Car-free movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car-free_movement 

San Francisco Critical Mass in 2005

The car-free movement is a social movement centering the belief that large and/or high-speed motorized vehicles (cars, trucks, tractor units, motorcycles, etc.) are too dominant in modern life, particularly in urban areas such as cities and suburbs. It is a broad, informal, emergent network of individuals and organizations, including social activists, urban planners, transportation engineers, environmentalists and others. The goal of the movement is to establish places where motorized vehicle use is greatly reduced or eliminated, by converting road and parking space to other public uses and rebuilding compact urban environments where most destinations are within easy reach by other means, including walking, cycling, public transport, personal transporters, and mobility as a service.

Context

See also: Mobility transition

A quadracycle parked on a Canadian urban street between cars

Before the twentieth century, cities and towns were usually compact, containing narrow streets busy with human activity. In the early twentieth century, many of these settlements were adapted to accommodate the car with wider roads, more car parking spaces, and lower population densities, with space between urban buildings reserved for automotive use. Lower population densities caused urban sprawl with longer distances between locations. This also brought traffic congestion which made older transport methods unattractive or impractical, and created the conditions for more traffic and sprawl; the car system was "increasingly able to 'drive' out competitors, such as feet, bikes, buses and trains". This process led to changes in urban form and living patterns that offered little opportunity for people without a car.

Some governments have responded with policies and regulations aimed at reversing auto dependency by increasing urban densities, encouraging mixed use development and infill, reducing space allocated to private cars, increasing walkability, supporting cycling and other alternative vehicles similar in size and speed, and public transport. Globally, urban planning is evolving in an effort to increase public transport and non-motorized transport modal shares and shift away from private transport oriented development. Cities like Hong Kong developed a highly integrated public transportation system which effectively reduced the use of private transport. In contrast with private automotive travel, car sharing, where people can easily rent a car for a few hours rather than own one, is emerging as an increasingly important element for urban transportation.

Urban design

Passenger capacity of different transport modes

Road space requirements for different vehicle types

Proponents of the car-free movement focus on both sustainable and public transport (bus, tram, etc.) options and on urban design, zoning, school placement policies, urban agriculture, remote work options, and housing developments that create proximity or access so that long-distance transportation becomes less of a requirement of daily life.

New urbanism is an American urban design movement that arose in the early 1980s. Its goal has been to reform all aspects of real estate development and urban planning, from urban retrofits to suburban infill. New urbanist neighborhoods are designed to contain a diverse range of housing and jobs, and to be walkable. Other, more auto-oriented cities are also making incremental changes to provide transportation alternatives through Complete streets improvements.

World Squares for all is a scheme to remove much of the traffic from major squares in London, including Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square.

Car-free cities are, as the name implies, entire cities (or at least the inner parts thereof) which have been made entirely car-free.

Car-free zones are areas of a city or town where the use of cars is prohibited or greatly restricted.

To make the car-free zones/cities, (movable and/or stationary) bollards and other barriers are often used to deny car access.

Living streets and complete streets prioritize the needs of users of the street as a whole over those of car drivers. They are designed to be shared by pedestrians, playing children, bicyclists, and low-speed motor vehicles.

The ring road around Amsterdam (shown in red). At exits of ring roads such as this, distribution centers can be set up.

Distribution centers allow easy restocking of supermarkets, outlet stores, restaurants, and more in city centers. They rely on tractor units to unload their cargo in the suburban distribution center. The products are then placed in a small truck (sometimes electrically powered), cargo bike, or other vehicle to bridge the last mile to the destination in the city center. Besides offering advantages to the population (increased safety due to truck drivers having less blind spots, reduced noise pollution and traffic, reduced tailpipe emissions and reduced air pollution, and more), it also offers financial advantage for the companies, as tractor units require a lot of time to bridge this last mile (they lack agility and consume much fuel in congested streets).

The method above however still does not reduce car use inside non-car-free city centers (customers often use cars to fetch their groceries or appliances from city stores, since they have so much storage space). This problem is solved by means of online food ordering systems, which allow customers to order online, and then have it delivered to their doorstep by the supermarket or store itself, through bicycle couriers (using cargo bikes), electric delivery robots and delivery vans. Delivery vans allow to take along more cargo and deliver to several customers on a same trip. These food ordering systems could provide for a smooth transition for those cities that wish to become car-free as it can reduce both personal car use and personal car demand in cities.

At the outskirts of towns, between the exits of the rings roads, and the car-free zones in the city center themselves, additional car parking lots can be added, generally in the form of underground car parks (to avoid it taking up surface space). Careful placement of these car-parking lots is needed though, ensuring that they are made far enough from the city centers (and closer to the ring roads) to avoid them attracting more cars to the city center. In some instances, near these car parking lots, Park and ride public transport (i.e. bus) stops are foreseen, or bicycle-sharing systems are present.

Community bicycle programs provide bicycles within an urban environment for short term use. The first successful scheme was in the 1960s in Amsterdam and can now be found in many other cities with 20,000 bicycles introduced to Paris in 2007 in the Vélib' scheme. Dockless bike share systems have recently appeared in the United States and provide more convenience for people wanting to rent a bike for a short time period.

