New book distills three decades of learnings on survey design  Despite all the digital and virtual means by which the world is connected, when it comes to a researcher in, say, Brussels trying to get to know a community in, say, Almaty on a level that’s technical, substantial and deep enough to include in research, a physical, vocal or face-to-face survey still yields the best results. (And isn’t that nice?) So posits UNU-MERIT professorial fellow Anthony Arundel, who began his research into sur...

Here’s what participants have to say about our EPRM revamp Last semester, the Capacity Development Office at UNU-MERIT made changes to its flagship Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods (EPRM) programme based on feedback from its participants, who are working professionals from across the globe looking to enhance their ability to engage with research for better policymaking. While in essence the programme stays the same, some elements are now linked better to participants’ needs. So, what’s new...

On 28-29 September, UNU-MERIT held its annual Internal Conference — an intensive two-day gathering that convened all of our PhD fellows (both full-time and dual career), researchers and professors for an in-person research exchange. During this much-anticipated event, our academic community members showcased their scientific endeavours to their peers, received valuable feedback, gained new perspectives and inspiration from two esteemed external keynote speakers, and enjoyed a social evening out ...

Results from a new evaluation study In 2020, the EU’s EUR 80 billion research and innovation funding programme Horizon 2020 came to a close after running since 2014. Now, as its successor Horizon Europe kicks into gear, analyses and learnings from the original programme are being put forth to inform how this next Horizon can put its EUR 95.5 billion to best effect, and how the lessons learned can be used in Horizon Europe’s successor FP10. In this vein, the European Commission recently published...

   European Innovation Scoreboard 2023 released today The twenty-second edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS), which provides a comparative analysis of the research and innovation performance of EU Member States and selected third countries, was published today, 6 July 2023. The EIS presents and compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of countries’ research and innovation systems and helps policymakers assess areas in which they need to concentrate their efforts in ord...

In a 2012 Nature article, provocatively titled ‘Conform and be funded’, Joshua Nicholson and John Ioannidis showed that few of the most highly cited US biomedical scientists received funding from the country’s National Institutes of Heath. They attributed this to a reluctance at the agency to support potentially groundbreaking work. Since then, the sense that research funding is risk-averse and biased against novel work has become increasingly widespread within the scientific community. The poss...

For many researchers working on projects that spanned international borders, the imposition of travel restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid change in ways of working. Drawing on their own experience and those of colleagues of carrying out fieldwork during the pandemic, UNU-MERIT researcher Talitha Dubow and PRIO researcher Marta Bivand Erdal propose practical recommendations to support a more collaborative mode of fieldwork, which might be among the building bloc...

While the rise of populist politicians in the Europe and the US gets a lot of attention from the media and researchers alike, the drivers of the populism taking hold in emerging and developing economies still receives relatively little scrutiny. In a new working paper we provide new evidence tracing the rise of populism in Brazil – through both the victory of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002 and Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 – to regional economic shocks caused by a process of trade liberal...

Is it possible for politics and science to influence one another yet remain separate? To what extent should scientists be made accountable for the research that informs policy? What is the appropriate apparatus to mediate these issues? And what is the role of the media in shaping the public’s understanding and expectations of the links between science and policymaking? These were a few of the questions tackled in a Chatham House webinar on 11 September 2020, featuring Sir David King, former Chie...

I flew into Pretoria, South Africa, in March 2020 – just when COVID-19 was becoming a fully-fledged international crisis. Working under the umbrella of the CatChain project, I aimed to access and use the confidential firm-level dataset managed by the National Treasury of South Africa (NT). This is a relatively new dataset and, in partnership with our sister institute UNU-WIDER, the NT has welcomed researchers from all around the world to do research using these South African data. My PhD project...