Reflections on ESRC’s Applicant-led and Targeted research funding

On being less Laodicean

Unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write… I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth

Revelations 3:14-16

Like other research councils, ESRC has two main ways of making research grants: “applicant-led mode”, where we invite proposals on topics of the researcher’s choice, and “targeted mode”, where we invite proposals on specific topics (e.g., “set up an institute to study productivity and inform government policy”). (These modes have in the past been known as “responsive” mode and “managed” or “strategic” mode respectively.)

We’ve been reflecting on how we administer these two types of funding, and talking to researchers and other partners, and as a result identified certain things we believe we could improve as we develop ESRC’s strategy for the period 2025-2027.

First of all, our applicant-led mode is relatively small compared to those of some other UKRI research councils; we fund about twice as much research through targeted calls as responsive ones. Increasing the relative size of applicant-led mode would be a way of making good the Government’s welcome commitment to curiosity-driven research (if we interpret ‘curiosity-driven’ as ‘driven by questions the researcher is curious about, which feels like a good stab at pinning down a hard-to-define term). And applicant-led mode also potentially offers more scope for ‘blue sky’ (as opposed to applied or problem-focused) research, which is important to the long-term health of the social sciences. However, I hear from some researchers that they assume ESRC is not interested in responsive mode proposals unless they have a strongly applied bent, and that they believe that projects in ESRC’s stated priority areas will be viewed more favourably.

Secondly, we could do a better job of understanding the health and trajectory of different social science disciplines, to make us more mindful funders. I was surprised when I arrived at ESRC that we use relatively little scientometric or qualitative information to determine our funding priorities. We could do more to take advantage of the expertise we have, both internally and among researchers. I am also struck by the fact that other UKRI research councils make greater use than ESRC of ‘highlight notices’ to indicate disciplines that are underrepresented among applications or historical funding in relation to opportunities.

Finally, as well as being relatively large, our targeted funding mode is quite broad. ESRC’s current Strategic Delivery Plan (covering the years 2022 to 2025) has five thematic priorities, each of which is capacious (for example, one covers net zero, environment, biodiversity and climate change; another covers “digital society”). In practice, we also have a sixth priority, productivity and economic growth. This is a lot of priorities. And those priorities are quite broad when compared to some other more tightly constrained priorities (such as Nesta’s four missions or the published detail of the Government’s five missions).

One consequence of the size and breadth of our managed mode is that ESRC can afford to spend relatively little time on most managed mode projects (since our total “operating expenses” - which in practice mostly relate to staff costs - are something we work hard to limit), limiting our ability to fund in novel ways.

These things combine to create a strange paradox: our applicant-led modes, which could be encouraging curiosity-driven research and providing some space for excellent blue-sky research, can feel to researchers like our managed mode (at least in that they feel obliged to propose applied projects and to play up connections to ESRC’s stated priorities); and our targeted mode, which could be a high-touch, mission- and impact-oriented way of funding, risks looking like our applicant-led modes (with our staff time spread more thinly than we might like, and a range of focus areas that includes almost everything).

One piece of evidence that this blurring might be happening is that the proportion of grants that fall into ESRC’s current priority areas is about the same in our responsive mode portfolio as in our managed mode, a finding that I would not have expected to see.

The risk we run is that, like the Laodiceans in the Bible, we are neither hot nor cold - our funding modes blur into one another, and deliver neither the benefits we would expect of applicant-led mode nor those of targeted mode.

Managers of financial investments sometimes talk about the benefits of a so-called “barbell strategy”, an investment portfolio made up of very low-touch investments like index trackers, and very high-touch ones, like venture capital or private equity, avoiding the middle ground where management costs are higher but not justified by higher returns.

This would suggest a number of changes in how we run these particular funding streams:

• A relatively larger applicant-led mode - underpinned by a stronger capacity to understand the health and development of different social science disciplines

• A relatively smaller targeted mode, with a smaller number of more tightly defined priorities, and an increased ratio of operating expense to grant funding in this area to allow for more hands-on funding and investment management.

We will be working on this idea as we plan our 2025/26 budget and our future Strategic Delivery Plan. Changes we make will necessarily be gradual, since the nature of research funding is that around 80% money we spend in a given year is the result of investment decisions made in prior years. But we believe this change will be helpful, both by providing greater support for researchers’ ideas and curiosity-driven research, and by allowing us to increase the impact of our targeted research.