Advocacy groups

The Campaign for Better Transport (formerly known as Transport2000) was formed in 1972 in Britain to challenge proposed cuts in the British rail network and since then has promoted public transport.

Car Free Walks is a UK-based website encouraging walkers to use public transport to reach the start and end of walks, rather than using a car.

Activism groups

Road protests in the United Kingdom rose to prominence in the early 1990s in response to a major road building program both in urban communities and also rural areas.

Reclaim the Streets, a movement formed in 1991 in London, "invaded" major roads, highway or freeway to stage parties. While this may obstruct the regular users of these spaces such as car drivers and public bus riders, the philosophy of RTS is that it is vehicle traffic, not pedestrians, who are causing the obstruction, and that by occupying the road they are in fact opening up public space.

In Flanders, the organization Fietsersbond has called upon the government to ban tractor units in city centers.

Critical Mass rides emerged in 1992 in San Francisco where cyclists take to the streets en masse to dominate the traffic, using the slogan "we are traffic." The ride was founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists. The movement has grown to include events in major metropolitan cities around the world.

The World Naked Bike Ride was born in 2001 in Spain with the first naked bike rides, which then emerged as the WNBR in 2004 a concept which rapidly spread through collaborations with many different activist groups and individuals around the world to promote bicycle transportation, renewable energy, recreation, walkable communities, and environmentally responsible, sustainable living.

Parking Days started in 2005 when REBAR, a collaborative group of creators, designers and activists based in San Francisco, transformed a metered parking spot into a small park complete with turf, seating, and shade and by 2007 there were 180 parks in 27 cities around the world.

r/fuckcars is an anti-car subreddit with 440,000 members as of July 2024.

Official events

Jakarta Car Free Day

Car Free Days are official events with the common goal of taking a fair number of cars off the streets of a city or some target area or neighborhood for all or part of a day, in order to give the people who live and work there a chance to consider how their city might look and work with significantly fewer cars. The first events were organized in Reykjavík (Iceland), Bath (UK) and La Rochelle (France) in 1995. Jakarta, Indonesia is one such city that hosts weekly Car-Free days.

Ciclovía is a similar event in many cities that places a large emphasis on cycling as an alternative to auto travel. The event originated in Bogotá, Colombia in 1974. Now, Bogotá holds weekly ciclovías that turn the streets into giant car-free celebrations complete with stages set up in city parks with aerobics instructors, yoga teachers, and musicians leading people through various performances. The event has inspired similar celebrations globally.

In town, without my car! is an EU campaign and day every autumn (Northern Hemisphere) for an increased use of vehicles other than the car. It has since spread beyond the EU, and in 2004 more than 40 countries participated.

World Urbanism Day was founded in 1949 in Buenos Aires and is celebrated in more than 30 countries on four continents each November 8.

Towards Car-free Cities is the annual conference of the World Car-free Network and provides a focal point for diverse aspects of the emerging global car-free movement. The conference has been held in major cities around the world, including Portland, Oregon, United States in 2008 (its first time in North America), and has also been in Istanbul, Turkey; Bogota, Colombia; Budapest, Hungary; Berlin, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic; Timișoara, Romania; and Lyon, France. The conference series attempts to bridge the gap between many of the diverse people and organizations interested in reducing urban dependence on the automobile.

Transportation Alternatives' Annual Commuter Race pits a bicyclist against both a subway rider and a cab rider in a race from Queens to Manhattan. The Fifth Annual Commuter race took place in May 2009, where bicyclist Rachel Myers beat straphanger Dan Hendrick and cab rider Willie Thompson to make it the fifth year the contestant on the bicycle won. Myers took the 2009 title with a time of 20 minutes and 15 seconds to make the 4.2 mile trek from Sunnyside, Queens to Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Hendrick showed up 15 minutes later off the subway and Thompson arrived via cab nearly a half-hour after that. Transportation Alternatives is a group that "seeks to change New York City's transportation priorities to encourage and increase non-polluting, quiet, city-friendly travel and decrease—not ban—private car use. [They] seek a rational transportation system based on a 'Green Transportation Hierarchy,' which gives preference to modes of travel based on their benefits and costs to society. To achieve its goals, T.A. works in five areas: Bicycling, Walking and Traffic Calming, Car-Free Parks, Safe Streets and Sensible Transportation." The 2009 Commuter Race came on the heels of a Times Square traffic ban in NYC that drew national media attention.

Car-free development

Definitions and types

There are many areas of the world where people have always lived without cars, because no road access is possible, or none has been provided. In developed countries these include islands and some historic neighborhoods or settlements, the largest example being the canal city of Venice. The term carfree development implies a physical change – either new building or changes to an existing built area.

Melia et al. (2010) define car-free development as follows:

Car-free developments are residential or mixed use developments which:

• Normally provide a traffic-free immediate environment, and:
• Offer no parking or limited parking separated from the residence, and:
• Are designed to enable residents to live without owning a car.

