Brussels, March, 7th
Dear Commissioner,
The European Association of Sociology (EAS), the European Confederation of
Political Science Associations (ECPSA), the European Educational Research
Association (EERA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and
the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC) have
welcomed your intention to improve the position of the Social Sciences and
Humanities (SSH), as you have stated on several occasions since the British
Academy meeting in November 2011.
Considering your clearly expressed political intent to support SSH, in line with the
European Parliament and the Member States, we wish to express our strong concern
about the implementation of H2020:
- The first available 2014-2015 work programs indicate that the share of SSH
research in SC6 has diminished dramatically. Extrapolated to the whole Horizon
2020 period, the core SSH program in SC6 will be funded up to the amount of
300 Million Euros. This is less than half of the FP7 budget for SSH (625 Million
Euros) and far removed from what has been claimed on many occasions prior to
this. It is now also evident that the main share of the SSH Challenge has been
allocated to other priorities: a third of the budget of SC6 has been given to DG
CNECT, which already gets more than 7 billion Euros under Priority 2 and from
other budgets elsewhere in various Societal Challenges, and a further third of
the budget is allocated to “innovation research”. Such budgetary decisions are in
complete contradiction to the proposals for the Specific Programme of H2020,
which allows for large research activity for SSH in SC6 in support of several key
policy areas developed in particular by DG EMPL, EAC, ECFIN, HOME, JUST,
DEVCO, BEPA, ENV and EEAS.
- According to the call for proposals, the « mainstreaming policy » of SSH in other
challenges, which was presented as an important complement to the specific
challenge, rarely pertains directly to research in SSH. Instead the calls have a
narrow utilitarian approach to SSH and fail to mobilise the breadth of relevant
SSH research for societal challenges. The selection of experts similarly fails to
draw the breath of relevant SSH expertise.
We hope that we are mistaken. We therefore ask for a meeting with you urgently in
order to get some clarification from you regarding the situation detailed above and
so that SSH core research in SC6 can be granted the key position that was agreed
upon by the European Parliament and the Council.
Yours sincerely,
Carmen Leccardi
President of ESA
Pablo Oñate
President of ECPSA
Lejf Moos
President of EERA
Noel B. Salazar
President of EASA
Poul Holm
President of ECHIC
Answer to: carmen.leccardi@unimib.it , pablo.onate@uc3m.es , moos@dpu.dk ,
noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be ; holmp@tcd.ie
This letter was Cc’ed to:
- Members of Parliament
- Members of the Programme Committee for Challenge 6 (H2020)
- Media in member states: La Repubblica, El Pais, Libération, Der Spiegel, The
Times
