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Abstract
Competitive funding is one of several instruments to fund research. Competitive grants are increasingly being used in developing countries, especially Latin America, to fund research on agriculture and natural resources. Policymakers and donors see competitive funding mechanisms as effective tools to redirect priorities, lower research costs, and strengthen the participation of universities, foundations, and other nonpublic and private-sector research organizations. Research managers, in turn, see competitive grants as an additional source of income, especially of scarce operating funds, and as devices to develop joint ventures with other public- and private-sector research organizations. However, information on when the use of competitive funding is most appropriate, the complementarity of this type of funding to more traditional institutional funding mechanisms, and the development of benchmarks to measure its performance are still lacking. This paper intends to fill this gap by highlighting the potential advantages and disadvantages of competitive funding and by proposing guidelines to improve the performance of competitive grants. When competitive funding complements institutional funding, it has the potential to improve research performance. This paper describes the ways in which this can happen. This paper is the result of cooperation between ISNAR and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); a Spanish version will be published as an IDB working paper in 1999. Ruben G. Echeverría works in the Sustainable Development Department of the IDB, Washington, DC, USA. The interpretations and conclusions of the paper are those of the author and should not be attributed to the IDB or to ISNAR. Comments from Gary Alex, Julio Berdegue, Derek Byerlee, Diana Carney, Michael Collins, Howard Elliott, Cesar Falconi, Willem Janssen, George Norton, Paul Perrault, Lucio Reca, Han Roseboom, Carlos Seré, Kathleen Sheridan, Helio Tollini, and Eduardo Trigo are greatly appreciated. The useful suggestions of Howard Elliott in the preparation of the final draft are acknowledged.