This definition (which they distinguish from the more common "low car development") is based mainly on experience in Northwestern Europe, where the movement for car-free development began. Within this definition three types are identified:

• Vauban model
• Limited Access model
• Pedestrian zones with residential population

Vauban

Vauban, Freiburg, Germany is according to this definition, the largest car-free development in Europe, with over 5,000 residents. Whether it can be considered car-free is open to debate: many local people prefer the term "stellplatzfrei" – literally "free from parking spaces" to describe the traffic management system there. Vehicles are allowed down the residential streets at walking pace to pick up and deliver but not to park, although there are frequent infractions. Residents of the stellplatzfrei areas must sign an annual declaration stating whether they own a car or not. Car owners must purchase a place in one of the multi-storey car parks on the periphery, run by a council-owned company. The cost of these spaces – €17,500 in 2006, plus a monthly fee – acts as a disincentive to car ownership.

Limited access type

The more common form of car free development involves some sort of physical barrier, which prevents motor vehicles from penetrating into a car-free center. Melia et al. describe this as the "Limited Access" type. In some cases such as Stellwerk 60 in Cologne, there is a removable barrier, controlled by a residents' organizations. In others cases, such as in Waterwijk, vehicular access is only available from the exterior.

Pedestrian zones

Main article: Pedestrian zone

Whereas the first two models apply to newly built car free developments, most pedestrianized areas have been retro-fitted. Pedestrian zones may be considered car-free developments where they include a significant population and a low rate of vehicle ownership per household. The largest example in Europe is Groningen, Netherlands which had a city centre population of 16,500 in 2008.

Benefits and problems

Reduction in one's carbon footprint for various actions

Several studies have been done on European car free developments. The most comprehensive was conducted in 2000 by Jan Scheurer. Other more recent studies have been made of specific car-free areas such as Vienna's Floridsdorf car-free development.

The main benefits found for car free developments (summarized in Melia et al. 2010) found in the various studies are:

• very low levels of car use, resulting in much less traffic on surrounding roads
• high rates of walking and cycling
• more independent movement and active play amongst children
• less land taken for parking and roads – more available for green or social space

The main problems are related to parking management - if parking is not controlled in the surrounding area, there are often complaints from neighbors about overspill parking.

Funding of science

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science 

Research funding is a term generally covering any funding for scientific research, in the areas of natural science, technology, and social science. Different methods can be used to disburse funding, but the term often connotes funding obtained through a competitive process, in which potential research projects are evaluated and only the most promising receive funding. It is often measured via Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD).

Most research funding comes from two major sources: corporations (through research and development departments) and government (primarily carried out through universities and specialized government agencies; often known as research councils). A smaller amount of scientific research is funded by charitable foundations, especially in relation to developing cures for diseases such as cancer, malaria, and AIDS.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), more than 60% of research and development in scientific and technical fields is carried out by industry, and 20% and 10% respectively by universities and government. Comparatively, in countries with less GDP such as Portugal and Mexico, the industry contribution is significantly lower. The government funding proportion in certain industries is higher, and it dominates research in social science and humanities. In commercial research and development, all but the most research-oriented corporations focus more heavily on near-term commercialization possibilities rather than "blue-sky" ideas or technologies (such as nuclear fusion).

History

Conducting research requires funds. The funding trend for research has gone from a closed patronage system to which only few could contribute, to an open system with multiple funding possibilities.

In the early Zhou dynasty (-c. 6th century to 221 BCE), government officials used their resources to fund schools of thought of which they were patron. The bulk of their philosophies are still relevant, including Confucianism, Legalism and Taoism.

During the Mayan Empire (-c. 1200–1250), scientific research was funded for religious purposes. Research there developed a Venus Table, showing precise astronomical data about the position of Venus in the sky. In Cairo (-c. 1283), the Mamluk Sultan Qalawun funded a monumental hospital, patronizing the medical sciences over the religious sciences. Furthermore, Tycho Brahe was given an estate (-c. 1576 – 1580) by his royal patron King Frederik II, which was used to build Uraniborg, an early research institute.

The age of the academies

In 1700–1799, scientific academies became central creators of scientific knowledge. Funded by state sponsorship, academic societies were free to manage scientific developments. Membership was exclusive in terms of gender, race and class, but academies opened the world of research up beyond the traditional patronage system.

In 1799, Louis-Nicolas Robert patented the paper machine. When he quarreled over invention ownership, he sought financing from the Fourdrinier brothers. In 19th century Europe, businessmen financed the application of science to industry.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the pace of technological progress increased before and during the Industrial Revolution, most scientific and technological research was carried out by individual inventors using their own funds. A system of patents was developed to allow inventors a period of time (often twenty years) to commercialize their inventions and recoup a profit, although in practice many found this difficult.

The Manhattan Project (1942 – 1946) had cost $27 billion and employed 130,000 people, many of them scientists charged with producing the first nuclear weapons. In 1945, 70 scientists signed the Szilard petition, asking President Truman to make a demonstration of the power of the bomb before using it. Most of the signers lost their jobs in military research.

In the twentieth century, scientific and technological research became increasingly systematized, as corporations developed, and discovered that continuous investment in research and development could be a key element of competitive success. It remained the case, however, that imitation by competitors - circumventing or simply flouting patents, especially those registered abroad - was often just as successful a strategy for companies focused on innovation in matters of organization and production technique, or even in marketing.

