Environment, Energy, Economy

Chapter 3, Environment, Energy, Economy, opens as industrial PR practitioners in the 1950s and 1960s confront a new rival: environmental pollution and its discontents. Prior to the Second World War, industry was the leading source of information on air pollution among other problems of “industrial hygiene.” In the postwar era, with new federal science funding, changing norms of media representation, and rising legal battles for companies, alternative voices emerged around environmental issues. Amid the transformation of the nature of evidence in scientific research and a growing public anxiety over depletion of the commons, public relations counsel sought to balance the scales in their corporate clients’ favor. They would find this balance in the notion of energy as its own scarce resource in need of protection. The chapter reviews the expansion of public relations networks and the adoption of environmentalism as a force to be strategically managed.

A survey to gather perspectives of DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance-funded researchers on public engagement with science

Lately, the Indian research ecosystem has seen an upward trend in scientists showing interest in communicating their science and engaging with non-scientific audiences; however, the number and variety of science communication or public engagement activities undertaken formally by scientists remains low in the country. There could be many contributing factors for this trend. To explore this further, the science funding public charity in India, DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance (India Alliance), in a first of its kind of study by a funding agency in India, surveyed its 243 research grantees in November 2020 requesting their views on public engagement with science in India through an online survey. The survey included both quantitative as well as open-ended questions to assess the understanding of, participation in, and attitude of India Alliance Fellows/Grantees towards public engagement with research, identify the enablers, challenges, and barriers to public engagement for India Alliance Fellows/Grantees, understand the specific needs (training/capacity-building, funding, etc.) and develop recommendations for India Alliance as well as for the larger scientific ecosystem in the country. The survey showed that India Alliance grantees are largely motivated to engage with the public about science or their research but lack professional recognition and incentives, training and structural support to undertake public engagement activities.

Analysing Sentiments in Peer Review Reports: Evidence from Two Science Funding Agencies

Using a novel combination of methods and datasets from two national funding agency contexts, this study explores whether review sentiment can be used as a reliable proxy for understanding peer reviewer opinions. We measure reviewer opinions via their review sentiments both on specific review subjects and on proposals’ overall funding worthiness with three different methods: manual content analysis and two dictionary-based sentiment analysis algorithms (TextBlob and VADER). The reliability of review sentiment to detect reviewer opinions is addressed by its correlation with review scores and proposals’ rankings and funding decisions. We find in our samples that 1) review sentiments correlate with review scores or rankings positively, and the correlation is stronger for manually coded than for algorithmic results; 2) manual and algorithmic results are overall correlated across different funding programmes, review sections, languages, and agencies, but the correlations are not strong; 3) manually coded review sentiments can quite accurately predict whether proposals are funded, whereas the two algorithms predict funding success with moderate accuracy. Results suggest that manual analysis of review sentiments can provide a reliable proxy of grant reviewer opinions, whereas the two SA algorithms can be useful only in some specific situations. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00156

Science funding under an authoritarian regime: Portugal's National Education Board and the European ‘academic landscape’ in the interwar period

This article enables an understanding of scientific practice and funding in a peripheral country ruled by a dictatorship in the interwar period, and thus provides the basis for comparison with studies of other non-democratic regimes. We examine the work of Portugal's Junta de Educação Nacional (National Education Board), which administered and provided funding for science from 1929 to 1936. Our findings show that this public body encouraged the participation of the Portuguese academic community in international science networks. This scenario contrasts with the dominant historiographical thesis that between the wars the Portuguese academic community did not play a role in international networks, and that it lacked state support. Also in contrast with the dominant historiography, whose ideological bias meant that a simplified picture was portrayed, whereas the reality is shown to be complex, this study demonstrates that the Portuguese dictatorial state sought to foster scientific progress through the Junta, but that resentment among academics and the resistance of universities to innovation meant that this objective was only partially achieved. Finally, the memory of a number of scientists has been rescued from oblivion, as we show how their political stance during the dictatorship led to their being ignored by historiographers when democracy prevailed.

When funding fails: Planetary exploration at NASA in an era of austerity, 1967–1976

We can learn most about how science funding works when it stops working. Like moments of breakdown surfacing the inner workings of infrastructure, periodic fiscal crises reveal the social life of science funds at the level of everyday practice. Through a case study of NASA-funded planetary science in an era of austerity, the article explores how scientists navigate uncertain funding environments and articulate financially defensible projects. Examining the development of the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury in the aftermath of a significant downturn in science support, the article offers a middle path between the macro-politics of government funding and the micro-politics of doing science. In shaping how the mission was conceived and later operated, Mariner 10’s cost-driven paradigm translated the austerity of the period into the projectized work of robotic spaceflight missions.

