5. Conclusion
International cooperation in research and development is an important activity
to the U.S. government: Billions of dollars are spent on a rich and varied set
of interactions every year. The nature of the activity--diverse locations,
variety of topics, multiple goals--makes it difficult to track spending, assess
the benefits, and ultimately defend the activity to Congress and the American
public. Moreover, the disconnection between agreements signed at the executive
level of government and the actual commitment of funds to collaborative
research makes it difficult to know what the United States has promised to fund
and what ICRD is actually being conducted. Finally, the dearth of
well-developed measures for ongoing research complicates efforts to describe
the benefits of these activities. This chapter discusses the positive and
negative implications of this disconnection and briefly describes possible
approaches to improving government's ability to track ICRD spending and assess
benefits.
The ability to describe the benefits of ICRD to the American public and its
congressional representatives is particularly important given the opinion of
some that international cooperation provides aid to foreigners at the expense
of U.S. science, or that the interests of "good science" are subjugated to
political interests. To test or refute this assertion, an effort must be made
to describe actual, ongoing R&D activities and measure the benefits of
these activities. The inventory of actual ICRD spending conducted for this
study found a rich and varied amount of ICRD taking place across many agencies.
Also, the case study suggests that the United States may be receiving
significant benefits from this type of activity.
In the course of examining actual ICRD activities, we found little to support
the idea that ICRD is primarily another form of "foreign aid." Quite the
contrary, we learned that ICRD is primarily aimed at fulfilling the mission of
the sponsoring agency, not to fulfill an international agreement. U.S.
government agencies tend to guard their R&D funds jealously: Program
managers do not spend dollars for the sake of political expediency. Given that
most R&D spending decisions are made at the program level, and to the
extent that ICRD is a part of that, this suggests that U.S. government funding
for ICRD, on average (and perhaps better than average), is funding good
science. Moreover, nothing in our research indicates that the interests of
science and the interests of politics are in conflict. Certainly, federal
agencies conduct ICRD to achieve multiple agendas, among them, scientific
opportunity, technical efficiency, and strategic benefit. ICRD serves all
three goals:
- Government grant-making activity funds scientific researchers seeking to gain
access to an important global or foreign scientific resource or to collaborate
with a leading foreign researcher.
- Government improves technical efficiency by cooperating with other countries
on projects in which each country produces a piece of a larger system and
cooperates in its final production.
- The government works with other countries to contain nuclear waste, to reduce
pollution, to alleviate suffering and the spread of infectious disease, in a
way that serves strategic and political needs.
Some ICRD provides only indirect or long-term benefits to the U.S. taxpayer;
even in these cases, cooperation enhances the U.S. science base by increasing
scientific knowledge and access to resources and data. The case study on
earthquake sciences and seismology examined a number of projects that had only
indirect benefit to U.S. citizens. However, the United States is leveraging
foreign research dollars and greatly increasing new knowledge created about
earthquakes. This benefit will eventually accrue to citizens in enhanced
disaster preparedness. Another example might be efforts by AID to contain
infectious disease in Africa. U.S. citizens benefit only indirectly from this
activity, but U.S. researchers learn a great deal about the etiology of
infectious disease in ways that will benefit the United States.
Failure to follow through on ISTAs signed between the United States and other
countries paradoxically provides evidence of the relative absence of conflict
between scientific opportunity and political goals. If an agency does not see
scientific advantage to cooperating with another country, that agency often
does not follow through on an executive-level government-to-government
agreement to fund research. Most agencies report that scientific or
technological opportunity determines whether a project will be funded, not
whether it is required by an international agreement. Many agencies report
that an umbrella agreement to cooperate with another country in a specific area
of science would play only a minor role in the decision to fund research.
Indeed, government officials report that agency-level agreements, rather than
"umbrella" or framework agreements, often result from joint identification of
an opportunity for mutual benefit. While these projects are not always
implemented--research is risky, after all--agency-based agreements may be an
indicator of scientific opportunity in many cases.
While the government currently maintains hundreds of agreements to conduct
ICRD, not all scientific cooperation takes place under a
government-to-government agreement. Some agencies keep careful track of what
activities fall under which agreements, but not all agencies limit projects to
those that have signed agreements. Moreover, contractors and grantees, being
several steps removed from the government's diplomatic concerns, are sometimes
unaware that they are working under a bilateral or multilateral S&T
agreement. For cases in which intellectual property is created or trade or
other disputes arise, ignorance about the regulations governing ownership,
licensing, and royalties can have significant implications for where the
intellectual property is commercialized. Moreover, for cases in which
additional or new activities are being negotiated, it would be helpful to
decisionmakers to have a map of where existing activities are occurring.