In 2025, many funders make research outcomes transparent and accessible in data repositories or Open-access. Some researchers turn to crowdfunding in search of new projects to fund. Private and public foundations, governments, and others sponsor opportunities for researchers. As new funding sources become available, the research community grows and becomes accessible to a wider, and more diverse group of scientists.

Methodology to measure science funding

The guidelines for R&D data collections are laid down in the Frascati Manual published by the OECD. In the publication, R&D denotes three type of activity: basic research, applied research and experimental development. This definition does not cover innovation but it may feed into the innovative process. Business sector innovation has a dedicated OECD manual.  

The most frequently used measurement for R&D is Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD). GERD is often represented in GERD-to-GDP ratios, as it allows for easier comparisons between countries. The data collection for GERD is based on reporting by performers. GERD differentiates according to the funding sector (business, enterprise, government, higher education, private non-profit, rest of the world) and the sector of performance (all funding sectors with the exception of rest of the world as GERD only measures activity within the territory of a country). The two may coincide for example when government funds government performed R&D.

Government funded science also may be measured by the Government budget appropriations and outlays for R&D (GBAORD/ GBARD). GBARD is a funder-based method, it denotes what governments committed to R&D (even if final payment might be different). GERD-source of funding-government and GBARD are not directly comparable. On data collection, GERD is performer based, GBARD is funder. The level of government considered also differs: GERD may include spending by all levels of the government (federal – state – local), whereas GBARD excludes the local level and often lacks state level data. On geographic coverage, GERD takes into account performance within the territory of a country whereas GBARD also payments to the Rest of the world.

Comparisons on the effectiveness of both the different sources of funding and sectors of performance as well as their interplay have been made. The analysis often boils down to whether public and private finance show crowding-in or crowding-out patterns.

Funding types: public and private

Public/State Funding

Main article: Science policy

See also: Research council, United States national laboratories, and List of federally-funded research and development centers (US)

Public funding refers to activities financed by tax-payers money. This is primarily the case when the source of funds is channeled through government agencies. Higher education institutions are usually not completely publicly financed as they charge tuition fees and may receive funds from non-public sources.

Rationale for funding

R&D is a costly, and long-term investment to which disruptions are harmful.

The public sector has multiple reasons to fund science. The private sector is said to focus on the closer to the market stage of R&D policy, where appropriability hence private returns are high. Basic research is weak on appropriability and so remains risky and under-financed. Consequently, although governmental sponsorship of research may provide support across the R&D value chain, it is often characterized as a market failure induced intervention. Market incentives to invest in early-stage research are low. The theory of public goods seconds this argument. Publicly funded research often supports research fields where social rate of return may be higher than private rate of return. Appropriability potential is the potential for an entity to capture the value of an innovation or research outcome. The general free rider problem of public goods is a threat especially in case of global public goods such as climate change research, which may lower incentives to invest by both the private sector but also other governments.  

In endogenous growth theories, R&D contributes to growth. Some have depicted this relationship in the inverse, claiming that growth drives innovation. As of 2013, science workers applying their (tacit) knowledge may be considered an economic driver. When this knowledge and/or human capital emigrates, countries face the so-called brain–drain. Science policy can assist to avoid this as large shares of governmental R&D is spent on researchers and supporting staff personnel salaries. In this sense, science funding is not only discretionary spending but also has elements of entitlement spending.

R&D funded and especially performed by the State may allow greater influence over its direction. This is particularly important in the case of R&D contributing to public goods. However, the ability of governments have been criticized over whether they are best positioned to pick winners and losers. In the EU, dedicated safeguards have been enacted under a dedicated form of competition law called State Aid. State Aid safeguards business activities from governmental interventions. This invention was largely driven by the German ordoliberal school as to eliminate state subsidies advocated by the French dirigiste. Threats to global public goods has refueled the debate on the role of governments beyond a mere market failure fixer, the so-called mission-driven policies.

Funding modalities

Governments may fund science through different instruments such as: direct subsidies, tax credits, loans, financial instruments, regulatory measures, public procurement etc. While direct subsidies have been the prominent instrument to fund business R&D, since the 2008 financial crisis a shift has taken place in OECD countries in the direction of tax breaks. The explanation seems to lay in the theoretical argument that firms know better, and in the practical benefit of lower administrative burden of such schemes. Depending on the funding type, different modalities to distribute the research funds may be used. For regulatory measures, often the competition/antitrust authorities will rule on exemptions. In case of block funding the funds may be directly allocated to given institutions such as higher education institutions with relative autonomy over their use. For competitive grants, governments are often assisted by research councils to distribute the funds. Research councils are (usually public) bodies that provide research funding in the form of research grants or scholarships. These include arts councils and research councils for the funding of science.

