Forcing the issue: Time to re-examine development research funding?

Individual academics – including at King’s – can and will continue to furnish fantastic advice, but surely a dedicated organisation working on these exact problems, giving the experts funded time away from the annual grind of teaching and meetings, would be even better? That has understandably been an underlying assumption of recent government funding models.

Development expert Dr Portia Roelofs argues in her new DPE Policy Brief that funding trends over the last 10 years have led to the rise of the large grant-funded research centre (LGRC). These are ‘pyramid-shaped’ hierarchical structures with senior academics (often referred to as PIs or principal investigators) leading large teams of up to 50 or more, more junior researchers.

The problem, Dr Roelofs argues, is that these LGRCs don’t evolve organically from the direction of research, but originate in the impetus to win the grant. They are organised quite differently from the horizontal, individualised knowledge structures that usually support scholarship in development studies, political science, and across the social sciences.

Commitments from PIs of LGRCs to redefine the field tend to be baked in at application stage which precludes the kind of genuine wayfinding usually seen in individual or small team research. Above all, much of the dissemination of concepts and ideas produced by the LGRC is done through 'grey literature' which is not peer-reviewed but necessary to meet their impact commitments to the funder.

Does this matter and why should policy makers be concerned, as long as they have access to the best minds on the job? Dr Roelofs’s case study finds it does matter, that concepts relating to some of the world’s most insecure places have been popularised and actively disseminated without the scholarly peer review that usually assures robustness. In particularly egregious case, across six research reports from a LGRC the PI and 20 more junior researchers used an idea invented by the PI more than 200 times without citing it properly once.

The structure of LGRCs meant PIs were incentivised to demonstrate the broad applicability of their ideas even if this meant riding roughshod over standards of academic rigour. To quote the noughties teen movie Mean Girls, LGRCs put a lot of money and manpower in the hands of PIs who were 'trying to make “fetch” happen’ - that is say trying to forcibly popularise their chosen term in a context where a term becoming popular would normally depend on organic voluntary uptake. The knock-on effects of such wobbly evidence for sound decision-making are hard to predict in individual cases, but the potential for things to trend away from correct understanding is obvious.

The goal of every individual and organisation involved in this process is (obviously) deep, peer-reviewed, well-communicated knowledge and informed decision-making, yet somehow the incentives are not lining up. How can we fix this? Dr Roelofs suggests some measures for policy makers, academics and funders to consider, as the start of a conversation.