It may be useful to policymakers and agency officials to set a baseline to
determine which R&D activities take place under ISTAs, and which take place
outside them. Then, as agencies fund additional activities or sign new ISTAs,
they could report this information on a Web page or other electronic
repository. Given the advances in computer networking, this type of data
collection should be relatively easy. These data would be very useful to U.S.
and foreign researchers looking for opportunities to cooperate with others.
Continually refining our understanding of how best to measure ICRD will help to
improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these activities. In addition,
asking researchers and program managers how they would assess the effectiveness
of ICRD activities would provide useful input to the process of collecting data
and assessing progress.
To better track ICRD, link it to ISTAs, and measure benefits, improved data
creation and tracking are needed. Data are available to assess the benefits of
ICRD. Collected efficiently, placed in proper context, and combined with
qualitative testimony, these data can provide usable information to help
decisionmakers track benefits and compare the returns on one activity against
others. The framework suggested in this report provides a way to select
measures and organize the data to streamline the assessment of and perhaps
ultimately defend international R&D cooperation.
Improved data, provided in a timely way, would greatly enhance the ability of
program managers and policymakers to monitor ICRD. The relevance and
availability of the measures suggested in this study should be improved and
additional ones should be developed. In the process, priority should be given
to less intrusive measures, such as bibliometric publication and citation data
and milestones, so that measurement does not unduly influence the choices
researchers make when conducting ICRD projects. Given that these unobtrusive
measures are scarce, additional research and development is needed to refine
indicators and to suggest the best methods for collecting and aggregating
measures.
Program managers and policymakers may wish to work at the agency level to
develop a system of "signposts" that report on outputs and that track the
relevance of those outputs to the scientific and technical community. This
could include periodic reports on the excellence of ICRD taking place in a
particular field. Bibliometric tools can count the number of jointly authored
publications relative to U.S.-authored papers and the relative frequency of
citations of jointly authored publications. Government agencies such as the
DoC National Technical Information Service and government contractors such as
Scientific Citations, Inc. could be tasked to refine measures of the outputs of
ICRD, to craft signposts of progress, and to make these data more consistently
available to government offices.
Two additional actions could improve ICRD data and, thereby, government
monitoring. First, agencies should add a request for measures to international
project plans. Many agencies are already developing these measures and
collecting these data in response to GPRA and other government accountability
practices, but the measures collected at the agency level will not aggregate to
the interagency level. A request to periodically provide these measures to the
NSTC could help to create the data for interagency comparisons. Second,
periodic review or continual data monitoring of international science and
technology agreements should be requested. This data can be collected by the
agencies, or by a technical agency such as the National Technical Information
Service. The data can be aggregated at the NSTC level to provide feedback on
the extent to which ISTAs are reaching their stated goals.
Information about the benefits of ICRD accruing to the United States would
provide input to agency and NSTC-level funding decisions. However, a method
needs to be developed to track ICRD spending over time. This study examined
only one fiscal year, 1995, of government ICRD spending, and the data
collection and analysis process were labor intensive. Providing a monitoring
capability of ICRD year-to-year would require one of the following:
- The easiest approach would be to collect yearly R&D data on
ICRD-intensive programs. Analysts would be able to take a percentage of
spending (say 4.5 percent, to track with RAND's finding of ICRD's 4.5 percent
of all R&D spending) as representative of ICRD spending. The summary table
in Appendix A contains a list of relevant bureaus. The outlines in Appendix B
list the relevant programs. Such an approach would provide an approximate
figure of ICRD activities, but it may miss significant changes and subtle
shifts that take place from year to year. Moreover, it would not allow the
cross-agency comparisons that provide input to the assessment framework.
- A second option would be to reproduce every few years a cross-cutting
inventory like this one. This approach would provide useful snapshots of
activities and a trend analysis, but it would not provide data to allow
decisionmakers to track activity and make key interventions in programs that
are showing significant promise or are lagging expectations.
- A third and more time-consuming, but ultimately more comprehensive, approach
would be to ask agencies to "tag" ICRD activities for the purposes of budgeting
and reporting. This would allow tracking over time, would show trends, and
would allow analysts, program managers, and policymakers to aggregate the data
for the purposes of cross-cutting analysis. A tagging system could also
provide a way for agencies to identify which activities take place under
international science and technology agreements, and within this category,
which of these activities may produce scientific results or intellectual
property of commercial value.
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