List of research councils

An incomplete list of national and international pan-disciplinary public research councils:

Name	Location
National Scientific and Technical Research Council	Argentina
Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Australian Space Agency, Defence Science and Technology Group	Australia
Austrian Research Promotion Agency, Austrian Science Fund, Austrian Space Agency	Austria
Sciensano, Research Foundation - Flanders	Belgium
National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazilian Space Agency	Brazil
National Research Council, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canadian Space Agency, Defence Research and Development Canada, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Public Health Agency of Canada	Canada
National Commission for Scientific Research and Technology	Chile
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China National Space Administration	China
Czech Science Foundation, Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, Czech Space Office	Czech Republic
Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation	Denmark
European Research Council, European Defence Fund	European Union
Research Council of Finland, Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation	Finland
National Agency for Research, National Centre for Space Studies, French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, French National Centre for Scientific Research, French National Institute of Health and Medical Research	France
German Research Foundation, German Aerospace Center	Germany
National Hellenic Research Foundation	Greece
Icelandic Centre for Research	Iceland
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Council of Medical Research, Indian Space Research Organisation, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Defence Research and Development Organization	India
Irish Research Council, Science Foundation Ireland	Ireland
Israel Science Foundation, Israel Innovation Authority, Israel Space Agency	Israel
National Research Council, Italian Space Agency	Italy
National Research and Technology Council, Mexican Space Agency	Mexico
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Netherlands Space Office	Netherlands
Research Council of Norway, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Norwegian Space Agency	Norway
Pakistan Science Foundation, Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Pakistan Health Research Council, Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, Defence Science and Technology Organization	Pakistan
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology	Portugal
Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia	Serbia
Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Defence Science and Technology Agency	Singapore
National Research Foundation of South Africa	South Africa
Spanish National Research Council, State Research Agency, National Institute for Aerospace Technology, Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology, Spanish Space Agency, Carlos III Health Institute, Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research	Spain
National Research Council of Sri Lanka	Sri Lanka
Swedish Research Council, Swedish National Space Agency, Swedish Defence Research Agency	Sweden
Swiss National Science Foundation, Swiss Space Office	Switzerland
National Science and Technology Development Agency	Thailand
Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, Turkish Space Agency	Turkey
Uganda National Council for Science and Technology[29]	Uganda
National Research Foundation, United Arab Emirates Space Agency	United Arab Emirates
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Innovate UK, National Institute for Health and Care Research, Natural Environment Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Research England, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, UK Energy Research Centre, UK Space Agency, Advanced Research and Invention Agency	United Kingdom
National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, DOE Office of Science, Agricultural Research Service	United States

Conditionality

In addition to project deliverables, funders also increasingly introduce new eligibility requirements alongside traditional ones such as research integrity/ethics.

The 2016 Open Science movement, tied funding increasingly tied to data management plans and making data FAIR. The Open Science requirement complements Open Access mandates which in 2025 are widespread.

The gender dimension also gained ground in recent years. The European Commission mandates research applicants to adopt gender equality plans across their organization. The UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund mandates a gender equality statement.

As of 2022, the European Commission also introduced a "Do No Significant Harm" principle to the Framework Program which aims to curb the environmental footprint of scientific projects. "Do No Significant Harm" has been criticized as coupled with other eligibility requirements it is often characterized as red-tape. Since 2020, European Commission has been trying to simplify the Framework Program with limited success. Simplification attempts were also taken by the UK Research and Innovation.

Process

Often scientists apply for research funding which a granting agency may (or may not) approve to financially support. These grants require a lengthy process as the granting agency can inquire about the researcher(s)'s background, the facilities used, the equipment needed, the time involved, and the overall potential of the scientific outcome. The process of grant writing and grant proposing is a somewhat delicate process for both the grantor and the grantee: the grantors want to choose the research that best fits their scientific principles, and the individual grantees want to apply for research in which they have the best chances but also in which they can build a body of work towards future scientific endeavors.

As of 2009, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the United Kingdom devised an alternative method of fund-distribution: the sandpit.

Most universities have research administration offices to facilitate the interaction between the researcher and the granting agency. "Research administration is all about service—service to our faculty, to our academic units, to the institution, and to our sponsors. To be of service, we first have to know what our customers want and then determine whether or not we are meeting those needs and expectations."

In the United States of America, the National Council of University Research Administrators serves its members and advances the field of research administration through education and professional development programs, the sharing of knowledge and experience, and by fostering a professional, collegial, and respected community.

Hard money versus soft money

In academic contexts, hard money may refer to funding received from a government or other entity at regular intervals, thus providing a steady inflow of financial resources to the beneficiary. The antonym, soft money, refers to funding provided only through competitive research grants and the writing of grant proposals.

Hard money is usually issued by the government for the advancement of certain projects or for the benefit of specific agencies. Community healthcare, for instance, may be supported by the government by providing hard money. Since funds are disbursed regularly and continuously, the offices in charge of such projects are able to achieve their objectives more effectively than if they had been issued one-time grants.

Individual jobs at a research institute may be classified as "hard-money positions" or "soft-money positions"; the former are expected to provide job security because their funding is secure in the long term, whereas individual "soft-money" positions may come and go with fluctuations in the number of grants awarded to an institution.

Private funding: industrial/philanthropy/crowdfunding

See also: Private-equity fund

Private funding for research comes from philanthropists, crowd-funding, private companies, non-profit foundations, and professional organizations. Philanthropists and foundations have been pouring millions of dollars into a wide variety of scientific investigations, including basic research discovery, disease cures, particle physics, astronomy, marine science, and the environment. Privately funded research has been adept at identifying important and transformative areas of scientific research. Many large technology companies spend billions of dollars on research and development each year to gain an innovative advantage over their competitors, though only about 42% of this funding goes towards projects that are considered substantially new, or capable of yielding radical breakthroughs. New scientific start-up companies initially seek funding from crowd-funding organizations, venture capitalists, and angel investors, gathering preliminary results using rented facilities, but aim to eventually become self-sufficient.

