SPARC Handbook

In FY 2008 the US federal government spent almost $150 billion on research and development. What gets done with that enormous sum has important implications for the wide variety of problems facing our society today and in the years to come. Efforts to address challenges like national defense, environmental change, rapid urbanization, and public health rely on scientific knowledge to inform important decisions about how to deal with key aspects of these challenges. How can science funders effectively orient a vast research enterprise to make real progress toward desired social goals?

This guide will be about the challenge of producing usable science – science that meets the changing needs of decision makers. Producing usable science requires smart choices about the support for and management of science.

As anyone involved with federal research and development (R&D) knows, making choices about what science to do, and how to do it, is complicated. No single person or organization decides how to allocate resources to various domains of science, and there is no single set of criteria for determining the best course of action. We cannot offer a simple explanation of how to navigate the complex politics of this process. However, the findings from our five-year, National Science Foundation-supported research program suggest some useful approaches to thinking about science management and science funding. We have condensed them in this short guide, along with some specific examples from across the federal government, in the hopes that readers may expand their thinking about scientific choice.

Our research has focused on the problem of reconciling the needs of potential science users (“demand”) with the “supply” of scientific information. Through interviews, workshops, and analyses, we have examined the interactions between these two “sides” of the equation, and the ways in which people seek to reconcile them with varying degrees of success. The results have implications for the practice of science, and for the management of science programs by federal agencies and other actors. The following pages deal with both of these overlapping domains, but the target audience is program managers and the range of others involved with managing the process of scientific choice.

The entire SPARC Handbook will be availble soon.