November 10, 2024

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OPINION – A funding story

OPINION – A funding story

Macau Business | October 2024

Keith Morrison – Author and educationist


Societal and business developments draw on research of all kinds. Research is essential for the development of Macau and beyond. Will the new Chief Executive continue the provision of funding for research in Macau’s higher education institutions? Here’s a story that might spark a thought or two.

Imagine this: a generous, forward-looking government, recognising the importance of social, economic, human, and service-related research for development and improvement, funds research projects in the natural and life sciences, humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, applied sciences, and the arts. Wonderful. 

University researchers rise to this. They spend weeks and months poring over the preparation of their research funding proposals to ensure that their projects contribute to their targeted communities, to scholarship, to science, the arts and humanities, to development and improvement for all. They ensure that their proposed research is of local, regional, national, and international significance, originality, worthwhileness, merit, benefit, and consequence for the economic, scientific, human, environmental, and societal condition. 

For each research proposal, the expert researchers prepare their budget with meticulous precision, and to the last cent. They network with partners in national and international institutions, research centres, organisations, industries, businesses, communities, etc., to ensure the highest quality, importance, rigour, consequence, relevance, contribution, value, and utility of their research. Noting that the criteria stated for funding are open to multiple interpretations, the researchers seek pre-submission advice and feedback from international experts, to ensure that their research is of the highest standard and match to the given criteria.

Bubbling with fervent enthusiasm, expertise, and commitment, they complete page after page of the application pro-forma and supporting documents, so that, when the funders announce their call for research project proposals, there they are, ready, willing, keen, capable, and positive. They even have fulfilled the funder’s peculiar requirement for an indication of the exact academic and/or professional journal in which their findings will be published, apparently unaware of the fact that journal editors, not authors, decide what to accept for publication. With boundless optimism they submit their research proposal.

Will the new Chief Executive continue the provision of funding for research in Macau’s higher education institutions? Here’s a story that might spark a thought or two.

Crash. Their proposal is rejected. All that they receive from the funder, for their months of careful preparation, tenacity, perseverance, and internationally supported, first-class proposal, is a curt sentence or two indicating the rejection, with scant, negligible, even no reasons given for this. That’s all; no other feedback. What the researchers had demonstrated to be an important, sound, solid, and beneficial proposal turned out, in the funder’s eyes, to be as brittle, fragile, and unimportant as an unwanted, thin glass, useless ornament.

Crestfallen, feeling insulted, bitter, demoralised, and despondent, the researchers ask their international colleagues if such curt rejection is typical of their government’s funding agencies. With eyes wide open in shock, the answer comes: ‘of course not; we receive a full report and feedback. That is a requirement. Why not appeal? Why not revise and resubmit? We can, and we do, and it works.’ The researchers reply that, where they live, to appeal is to be marked for ever, tacitly, as being troublesome and someone to be turned down in the future, so they suffer in silence.

Then the researchers find from their researcher friends in other institutions that some of their projects have been granted partial research funding from their government. ‘What use is that?’ their friends ask themselves, commenting that ‘the researchers needed all the money, not half of it. It’s like being offered half a television, not the whole television; it’s useless’, so their friends have had to tell the government that their projects cannot proceed. It makes the government look good by offering money without actually having to give any money.

The researchers are puzzled. ‘How did the funder come to its decisions, and where are transparency, accountability, evidence of academic and professional behaviour, impartiality, fairness, ethics, duty of care, feedback, and the right of response, appeal, and revision?’ they wonder. They ask the funder, and await a response. What do they get? A self-protective carapace of silence.

In 2019, a prestigious journal (PLOS Biology) published an article (‘Contest Models Highlight Inherent Inefficiencies of Scientific Funding Competitions’) in which its authors (Gross and Bergstrom) commented that ‘[t]he grant proposal system compels researchers to devote substantial time to writing proposals that could have instead been used to do science’. They noted that ‘proposal competitions are inevitably and inescapably inefficient mechanisms for funding science when the number of awards is smaller than the number of meritorious proposals’. In early 2024, Gigerenzer and his colleagues published ‘Alternative Models of Research Funding’ for the sciences, with useful suggestions; well worth reading.

I ask myself whether Macau, with its honourable intentions and practices to further and support research, encounters any of these issues and/or finds them interesting. Just a thought.

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