Europe and the United States have both reiterated the need for further private funding within universities. The European Commission highlights the need for private funding via research in policy areas such the European Green Deal and Europe's role in the digital age.

Criticism of science funding

See also: Academic bias, Scholarly peer review § Criticism, and Criticism of science

The source of funding may introduce conscious or unconscious biases into a researcher's work.^[54] This is highly problematic due to academic freedom in case of universities and regulatory capture in case of government-funded R&D.

Conflict of Interest

See also: Conflicts of interest in academic publishing and Politicization of science

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest (COIs) is used by journals to guarantee credibility and transparency of the scientific process. Conflict of interest disclosure, however, is not systematically nor consistently dealt with by journals that publish scientific research results.

When research is funded by the same agency that can be expected to gain from a favorable outcome there is a potential for biased results and research shows that results are indeed more favorable than would be expected from a more objective view of the evidence.^[55] A 2003 systematic review studied the scope and impact of industry sponsorship in biomedical research. The researchers found financial relationships among industry, scientific investigators, and academic institutions widespread. Results showed a statistically significant association between industry sponsorship and pro-industry conclusions and concluded that "Conflicts of interest arising from these ties can influence biomedical research in important ways". A British study found that a majority of the members on national and food policy committees receive funding from food companies.

In an effort to cut costs, the pharmaceutical industry has turned to the use of private, nonacademic research groups (i.e., contract research organizations [CROs]) which can do the work for less money than academic investigators. In 2001 CROs came under criticism when the editors of 12 major scientific journals issued a joint editorial, published in each journal, on the control over clinical trials exerted by sponsors, particularly targeting the use of contracts which allow sponsors to review the studies prior to publication and withhold publication of any studies in which their product did poorly. They further criticized the trial methodology stating that researchers are frequently restricted from contributing to the trial design, accessing the raw data, and interpreting the results.

The Cochrane Collaboration, a worldwide group that aims to provide compiled scientific evidence to aid well informed health care decisions, conducts systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of health care interventions and tries to disseminate the results and conclusions derived from them. A few more recent reviews have also studied the results of non-randomized, observational studies. The systematic reviews are published in the Cochrane Library. A 2011 study done to disclose possible conflicts of interests in underlying research studies used for medical meta-analyses reviewed 29 meta-analyses and found that conflicts of interest in the studies underlying the meta-analyses were rarely disclosed. The 29 meta-analyses reviewed an aggregate of 509 randomized controlled trials. Of these, 318 trials reported funding sources with 219 (69%) industry funded. 132 of the 509 trials reported author disclosures of conflict of interest, with 91 studies (69%) disclosing industry financial ties with one or more authors. However, the information was seldom reflected in the meta-analyses. Only two (7%) reported funding sources and none reported author-industry ties. The authors concluded, "without acknowledgment of COI due to industry funding or author industry financial ties from RCTs included in meta-analyses, readers' understanding and appraisal of the evidence from the meta-analysis may be compromised."

In 2003 researchers looked at the association between authors' published positions on the safety and efficacy in assisting with weight loss of olestra, a fat substitute manufactured by the Procter & Gamble (P&G), and their financial relationships with the food and beverage industry. They found that supportive authors were significantly more likely than critical or neutral authors to have financial relationships with P&G and all authors disclosing an affiliation with P&G were supportive. The authors of the study concluded: "Because authors' published opinions were associated with their financial relationships, obtaining noncommercial funding may be more essential to maintaining objectivity than disclosing personal financial interests."

A 2005 study in the journal Nature surveyed 3247 US researchers who were all publicly funded (by the National Institutes of Health). Out of the scientists questioned, 15.5% admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies due to pressure of an external funding source.

Regulatory capture

Private funding also may be channeled to public funders. In 2022, a news story broke following the resignation of Eric Lander, former director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the Biden administration, that the charity of former Google executive Eric Schmidt, Schmidt Futures, paid the salary of a number employees of the OSTP. Ethics inquiries were initiated in the OSTP.

Efficiency of funding

See also: Economics of science and Economics of scientific knowledge

The traditional measurement for efficiency of funding are publication output, citation impact, number of patents, number of PhDs awarded etc. However, the use of journal impact factor has generated a publish-or-perish culture and a theoretical model has been established whose simulations imply that peer review and over-competitive research funding foster mainstream opinion to monopoly. Calls have been made to reform research assessment, most notably in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. The current system also has limitations to measure excellence in the Global South. Novel measurement systems such as the Research Quality Plus has been put forward to better emphasize local knowledge and contextualization in the evaluation of excellence. A wide range of interventions has been proposed to improve science funding. Open peer review can improve the quality of scholarly peer review. A systematic review found a scarcity of randomized controlled trials on peer review interventions.

Another question is how to allocate funds to different disciplines, institutions, or researchers. A recent study by Wayne Walsh found that "prestigious institutions had on average 65% higher grant application success rates and 50% larger award sizes, whereas less-prestigious institutions produced 65% more publications and had a 35% higher citation impact per dollar of funding."

