AGRO is well prepared to compete for policy support tasks

During the summer months there can be a dearth of interesting news and therefore the press often have to hunt for stories on their own. Writing a leader for Biweekly during the summer period can thus be a bit of a challenge. 

This year the situation has been different. I am not referring to Prince Henrik and his existential crisis about where he might someday be buried, but about the Minister of Environment and Food of Denmark Esben Lunde Larsen’s message that he wants the ministry’s policy support to be subjected to open competition before 2022. 

Open competition for research-based policy support tasks is not new, but it is rather surprising that we are subject to it now, so soon after the ministry has renewed its contract with Aarhus University.

We are well prepared for the task

We could choose to close our eyes and hope that the decision will be rescinded, if we for example get a new government, but that is not probable now that the genie is out of the bottle. The obvious question now is how all this will affect AU and, not least, AGRO, that receives a large share of the grant that AU is awarded from the Ministry of Environment and Food.

We are professionally well prepared to meet the competition in that we represent the most excellent knowledge in Denmark under the purview of the Ministry of Environment and Food. Over the years, we and DCA have developed a good setup with regard to policy support – a setup that ensures delivery on time, quality assurance, and, not least, an overview of which resources the various tasks require.  

The latter will be important when we make a bid for the tasks in the future. Personally, I believe that open competition for policy support tasks will mean that the ministry will get less bang for its bucks than the case is now because more attention will be paid to expense management. However, time will tell. 

Challenges on the way

You can discuss the wisdom of an open competition for policy support tasks because the price for creating competition will involuntarily be that significant amounts of financial resources will be allocated to acquiring the funding – money that could otherwise have been spent on co-financing the required underlying research. We are all too familiar with this scenario in our daily battle to acquire various research funds. 

What can AGRO and AU do to prepare for the future? One thing we should consider doing is, when we know which scientific areas will be in the open competition, to establish consortiums with for example other universities in Denmark and abroad. All Danish and foreign universities can make a bid for the tasks but the grant must be given to a Danish university. We must ensure that this is AU, but we can strengthen our position by entering into partnerships with other strong players, just like when we apply for research funding. 

This means, of course that we will have to share the grants with others but the alternative could be no grant at all. 

Another challenge is holding on to the people who have the skills to carry out the policy support tasks. If we want to succeed with this then there must be a career route for the scientists who dedicate a large portion of their time to solving policy support tasks. This requires a shift of focus to other things than number of articles, H-index, patents, etc. 

We are not just talking about pin money here. I do not believe that we can exclude the idea that the universities will take advantage of each other and try to lure scientists from other universities in order to strengthen their applications. With this scenario in mind,ac it will be even more important to hold on to our present key staff in the policy support area and train new ones.  

We face many challenges but I would like to emphasise that I believe that we are well prepared for open competition. However, we must already now take steps to ensure that AU is impossible to avoid as a key figure with regard to policy support for the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. This is a task that AU’s management must prioritise very highly in the months and years to come.