‘All things are in flux’: China in global science

Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China’s science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear.

Getting to the bottom of research funding: Acknowledging the complexity of funding dynamics

Research funding is an important factor for public science. Funding may affect which research topics get addressed, and what research outputs are produced. However, funding has often been studied simplistically, using top-down or system-led perspectives. Such approaches often restrict analysis to confined national funding landscapes or single funding organizations and instruments in isolation. This overlooks interlinkages, broader funding researchers might access, and trends of growing funding complexity. This paper instead frames a ‘bottom-up’ approach that analytically distinguishes between increasing levels of aggregation of funding instrument co-use. Funding of research outputs is selected as one way to test this approach, with levels traced via funding acknowledgements (FAs) in papers published 2009–18 by researchers affiliated to Denmark, the Netherlands or Norway, in two test research fields (Food Science, Renewable Energy Research). Three funding aggregation levels are delineated: at the bottom, ‘funding configurations’ of funding instruments co-used by individual researchers (from single-authored papers with two or more FAs); a middle, ‘funding amalgamations’ level, of instruments co-used by collaborating researchers (from multi-authored papers with two or more FAs); and a ‘co-funding network’ of instruments co-used across all researchers active in a research field (all papers with two or more FAs). All three levels are found to include heterogenous funding co-use from inside and outside the test countries. There is also co-funding variety in terms of instrument ‘type’ (public, private, university or non-profit) and ‘origin’ (domestic, foreign or supranational). Limitations of the approach are noted, as well as its applicability for future analyses not using paper FAs to address finer details of research funding dynamics.

Systems epidemiology and cancer: A review of the National Institutes of Health extramural grant portfolio 2013–2018

Objectives Systems epidemiology approaches may lead to a better understanding of the complex and dynamic multi-level constellation of contributors to cancer risk and outcomes and help target interventions. This grant portfolio analysis aimed to describe the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) investments in systems epidemiology and to identify gaps in the cancer systems epidemiology portfolio. Methods The analysis examined grants funded (2013–2018) through seven NIH systems science Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) as well as cancer-specific systems epidemiology grants funded by NCI during that same time. Study characteristics were extracted from the grant abstracts and specific aims and coded. Results Of the 137 grants awarded under the NIH FOAs, 52 (38%) included systems epidemiology. Only five (4%) were focused on cancer systems epidemiology. The NCI-wide search (N = 453 grants) identified 35 grants (8%) that included cancer systems epidemiology in their specific aims. Most of these grants examined epidemiology and surveillance-based questions (60%); fewer addressed clinical care or clinical trials (37%). Fifty-four percent looked at multiple scales within the individual (e.g., cell, tissue, organ), 49% looked beyond the individual (e.g., individual, community, population), and few (9%) included both. Across all grants examined, the systems epidemiology grants primarily focused on discovery or prediction, rather than on impacts of intervention or policy. Conclusions The most notable finding was that grants focused on cancer versus other diseases reflected a small percentage of the portfolio, highlighting the need to encourage more cancer systems epidemiology research. Opportunities include encouraging more multiscale research and continuing the support for broad examination of domains in these studies. Finally, the nascent discipline of systems epidemiology could benefit from the creation of standard terminology and definitions to guide future progress.

Coercion, Consent and Contestation: A Study of Changing Scientific Practices in India

The advent of the customer–funder–policymaker as a prominent element in scientific practice since mid-1990s in India and intensifying thereafter seems to have forced scientists to (re)negotiate scientific boundaries and to do some of the delicate boundary work. The challenge for scientists is to not only bring science ‘close enough’ to politics and policy demonstrating social accountability, legitimacy and relevance but also avoid either science or politics overextending into the other’s territory—a prospect that is evidently disorienting and poses serious threats to idealised identities of science and the scientific community. Based on in-depth personal interviews with 68 agricultural biotechnologists in 24 scientific institutions in India, this article examines the factors responsible for the shift in the practice of science from being a curiosity-driven activity to contract obligation. Through the radical changes in science funding and policy-orientation in India since mid-1990s, scientists seem to be vigorously mapping out the cultural spaces for science and for their own identities as forming the scientific community. In this context, scientists included in the study are not actually in the process of (re)classifying a satisfactory version of ‘science’ and ‘policy’ through their work. Instead, they are engaged in multiple versions of actively negotiated science–policy boundaries, many of which seem to have different qualities and make different demands on them as researchers/scientists.