Trends

Main article: List of countries by research and development spending

In endogenous growth theories R&D contributes to economic growth. Therefore, countries have strong incentives to maintain investments in R&D.

By country

Different countries spend vastly different amounts on research, in both absolute and relative terms. For instance, South Korea and Israel spend more than 4% of their GDP while many less developed countries spend less than 1%. In developed economies, GERD is financed mainly by the business sector, whereas the government and the university sector dominates in less-developed economies. In some countries, funding from the Rest of the World makes up 20-30% of total GERD, probably due to FDI and foreign aid, but only in Mali it is the main source of fund. Private non-profit is not the main source of fund in any countries, but it reaches 10% of total GERD in Columbia and Honduras.

When comparing annual GERD and GDP Growth, it can be seen that countries with lower GERD are often growing faster. However, as most of these countries are developing, their growth is probably driven by other factors of production. On the other hand, developed countries who have higher GERD also produce positive growth rates. GERD in these countries has a more substantial contribution to growth rate.

Country (and the EU)	GERD as % of the GDP in 2017	GDP Growth (annual %) in 2017	Main GERD source of fund	Targets
Israel	4,81	4,38	Business
Republic of Korea	4,29	3,16	Business	5% by 2017
USA	2,81	2,33	Business
European Union	2,15	2,8	Business	3% of EU GDP by 2030
China	2,11	6,95	Business	annual increase of 7% (2021- 2025)
Uruguay	0,48	1,63	Higher Education
Mali	0,29	5,31	Rest of the World
Armenia	0,22	7,5	Government
Iraq	0,04	-1,82	Government
Guatemala	0,02	4,63	Higher education

Recessions

In crisis, business R&D tends to act procyclically. As R&D is a long-term investments and so disruptions should be avoided. Keynesian countercyclical reactions were advocated for after the 2008 financial crisis, but this was difficult to achieve for some countries. Due to the nature of COVID-19, the pandemic accelerated publicly funded R&D spending in 2020, primarily into the pharmaceutical industry. A fall is expected in spending for 2021, although not below 2020 levels. The pandemic made health research and sectors with strategic value-chain dependencies the main target of science funding.

Back-to-the-land movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and local community than found in a conventional industrial or postindustrial way of life. Some of the motives behind such movements have included social reform, land reform, and civilian war efforts. Groups involved have included political reformers, counterculture hippies, and religious separatists.

History

The concept was popularized in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by activist Bolton Hall, who set up vacant lot farming in New York City and wrote many books on the subject; and by his follower Ralph Borsodi, who is known for his practical experiments in self-sufficient living during the 1920s and 1930s. The practice, however, was strong in Europe even before that time.

During World War II, when Great Britain faced a blockade by German U-boats, a "Dig for Victory" campaign urged civilians to fight food shortages by growing vegetables on any available patch of land.

Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, the USA had a revived back-to-the-land movement, with substantial numbers of people migrating from cities to rural areas.

The back-to-the-land movement has ideological links to distributism, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism.

Historical precedents

The American social commentator and poet Gary Snyder has related that the many back-to-the-land population movements throughout the centuries, and throughout the world, can be largely attributed to the occurrence of severe urban problems where people felt the need to live a better life or were otherwise simply trying to survive.

The historian and philosopher of urbanism Jane Jacobs remarked in an interview with Stewart Brand that with the Fall of Rome city dwellers re-inhabited the rural areas of the region.

From another point of departure, Yi-Fu Tuan takes a view that such trends have often been privileged and motivated by sentiment, who wrote in his book Topophilia (1974): "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place." Tuan writes that an appreciation of nature springs from wealth, privilege, and the antithetical values of cities. He argues that literature about land (and, subsequently, about going back to the land) is largely sentimental: "Little is known about the farmer's attitudes to nature..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in the Hellenistic, Roman, Augustan, and Romantic eras, as well as, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

North America

Regarding North America, many individuals and households have moved from urban or suburban circumstances to rural ones at different times; for instance, the economic theorist and land-based American experimenter Ralph Borsodi (author of Flight from the City) is said to have influenced thousands of urban-living people to try a modern homesteading life during the Great Depression.

In 1933, the New Deal town of Arthurdale, West Virginia, was built using the back-to-the-land ideas current at the time.

After World War II, interest in moving to rural land once again began to rise. In 1947, Betty MacDonald published what became a popular book, The Egg and I, telling her story of marrying and then moving to a small farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. This story was the basis of a successful comedy film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray.

The Canadian writer Farley Mowat says that many returned veterans after World War II sought a meaningful life far from the ignobility of modern warfare, regarding his own experience as typical of the pattern. In Canada, those who sought a life completely outside the cities, suburbs, and towns frequently moved into semi-wilderness environs.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the phenomenon of the rural relocation trend became sizable enough to be identified in the American demographic statistics.

The roots of this movement can perhaps be traced to some of Bradford Angier's books, such as At Home in the Woods (1951) and We Like it Wild (1963), Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took to the Woods (1942) and subsequent books, or perhaps even more compellingly to the publication of Helen and Scott Nearing's book, Living the Good Life (1954). This book chronicles the Nearings' move to an older house in a rural area of Vermont and their self-sufficient and simple lifestyle. In their initial move, the Nearings were driven by the circumstances of the Great Depression and influenced by earlier writers, particularly Henry David Thoreau. Their book was published six years after A Sand County Almanac, by the ecologist and environmental activist Aldo Leopold, was published in 1948. Influences aside, the Nearings had planned and worked hard, developing their homestead and life according to a twelve-point plan they had drafted.

