A decade of uncertainty over who should control Swedish science could be about to end. The Swedish parliament is considering a bill to replace the country's myriad research councils with just four.

A single agency, the National Science Council, would support basic research. One applied agency would cater for social and working-life issues, another for environment and agriculture, and a fourth for industrial research.

Research has become a political hot potato in Sweden. A lack of economic growth during the early 1990s was accompanied by a 30% reduction in research spending. The centre-right coalition decided in 1994 to use US$800 million, raised through a tax on industry, to fund a Foundation for Strategic Research. This resulted in a controversial shift towards greater support for research with socioeconomic goals.

In 1998, a parliamentary report called for a re-emphasis on basic science, and a radical streamlining of the various agencies within just four councils under the ministry of education, covering applied and basic research.

Östros: accepted plans for a single agency. Credit: EPA

A new ally came with the return of the Social Democrats in late 1998, when 35-year-old Thomas Östros became minister for education and science. Östros has promised an increase of almost 10% in the basic research budget by 2002. Sweden's total spending on research, at $59.48 billion or 3.6% of gross domestic product, is already high by European standards.

The new bill, endorsed by the Green and Left parties, and presented to parliament by Östros in June, adopts many of the conclusions of the 1998 report.

Being a small country, Sweden needs a single highly competitive system for distributing research funds across the universities, says Dan Brandström, chairman of the committee that will implement the new structure if the bill is passed as expected. “Before, we had a very fragmented system.”

The National Science Council will replace the current Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, the Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Medical Research Council, the Natural Sciences Research Council and the Research Council of Engineering Sciences. In line with the 1998 report, scientists should be in charge: most of the governing board will be elected by the research community.

Lars Nilsson heads the 54-year-old Swedish Natural Science Research Council, which will disappear under the new structure. He says that it is too soon to predict the outcome of the proposed change, but it has the “potential to be something much better”.

The streamlined structure should allow coordinated use of funding, says Nilsson, and makes sense in an era where research proposals often span sectors that are currently covered by separate organizations.

“The change is positive,” says Torvard C. Laurent, professor emeritus at the University of Uppsala. “The new organization will to a large extent be run by scientists elected by the academic community,” he adds, noting that the former government had politicized the research agencies.

“The cooperation between the ministry and science is more relaxed now,” Nilsson agrees. He believes that the improved state of the economy has also given the present government greater room for manoeuvre.

The former research councils will survive as subunits of the council covering humanities and social sciences, medicine, and ‘natural and engineering sciences’. The difficulty will be in achieving a new organizational culture, says Brandström. “The new agencies need to be more proactive. Until now they have been reactive to applications coming from funding proposals.”

The agencies will be run by the ministry of education and science. But the ministry of industry will oversee the new national agency for research and development.

“It is a compromise,” says Brandström. “The ministry of education and science has one main body, industry the other.”