The fifth monitoring report on SSH integration in H2020 shows that despite a quantitative increase more efforts with respect to quality are needed.
At the beginning of the year, the European Commission (EC) published the fifth edition of its regular report on ‘Integration of Social Science and Humanities (SSH) in Horizon 2020’ covering topics and projects in 2018. The fourth report was published two years ago in early 2019 (see SwissCore article). Like in 2019, the new report shows that substantial quantitative progress has been made with respect to SSH integration; however, it also indicates that more efforts are needed to increase the quality of integration.
The report examined several dimensions to monitor developments. It was looking at the budget going to SSH partners, qualitative aspects, the performance of disciplines and sectors involved, as well as the representation of different countries and their roles in projects. Over the years, the scope of the report has also been extended to cover more parts of Horizon 2020 including the European Research Council (ERC), Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, and Research Infrastructures. New in this year’s edition is the coverage of the topical ‘Science with and for Society’ part of the programme.
In summary, the report provides six key findings: The quality of SSH integration has improved and 65% of projects with SSH have reached the quality threshold. Together with the increase in high quality projects, also the number of projects failing to meet quality criteria has decreased (11% of projects). The number of SSH-flagged topics has increased from 113 to 130 and with them; also the total number of projects funded under these flagged topics has increased. The amount of budget spent on projects with SSH integration has grown from €1.2 bn to €1.9 bn and along with this the amount of funding given to the SSH partners themselves has increased by 50% from €272 million to €415 million. Overall, the proportion of H2020 projects overall with SSH partners, the partners’ involvements and budget share has remained similar to previous years.
In conclusion, the EC considers the findings of the report encouraging. The monitoring data indicates strengthening of SSH integration. However, the levels of integration remain patchy and differ between programme parts as does the representation of different SSH disciplines. The strongest present disciplines are economics, political sciences and public administration, while history, anthropology as well as humanities and the arts figure at the bottom of the ranking. The EC thus calls for a sustained effort to encourage SSH integration. The topics also remain of concern for the new framework programme Horizon Europe, which makes SSH integration a programme principle and will dedicate a section of its strategic plan to the issue. SSH is considered a key constituent of research and innovation especially regarding the twin green and digital transitions, which include societal aspects. The EC says that SSH should be integrated from the drafting of the topic up to the selection and evaluation of projects by evaluators with demonstrable SSH expertise.