The narrative of Phil Cousineau's documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future asserts that in the decades after World War II, "The world was forced to confront the dark shadow of science and industry... There was a clarion call for a return to a life of human scale." By the late 1960s, many people had recognized that, leaving their city or suburban lives, they completely lacked any familiarity with such basics of life as food sources (for instance, what a potato plant looks like, or the act of milking a cow)—and they felt out of touch with nature, in general. While the back-to-the-land movement was not strictly part of the counterculture of the 1960s, the two movements had some overlap in participation.

Many people were attracted to getting more in touch with the basics mentioned. Still, the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampant consumerism, the failings of government and society, including the Vietnam War, and a perceived general urban deterioration, including growing public concern about air and water pollution. Events such as the Watergate scandal and the 1973 energy crisis contributed to these views. Some people rejected the struggle and boredom of "moving up the company ladder." Paralleling the desire for reconnection with nature was a desire to reconnect with physical work. Farmer and author Gene Logsdon expressed the aim aptly as: "the kind of independence that defines success in terms of how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could buy."

One prominent segment within the movement included those who were familiar with rural life and farming, had skills, and wanted land of their own on which they could demonstrate that organic farming could be made practical and economically successful.

Besides the Nearings and other authors writing later along similar lines, another influence from the world of American publishing was the Whole Earth Catalogs. Stewart Brand and a circle of friends and family began the effort in 1968 because Brand believed that there was a groundswell of biologists, designers, engineers, sociologists, organic farmers, and social experimenters who wished to transform civilization along lines that might be called "sustainable". Brand and cohorts created a catalog of "tools"—defined broadly to include useful books, design aids, maps, gardening implements, carpentry and masonry tools, metalworking equipment, and more.

Another important publication was The Mother Earth News, a periodical (originally on newsprint) that was founded a couple years after the Catalog. Ultimately gaining a large circulation, the magazine was focused on how-to articles, personal stories of successful and budding homesteaders, interviews with key thinkers, and the like. The magazine stated its philosophy was based on returning to people a greater measure of control of their own lives.

Many of the North American back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s used the Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalog series, and derivative publications. As time went on, however, the movement drew more people into it, more or less independently of any impetus from the publishing world.

Antireductionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antireductionism 

Antireductionism is the position in science and metaphysics that stands in contrast to reductionism (anti-holism) by advocating that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions.

General concepts

The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole. One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail. The other kind of antireductionism (ontological) holds that such a complete explanation in terms of basic constituents is not possible even in principle for some systems. Robert Laughlin, e.g. supports this view. Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.

Although breaking complex phenomena into parts is a key method in science, there are those complex phenomena (e.g. in physics, psychology, sociology, ecology) where the approach does not work. Antireductionism also arises in academic fields such as history, economics, anthropology, medicine, and biology as attempts to explain complex phenomena using reductionist models do not provide satisfactory insight.

Specific views

An example of antireductionism in psychology is Donald Davidson's proposed ontology of what he calls 'events' and its use "to provide an antireductionist answer to the mind/matter debate ...[and to show that]...the impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between...the mental and the physical".

Karl Popper was a famous proponent of antireductionism. In his essay Of clouds and clocks, Popper classified phenomena into two types: "clock" phenomena with a mechanical basis and "cloud" phenomena which are indivisible and depend upon emergence for explanation.

For example, Popper thought that a materialist explanation of consciousness is not possible. The view of reductionists about consciousness is explained by Max Velmans:

Most reductionists accept that consciousness seems to be different from brain states (or functions) but claim that science will discover it to be nothing more than a state or function of the brain. In short, they mostly accept that brains states and conscious states are conceivably different, but deny that they are actually different (in the universe we happen to inhabit).

Velmans himself is not in agreement with this reductionist stance. Opposition to this mind = brain reductionism is found in many authors. An often mentioned issue is that science cannot explain the hard problem of consciousness, the subjective feelings called qualia. Another objection, whose explicit formulation is due to the physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is that science is not a self-contained entity, because the theories it uses are creations of the human mind, not inevitable results of experiment and observation, and the criteria for adoption of a particular theory are not definitive in selecting between alternatives, but require subjective input. Even the claim that science is based upon testability of its theories has been met with qualifications.

According to Alexander Rosenberg and David Kaplan, the conflict between physicalism and antireductionism can be resolved, that "both reductionists and antireductionists accept that given our cognitive interests and limitations, non-molecular explanations may not be improved, corrected or grounded in molecular ones". However, others find that the conflict between reductionism and antireductionism is "one of the central problems in the philosophy of psychology...an updated version of the old mind-body problem: how levels of theories in the behavioral and brain sciences relate to one another. Many contemporary philosophers of mind believe that cognitive-psychological theories are not reducible to neurological theories...most nonreductive physicalists prefer the idea of a one-way dependence of the mental on the physical."