The EU commissioner for research Carlos Moedas has called on member states to raise their commitment to joint programming, despite evidence of ongoing problems with pooling research spending.
Speaking at a conference in Lund on 4 December, Moedas said that member states must “generate new momentum” for tackling grand challenges by “giving joint programming political commitment”. Joint programming was introduced in 2008 as a way for national governments to align spending across ten fields of research, including neurodegenerative diseases and antimicrobial resistance.
Despite progress, joint programming has not yet achieved sufficient results in combining research efforts across Europe, the conference heard. “The problem with Europe is that everyone still wants to do it his or her way, which is not leading to the outcomes we would like to see,” the Commission director-general for research, Robert-Jan Smits, told the event.
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