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...

"The vast network of scholars that the CatChain project brings is truly a great opportunity for anyone who participates in it, as it embraces a new economic thinking through the sharing of different experiences among the partner institutions and with other external parties." Dr. VGR Chandran Govindaraju, University of Malaya, Malaysia...

A new decade begins with the promise of a global rebrand, a new website, and a new director for UNU-MERIT. All three are currently being decided, so now is a good time to look back on 2019 – a year that featured two major developments in our outreach activities. First, European membership of The Conversation UK, which calls itself “an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public”. Second, a non-profit account with Short...

Charlotte Mueller’s PhD research focuses mainly on the African nations of Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Somalia — and she has travelled to all these countries over the last three years to collect data. Yet, as a European researching African issues, she is acutely aware of various Eurocentric assumptions, and that African development is still frequently discussed from an external, third person perspective. In this post, Charlotte argues that the 2030 Agenda will only succeed across Afric...

Teaching research methodology to our new PhD fellows is my favourite class. Doing so in small groups, as is often the case in our PhD programmes and professional training, allows me to engage in creative and innovative educational formats. It’s also much appreciated when teaching mid-career professionals, who are not used to sitting in class and listening for hours. Every time I teach, I try a new set-up or tweak things a little. But of course, some formats have proven their value over tim...

Every year on 11 February, the United Nations, partners worldwide, women and girls mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Why does it matter? Recent studies suggest that 65% of children entering primary school today will have jobs that do not yet exist. While more girls are attending school than before, girls are significantly under-represented in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects in many settings and they appear to lose interest in STEM subjects a...