us, that ideas come before instruments. To address this theme, the chapter is structured as follows. In Section 5.2, an overview of the literature on ideas and instruments in public policy is presented. In Section 5.3, PRF is analysed from an ideational perspective, while in Section 5.4, the analysis is performed from an instrumental perspective. Section 5.5 shows how, over time, PRF systems develop as mixes of ideas and instruments that are not necessarily consistent or coherent."