Topics of social relevance in research project funding instruments: evidences from European countries

The paper wants to investigate, using existing recent data collected at European level on government R&D funding, the characteristics of project funding instruments managed by the Research Funding Organizations (RFOs) in different European countries to understand how far they are oriented toward addressing problems of social relevance. The research questions are: how project funding instruments are characterised? How far instruments address topics of social relevance? We assume that differences between instruments portfolios are mainly related to their aims and objectives and to the criteria used in the selection processes. Instruments with targeted objectives toward topics of social relevance may be implemented in a way that lessen the relevance of the objectives when the selection is driven by criteria that do not score high the social relevance.