Strategy, history and structure

Some reflections at the start of ESRC's 60th anniversary year

Happy 2025. This year marks the ESRC’s 60th anniversary* - our diamond anniversary, if you like. It is also the year in which, under the terms of Higher Education and Research Act 2017, we are required to publish a new ‘Strategic Delivery Plan’, the multi-year documents in which Research Councils set out their high-level aims.

So it’s a good time to reflect on our strategy.

This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on how ESRC does what we do, and how we might improve it. Today, as we begin our anniversary year, I wanted to begin with some reflections on how our strategy is informed by our history and by the type of organisation we are.

What we are, and what we’re not

Open Philanthropy (our funding partner in our recent Metascience grant call), have written a number of pieces over the years explaining how they choose to fund, such as this piece on their approach to “hits-based giving’, which starts from the question “what are philanthropists structurally better-suited (and worse-suited) to do compared with other institutions?”.

One conclusion Open Philanthropy reach from this process is a focus on big bets. As a result of being “far less constrained by the need to… justify their work to a wide audience”, they argue that “when philanthropists are funding low-probability, high-upside projects, they’re doing what they do best, relative to other institutions.” (ARIA, the UK’s new research funder, is the exception that proves the rule here - it purpose is to make significant research bets, and as a result was set up to be as little like a standard public body as possible from a governance and institutional point of view.)

When people debate what public research funders should learn from ARIA or from new philanthropic funders, they sometimes conclude that organisations like ESRC should become more “hit-driven” and focus on big bets. In my view, the right lesson to learn from innovative funders is not for us to shift wholesale to hit-driven funding practices, but rather to emulate them in thinking about how our structural set-up and our place in the research ecosystem should inform our strategy.

I’d say there are two important things to consider here: how we are constituted, and our institutional history.

Let’s start with the ESRC’s constitutional position: we are of course funded by the taxpayer, not by philanthropy. As part of UK Research and Innovation, we are accountable to the Government through the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. There is a strong constitutional tradition that our decisions to fund specific projects will be made according to the Haldane Principle (defined in our foundation act of Parliament as “decisions on individual research proposals are best taken following an evaluation of the quality and likely impact of the proposals (such as a peer review process)”). Our funding decisions are periodically scrutinised in the media and by politicians (legitimately so, since we are spending taxpayers’ money). And we are understandably expected to keep operating expenses - money spent on ESRC staff and admin - low, so that as much money as possible can go on research. All of this militates against the more counterintuitive and high-variance sorts of “big bet” strategy, which can be expensive to run, risky, and in some cases controversial.

Then, there is our history: the rationale for why ESRC was set up in the first place. Our sixtieth year is a good time to remember that the ESRC has a foundational tradition of seeking to achieve real-world impact. Our founder, the great social entrepreneur Michael Young, claimed that “the social sciences are and will be useful and in that measure supported in so far as they add to mankind's span of control” - closely linking the case for public funding to the ability of social science to change the world for the better. “Impact”, as we now call it, was very much part of the foundational vision of the ESRC.

Implications for a public funder

ESRC’s dual duty to promote the social science ecosystem and at the same time to promote impact has several implications for our strategy.

First of all, as the main publicly-funded body charged with social science funding, I believe we have a role not just in respect of the specific social science we fund, but as stewards of the ecosystem of social science in the UK. (I say “the social science ecosystem” rather than the more common phrase “the research community”, because it seems to me that our responsibility extends beyond researchers and certainly beyond the traditional academic researchers people sometimes mean when they say “the research community” to include users of social science.)

Secondly, as a public funder, one of our missions should be to complement the role of other funders who are better set up to do “hit-driven” funding, of the individual efforts of researchers themselves (given that much social science research is funded by universities directly or not discretely funded at all). This means funding infrastructure, such as data repositories and the longitudinal studies for which UK social science is rightly well known; funding the early career training to provide for the next generation of researchers and innovators; and funding the curiosity-driven research that serves as an investment in the impact of the future (for example, what we call ‘applicant-led’ funding competitions, where we invite proposals from researchers on any subject).

Thirdly, to fulfil our commitment to “impact”, we should do a certain amount of more directed or targeted funding, focused on a limited number of areas. This type of funding is more costly to manage, but would, it is hoped, have higher return in expectation. Given our public accountability, these areas of focus are likely to be different to some of the more exotic challenges backed by philanthropic organisations spending their own money - promoting economic growth is a more likely field of focus than shrimp welfare. We would expect these projects to have a focus not just on knowledge-creation but also on application and real-world change.

So far, this may not sound very different from what ESRC currently funds: a portfolio of infrastructure (mostly data projects like Administrative Data Research UK or Understanding Society), PhD funding through Doctoral Training Partnerships, “responsive” or “applicant-led” funding calls, and targeted funding calls and knowledge exchange. But thinking of our role in this way can, I believe, provide helpful guidance for how our funding offering should be structured.

Implications for how we fund

Firstly, if we have a responsibility to the wider social science ecosystem, it would require us to improve our quantitative and qualitative understanding of the social science that takes place in the UK, of the health of disciplines, and of new methodological developments (for example, at the moment we might be expected to have good intelligence on the emerging role of AI in the social sciences or of likely consequences of the growing problems affecting large-scale surveys in a world of smartphones and hybrid working) - what a former chair of UKRI described as the ‘strategic brain’ capability of the research system.

Second, it would require us to work more collaboratively with other funders, including philanthropic ones. There are a lot of these, including UK foundations like Nuffield and Leverhulme, foundations in other countries (particularly but not exclusively the US), and businesses (especially in the field of AI-enabled social research). It’s notable how health researchers have improved their coordination and information sharing, in part through the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research - ESRC should be seeking to partner more with other funders and to do more to support their work. The collaborations we are putting in place with funders like Open Philanthropy on metascience and Wellcome on evidence synthesis and our exploratory work with Google DeepMind on AI in the social sciences perhaps offer a good starting point for this.

Thirdly, it encourages us to reflect on the distinction between our applicant-led research funding and our targeted research funding. A comment I hear from time to time about ESRC’s applicant-led mode is that researchers assume ESRC is mainly interested in proposals that have a strongly applied bent, and that projects in ESRC’s stated priority areas will be viewed more favourably. At the same time, our current priority areas for targeted research funding are quite broad. Framing applicant-led funding as a means of supporting curiosity-driven research and supporting the health of disciplines, and seeing targeted funding as a way of providing funding for a limited range of impact-oriented projects would help align our research funding more clearly with ESRC’s different objectives.

As we develop our new Strategic Delivery Plan in the coming months, we will be building on these ideas.

* or to be precise, it is the 60th anniversary of the foundation of our precursor organisation, the Social Science Research Council, by the great Michael Young. The SSRC was reconstituted as the ESRC in 1983, and reconstituted again as a ‘committee’ of UK Research and Innovation in the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act.