EAGER: International Type II: Classifying the Causes, Consequences, and Lessons of Resilience Within International Scientific Collaboration

Part I: Nontechnical description

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear both the importance of international scientific collaboration and its fragility. Given the observed disruption to international scientific teams and collaborative efforts, as well as the risk of future potential disruptions, there is a critical need to understand how to build international scientific collaborations that are resilient and sustainable in the face of disruption.

This project addresses the following questions: what are the characteristics of international teams that influence long-term collaboration? How do such characteristics allow teams engaging within international scientific exchange to recover from disruption to their collaborative efforts, while other characteristics tend to contribute to strain and even failure? To answer such questions, this project aims to create a comparative methodology that will allow us to understand, gauge, and contribute to improving future international scientific collaboration. Analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international scientific collaborations will drive our understanding of i) the potential benefits of international scientific collaboration and how they are realized, ii) the barriers to continued collaboration in the event of systemic disruption, iii) the reasons why some collaborations are more resilient than others, and iv) the ways in which risks to collaboration can be mitigated.

To answer these questions, the investigators will develop and test a method that uses i) publicly available quantitative and qualitative data on international research funding, administration, and use and ii) original interviews with key informants selected for their expertise in analysis of scientific network sustainability and resiliency. Using this information, we will compare international scientific collaboration in polities chosen for their different positions in world science and different policy approaches to scientific collaboration.

The findings from this method will be useful on two levels: to gain informants' understanding of scientific collaboration and resilience; and to gain an understanding of different governmental and policy approaches from comparing the frameworks, policies, and ideas that are enunciated in different systems. Results from this effort will provide international scientific engagements and teams with a critical foundation to develop and enhance their resilience against current and future disruptions - ensuring that international engagement and scientific innovation shall continue despite any aberration in how such teams and organizations interact, collaborate, and pursue cutting-edge scientific ideas in various fields.


Part II: Technical description
This project aims to develop a scientifically robust methodology to comparatively evaluate international scientific relationships and their resilience in the face of global crises. Anecdotally, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the dynamics of international scientific collaboration, challenging collaboration in many ways while demonstrating its value in addressing shared problems. But the resilience of international scientific engagement is under-researched at present, and there is urgent need to develop resilience structures and practices to prevent permanent disruption.
To develop a scientific and policy approach focused on the resilience of international collaborative teams, this project will generate qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with a purposeful, stratified sample of research funders, administrators and researchers in selected countries. A review of publicly available policy documentation, laws, research outputs and funding amounts will supplement the interview data. An Expert Advisory Group of senior scientists drawn from selected countries (UK, Singapore, EU) will advise the team in identifying and constructing the initial stratified sample of interviewees. The interview data, review of publicly available data, and advice from the Expert Advisory Group will be used by the investigators to identify both qualitative lessons and quantitative metrics relating to the resilience of international research collaborations.
This method would develop knowledge in two ways. First, by having interviewees in science policy discuss their operative theories of resilient collaboration, the lessons they drew from the disruption of COVID-19, and how to build resilient international collaboration, we would bring the practical expertise and theories of experts into the discussion of resilience. Second, by taking an explicitly mixed methods, comparative approach to a diverse sample of science policy systems, we can develop a framework for comparing different science policy approaches to collaboration and their effects on resilience.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.