Mergers between universities and governmental research organizations in the Netherlands and Denmark. Institutional platforms for agricultural transformations

Research on research policy is often characterized by heavily normative notions of development and progress, as in contemporary discourse about societal challenges and sustainability transformations. When these normative concepts are simultaneously used as descriptive terminology for empirical changes in society, they become problematic for social science. This paper explores how insights from historical institutionalism can be applied to achieve a stricter separation between the analysis of institutional change and contemporary policy discourse. The material for this study are two contrasting cases of merger reforms of public sector research institutes with universities. In the Netherlands, the former governmental Agricultural Research Service was merged with Wageningen University in 1997-1998. In Denmark, several former governmental research institutes were merged with Aarhus University and Technical University of Denmark in 2007. The reforms exemplify changing conceptions of societal impact of research. The information on each case is taken from prior literature and analyzed in a historical institutionalist comparative framework. In particular, the concept of “political development”, defined by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek as “enduring shifts in government authority” is applied to define the observable event of change in each case. It is then analyzed how these reforms were politically achieved (“intercurrence of political institutions”), what were the respective policy objectives and how they were framed (“policy discourse”), to what extent they resulted in continuity or discontinuity of governmental research (“institutional change”), and what were institutional implications for later research policies in each case (“institutional platform for political action”). The paper aims to show how a more temporal, developmental understanding of institutions in real-world polities could help us to reflect better about relevant institutional change from the perspective of particular policy objectives.