Tomas Hellström
Emerging doctrine for Evaluation of Research Infrastructures
Evaluation, priority setting and the trade-off between various kinds of values, social, epistemic and both, are at the heart of large investments in science. The ESS has been and will be subject to various more or less coherent of value frameworks via the creation and use of evaluations, and these drive science policy choice in a very real way.
This project is an attempt to identify and reconstruct some of these value dimensions, especially those being reformulated in the priority setting and evaluation of large research infrastructures on different levels of the science system. The first part of this sub-project is an analytical survey which concerns the conceptual underpinning and assumptions regarding evaluation, as applied to research infrastructure policy and governance, while the second part focuses on the ‘value drift‘ which may be expected to occur as one moves between system levels, from the supra-national (EU) to the local (ESS) and the effects of trade-offs of shifting occurring as supra-levels diffuse downwards.
The sub-project will contribute to an account of how the boundaries between locally valid and general criteria for research evaluation can be negotiated.
Last modified 1 Oct 2012