The CNR office building in Rome. Credit: TK Kurikawa/ Shutterstock Images.
The Italian government is starting a reform of the National Research Council, the country’s main research body, as part of the 2022 budget law. A section of the law creates a committee tasked with preparing a plan for the reorganization and relaunch of the institute, and assigns additional funds to the CNR budget, to be used mostly for the reorganization.
CNR is the main Italian research body, representing 88 institutes on all disciplines across the country, 8,500 researchers and a €900 million budget. It has gone through chronic funding cuts for years, with a heavy bureaucratic structure.
According to the new bill, a Strategic Committee comprising five experts, Italian or foreign, appointed by the Minister of University and Research, will work with the CNR Board of Directors to complete a reorganization plan within the first half of 2022. The plan will then be approved by the Research Ministry through a decree, and will have to be put into practice within 3 years.
The scheme also allocates €10 million for turning short-term contracts of CNR researchers into permanent ones, and €50 million, to be spent between 2022 and 2024, to implement the reorganization and relaunch plan. Additionally, the CNR budget will be increased by €20 million per year starting in 2023, provided that the reorganization plan is on track.
The initial draft of the law put the CNR President, and not its Board, in charge of the process, and gave the Ministry full autonomy in selecting the members of the Strategic Committee. When that draft became public, hundreds of scientists and academics signed an appeal to ask Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, to stop the reform, that they considered unconstitutional. “It was like putting a commissioner in charge of the main national research body, completely ignoring its autonomy” says Rino Falcone, Research Director at the CNR Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, who promoted the appeal.
Elena Cattaneo, a stem-cell scientist and Senator for life, also asked for a wider involvement of the CNR itself and of the research community at large. With Senator Francesco Verducci, of the Democratic Party, she co-signed an amendment request to the budget law that, if approved, would have suppressed the Strategic Committee, would have required the CNR Board of Directors, instead of the President alone, to approve the reform plan, and would have introduced mandatory statements on the reform by parliamentary committees.
The version approved by the Senate on 24 December, and expected to pass without further changes in the lower chamber, is a compromise. It puts the Board of Directors in charge of the plan, but keeps the Strategic Committee, whose members will be chosen by the Minister from shortlists prepared by CNR itself, and by a committee that helps selects the presidents of research institutes. The Minister will have to present the reform in the Parliament, but will not need its approval.
According to Falcone, the main problem remains that “everything mentioned by this law could be done under existing law by the CNR management, that has the autonomy to change the institute’s governing statute”. Another problem, he says, is that the CNR reform will skip parliamentary scrutiny. “The government approves the reform through its own decree, and this goes against article 33 of the Italian Constitution,” he says. Article 33 says that universities, research institutes and other cultural institutions have a right to self-governance, that can only be limited by laws approved by the Parliament.
Falcone agrees that CNR needs to reduce its bureaucracy and boost turnover, as well as invest in international recruitment. On the other hand, he stresses that CNR is no less productive than other European research institutions. “We are not afraid of a reform, but it scares us that someone totally outside the institution, such as the Strategic Committee, might take over”.
CNR President Maria Carrozza declined to comment, citing the pending legislative process, as did the Research Minister, Maria Cristina Messa. A MUR spokesperson told Nature Italy that the reform must be seen in the context of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), that makes it vital to ensure CNR’s stability and efficiency in the use of funds.
