What we can learn from tracking research funding flows from North to South

Measuring the extent of research funding from the Global North to the Global South is complex and often overlooked beyond headline figures. Considering a new project to track global development research funding flows, this blog suggests how new evidence could provide valuable insights into key questions facing the international development sector.

A decade and a half into exploring research funding (its modalities, its effects on organised intellectual inquiry, and its aspirational link to socio-economic development) I keep circling back to the same persistent question:

Is the core issue whether research funding supports scientific enquiry (and hence, whether its structure is adequate), or how much funding is available (echoing the classic “big push” debates in development finance)?

Every researcher complains about funding cuts, but when it comes to systems that are structurally and chronically underfunded, prioritising and clarifying these questions becomes essential.

Where does research funding go and who uses it?

In a recent piece I asked a related and surprisingly difficult question, what is existing funding actually used for? Why do research donors seem to have no clear mandate to fund the kind of research they claim to want (transformative, impactful, transdisciplinary work) and everything that supports it? I am not the only one asking.

At the Global Development Network, where I coordinate the Doing Research initiative, we’ve been asking for over a decade who research funding is for—at the national level: which researchers, and which research? We consistently find that national ministries of science in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) often lack even basic information, let alone usable data, on who funds their own social sciences. In many cases, they don’t know how many social scientists are conducting research in (or on) their country.

Tracing flows of research funding

Turning to the question of how much research funding is deployed, as recently as last year, a team at the OECD’s Development Co-operation Directorate, which is also the Secretariat to the Assistance Committee (DAC), tried to track how much Official Development Assistance (ODA) is allocated to research for development. After all, a number of the OECD DAC sector codes (the standard for donors to report on their spending) relate to research (though it is unclear where social science research would fit).

They were discouraged by the figure they uncovered: in 2022, just 1% of bilateral aid from DAC countries went to R&D, and only 0.2% to research institutions—highlighting major gaps in data. That is after ODA for R&D decreased from USD 2.7 billion in 2018 to USD 1.7 billion in 2022 (over a third, in real terms). Seven DAC members provide most of the funding, and in this era of cutbacks, the sector’s reliance on a few donors raises concerns about both the lack of diversification and how other funders support or report on evidence. The issue is that research is embedded everywhere in development, so pervasive and essential that ironically, reporting standards are not particularly useful to track it.

Oxfam International developed a methodology to trace invisible, unreported funding flows in humanitarian emergencies, and for several years, I’ve been considering how to adapt this approach to make sense of research funding flows from North to South.

UKCDR and the Pandemic Sciences Institute have already shown that mapping global research funding—at least in relation to pandemics—is both feasible and worthwhile. A team at NUPI in Oslo and ACDI in Cape Town did something similar, focused on climate change research funding, and concluded that only ‘3.8% of global funding for climate-change research is spent on African topics’. But arguably, both teams had a more bounded task: mapping research funding within the research funding sector (basically, analysing research grants databases). Mapping research funding within the development sector is a more complex—and less coherent—undertaking. It is also more political.

Fig.1 reproduced from Christian Els’ 2017 work on mapping funding flows in the humanitarian sector, What would a graph such as this look like, if it focused on funding flows to Southern research?

Tracking funding to the Global South

A team at CLACSO and CWTS (Leiden University), funded by Canada’s IDRC, is currently working to answer that question. Their project aims to track global research funding flows with a focus on the Global South—shedding much needed light on entrenched inequalities and proposing fairer, more inclusive funding systems.

So perhaps it’s time to list the questions that might actually shift the balance.

Beyond the OECD’s team’s initial question—how much Northern funding goes to research—I would ask:

• How much research funding flows to the Global South?
• Does ODA research funding go to Northern institutions, or to Southern ones?
• Of the funding that reaches Southern researchers (including through North–South collaborations), whose questions is it meant to answer—those of donors or those of researchers, or those of societal actors? (Bonus question: what incentives do researchers face to co-construct questions with their stakeholders, as opposed to aligning with questions asked by their top peers?)
• How much of this funding is framed as research capacity building? That ratio, between research and research capacity building, could serve as a proxy for the level of trust donors place in Southern researchers to lead (many senior Southern researchers are frustrated about being included only thanks to capacity building funding). (My favourite bonus question: What do we even mean by “capacity building”? Where does the funding take researchers—physically, professionally, intellectually? How much of the funding goes to funding infrastructure, PhD scholarships, or simply the time of Southern researchers in North-South ‘partnerships’?)
• How much of this funding supports long-term research agendas versus short-term projects? There’s a difference between a meal and an orchard. Both are useful—even vital—but they serve very different purposes.

Can we change what we can’t measure?

Here’s the staggering part: this information exists. Every funding window has someone behind it, who could (in theory) answer these questions. Yet this information isn’t collected systematically, let alone aggregated, which means we can’t analyse it or make informed decisions about where to invest, how to improve funding delivery, or even how much additional funding is needed—and who should help raise it.

We may well be in a situation where, as I’ve argued elsewhere, international research funding is at best a neutral factor in domestic research ecosystems—and at worst, a distorting one, distracting researchers from their own questions and keeping the development of research systems and research networks in a limbo.

And the issue doesn’t stop at global or ODA-linked funding. To fully understand under what conditions research can meaningfully contribute to improving lives and capabilities, we must also examine the role of domestic public, private and philanthropic funding. This isn’t an obscure or self-referential debate. It’s a straightforward question of missing data—data that allows everyone to continue doing what they’ve long been doing, perhaps with reflexivity and compelling visions, but without any real way of knowing whether transformative change is possible.

So—why is this important? As Joseph Stiglitz noted in a 1999 paper, development is about ideas before it becomes about resources. And for ideas to flourish, for those ideas to be tested, to be refined and to be probed, we need research capacity—everywhere. That’s not a luxury. If we want to know where the next transformative piece of evidence will come from, we need to look at how—and whether—it will be funded.