Norway and the Joint Programming Initiatives : how does Norway participate and why?

Abstract

International science and technology cooperation has become increasingly important when facing the global challenges such as climate change, food security and health issues. Both Norwegian and EU strategies stress the importance of pooling our financial, infrastructure and knowledge resources together. The Joint Programming Initiatives (JPI) are bottom-up, member state driven initiatives set up to coordinate national efforts and pooling together resources to handle the challenges. This thesis is an explorative case study of Norwegian participation in three of the JPIs, with a focus on national motives and funding structures. The central issues from the principal-agent framework, goal conflict, moral hazard and adverse selection, have been used to highlight some of the governance challenges. I used document studies and semi structured interviews of representatives from the Ministry and Agency level to collect my empirical data. My studies show that the motives for participation are linked to social, scientific and economical drivers. For one of my cases economic return and strengthening the competitiveness of national research communities was an important driver, for two of my cases the chance to influence the European research agenda is an important motive, and access to knowledge and facing the grand challenges together is important for all my cases. There are slight differences in the governance structures of each JPI, and the funding arrangements mirror this. The case with the strongest strategic influence motive intends to use mostly institutionalized funding, while the two others have only just started to tackle this issue. Key words: ERA, EU, international STI cooperation, JPI, funding models, principal-agent