Institutionalisation and destabilisation of the public research governance paradigm: What can we learn about the next social contract for science from small industrialised democratic states?

National Research, Science and Innovation (RSI) systems are marked by inherent tensions and competing expectations that drive their policy dynamics. Domestic governments expect to see impact from their investment, but the nature of that impact is often left implicit and open to contestation. At the same time, global actors are now calling for better coordination across national RSI systems and highlighting the centrality of RSI to enable large-scale socio-technical transformation. With this combination of pressures, RSI is a volatile area of policy-making where diverse actors, at multiple scales, struggle to define a shared sense of purpose and how to achieve it. This context points to the need to better understand how national RSI systems change and adapt, especially as they are expected to be more societally purposeful at domestic and global scales. Yet, the scholarship and practice of RSI policy has tended to focus only on a narrow set of national academic and industrial outcomes, telling us nothing about multi-level governance and agenda-setting dynamics. To address this gap, this thesis applies a the lens of constructivist insitutionalism to analyse the rise and fall of national RSI governance paradigms over time. In doing so, it explores the potential for more purposeful and deliberate shift in the context of our current global crises. Using New Zealand and Denmark as analytical models, the thesis demonstrates that national RSI systems have experienced little stability in recent years. Instead RSI has become a key site in which governments exercise their broader agendas, as the notion of investment in research has come to be interpreted politically. Thus, funding objectives and organisational arrangements experienced swings across the political spectrum, which often took for granted that what governments perceived to be in the national interest was also in the public interest. However, rapidly changing conditions are now throwing into question this implicit alignment of interests and drawing attention to where successive governments were (and were not) prioritising their RSI investment. Case study observations challenge the traditional view of RSI as a generic system where simply getting the policy settings right will produce both fundamental and actionable knowledge as a global public good. Instead, national RSI systems are shown to reflect their multi-level institutional and material contexts, and the perspective of governments as they make sense of these contexts according to their own ideological commitments. These observations point to the challenges that lie ahead in prompting more purposeful and deliberate paradigm change if RSI is now to support socio-technical transformation at global scale. But this work also suggests points of intervention, each related to characteristics that distinguish governance paradigms: rationale, organisational arrangements, and key actors. Finally, this work contributes to constructivist and neo-institutional theory on governance dynamics, while adapting process-tracing methods to be more theoretically consistent. It also considers the utility of small country cases as analytical models more generally.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Politics and International Relations

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Allen, Kristiann

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Fadgen, Tim
• Wilkinson, Martin

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/68165

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/68165