Focus on France: Research policy takes centre stage in election race

Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal are making it a “priority” – and they are promising massive increases in public spending for science. But while both are also calling for structural reforms, they remain vague and cautious about the rhythm of such transformations.

So could research policy really decide the next French presidential election? You wouldn’t think so when the main socialist strategy seems to be to cast doubt on centre right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s democratic sentiments, or when a conservative ally of Sarkozy makes public statements about left candidate Ségolène Royal’s supposed attempts to avoid the country’s wealth tax.

But tactics is one thing. Candidates cannot avoid positioning themselves in France haunted by many books and reports about its decline. Various signs show that science and technology are truly high in the agendas of both candidates. During a visit at the new synchrotron at Orsay University, last week, Sarkozy has offered to make research “the budget priority” of the state. Meanwhile, in an editorial in the science magazine La Recherche to be published on 26 January Royal makes research a “strategic priority”.

Breaking new ground

Sylvie Inizan of Science and Techniques Observatory (OST), a public think tank evaluating French research, says French politics are breaking new ground by placing research policy as an object of debate in the presidential race. “It has to do with the realisation by French public opinion that the country’s research may be losing ground.”

After the shock caused by French researchers walking out on strike three years ago and the publication of various rankings showing French universities not even in the world’s top 100, public pride has been shaken enough for science policy to emerge as one of the key issues candidates trying to establish their profiles.

Against this background, the leading newspaper Le Monde recently published leaked extracts from a scathing report about French research economic performance by Inspection des Finances, the most powerful administrative body in France, and Inspection de l’Education Nationale (the education civil service inspectorate).

Despite being produced under the supervision of the general director of ANVAR-OSEO (the national agency in charge of assessing (“valorizing”) research, Henri Guillebeau, the report states that “despite the measures taken since the orientation law of innovation and research in 1999, research valorization has not progressed in France for the last fifteen years”.

Compared with the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan and Switzerland, France is worst in class on benchmarks such as the number of registered patents per millions of dollars spent on research or intellectual property revenues for a given amount of public research spending.

The old ways don’t work

To make the matter worse, it appears also that none of the classical ways of improving research economic performance has worked. For example, the value partnerships between public labs and private companies has actually fallen, when adjusted for inflation, from €512 million in 1992 to €509 million in 2004. When efficient, those partnerships are very concentrated: France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and engineering schools making 69% of the total, while they get only 40% of the research funding.

On the other hand, the state research agency CNRS accounts for only 24 per cent of the contracts while receiving 45 per cent of public money. According to this report, those results have nothing to do with any divide between fundamental and applied research because “the labs that [produce the highest value] are also those that publish the most”.

On the patent front, things are no better. Revenues from intellectual property cover only 1 per cent of public research spending, as against 3 per cent in the US and 5 per cent elsewhere in Europe.

The situation is a little bit better when it comes to new companies, with three times as many spin-off companies formed between 2000 and 2004 than during the mid 1990s. “But only 8.5 per cent of the surviving companies have more than a million euros revenues after four years,” says the report.

Beef up the budgets

In the face of all this, both Sarkozy and Royal’s first remedies appear classical: large increases in research budgets. The right-wing candidates want to increase public spending by 25 per cent or €4 billions over the next five years, while Royal promises to increase the public funding of research (currently €15 billion a year) by 10 per cent a year. Both champion underpaid and underequipped researchers – who are also voters.

But they differ on the way to achieve improvements. While Royal says that France is failing to reach the Lisbon target of research spending of 3 per cent of GDP, Pierre Lasbordes, the MP with Sarkozy’s UMP party in charge of science and technology, told Science|Business: “The state has done its part with more than 1 per cent of GDP devoted to R&D, the problem comes from the private companies that are not doing their share.”

So while both Royal and Sarkozy want to increase tax breaks for research, only Sarkozy seems ready to open the Pandora box of structural reform and say “No reform, no money”. Yet so far he has not revealed the reforms he wants. Lasbordes is ready to hint: “Nicolas Sarkozy has insisted on a financing by projects approach”.

Two years ago France, whose public system is based on the financing of large research organization such as CNRS, INSERM and INRIA, put most of its new public research money in the hands of the newly created Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), an agency that is financing project-oriented research. ANR already controls €800 million of the €15 billion of state research money, and its share is going to increase over years.

Too slow, too linked?

Some, like France Biotech president Philippe Pouletty, says the shift is too slow, and that the link with the ministry of research is too strong. For example Jacqueline Lecourtier, the director of the ANR, is the former director of the technology division at the ministry.

“But even the critics acknowledge now that ANR has been a considerable success,” says Inizan. “The long-term problem is that the new structure has not replaced the existing ones.” And many are saying that the grants agency is on a collision course with the other large public agencies. For example, agricultural research in France is conducted by at least three organizations – INRA, CEMAGREF and CIRAD – with work also done at CNRS laboratories. There is talk of the organisations consolidating – or even merging with universities, which in the French system are primarily concerned with education and only shelter researchers employed by state agencies. 

Who will grasp the nettle?

Will Sarkozy or Royal accelerate the logic already in place and start structural reforms? Pierre Lasbordes is quick to observe that “changes will be introduced slowly through new processes rather than quickly through big structural change”. For example, he hopes from some consolidation of the French system through the newly introduced RTRA (advanced research thematic network) and PRES (high education and research pole), which are asking various institutions to initiate projects where they can pool their resources. In other words, Sarkozy’s spokesperson for science and technology favours bottom-up reforms. It may explain why his boss is also encouraging universities to become more autonomous, “if they want to”.

Royal may be not that far apart on those issues. During her selection process by the Socialist Party she embraced competition even though it was one of Sarkozy’s achievements as finance minister. That is because she champions decentralization and local initiatives – which is why she may be also favour more autonomy for universities and encourage them to build ties with private companies.

Still, whoever is the next president of France, don’t expect a quick overhaul of the very sensitive research and universities system – a system that French politicians have lived in fear of since 1968.

But some people like Pouletty and his Strategic Council of Innovation (a lobby group assembling tech entrepreneurs and prominent scientist that triggers the ANR few years ago) want to accelerate change by introducing more competition. Before the election, they will be launching a new Paris Institute of Technology with a campus in Paris Biopark, on the east side of the French capital. Inspired by the American institutes of technology, the new campus is sure to make an impact in the political debate about France’s research future.