On Friday, December 8, the Ministry of Science and Education signed the first 14 program contracts with public scientific institutes and public polytechnics, including the Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health.
The program contract is a new instrument for public funding of scientific institutions, covering 100% of their budgets (including all costs, such as employee salaries and potential new hires), enabling institutions to independently manage scientific activities in line with national strategic goals and based on results.
The program contract establishes a four-year total funding for public scientific institutes from the state budget, consisting of basic, developmental, and performance budget components in accordance with the new Law on Higher Education and Scientific Activity.
The program contract allows public scientific institutes and higher education institutions to set their own goals and the means to achieve them, through linked investments from the state budget and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The funding criteria for the program contract are based on national strategic guidelines and directly depend on the results and quality of scientific work.
Institutes and polytechnics independently selected ten or more specific goals and related activities to achieve these goals over the four-year period from a catalog of goals prepared by the Ministry.
In the program contracts, after negotiations, the Ministry agreed on four-year funding of activities that contribute to achieving the agreed goals, and their implementation and the achievement of the set success indicators will be monitored with the help of independent experts.
This marks a significant step in the reform from the National Recovery and Resilience Program, “Reform and Strengthening of the Public Scientific Research Sector’s Capacity for Research and Development,” overseen by the Ministry of Science and Education.
The main goal of the reform is to increase the quality and international visibility of the public scientific sector, strengthen targeted research, and enhance the impact of science on the development of innovations, the economy, and society. The reform includes:
- Introducing a new model of program agreements for funding the public scientific research system, which was implemented by passing the new Law on Higher Education and Science and the Regulation on Program Financing of Public Higher Education Institutions and Public Scientific Institutes in the Republic of Croatia in 2022 and 2023.
- Increasing the budget of scientific institutions for more impactful research, achieved through an additional investment in budgets from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan for research projects (more than EUR 19 million for the 14 institutions with which the program contract was signed).
- Improving the quality of scientific research work by encouraging a transition to a results-based funding system, given that the program contract includes defined four-year goals and performance indicators on which the total amount from the state budget depends.
By signing the program contracts, a complete legal and financial framework for institutional funding of scientific activity was established for the first time, leading to greater autonomy and more impactful scientific research results, increased relevance, quality, and efficiency of studies, a higher number of competitive projects, stronger international cooperation, and more collaborations with enterprises.
The goal of the investment is to improve the system of financing scientific work at universities and scientific institutes to achieve greater autonomy, quality, and a stronger focus of research results on the development of the economy and society.
The total four-year value of all program contracts for the first 14 institutions that completed negotiations is EUR 302,189,829.63, of which EUR 19,670,838.90 are additional funds provided for research projects from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which is an increase of more than 10 percent annually compared to 2023.
The program contracts were signed by the following public scientific institutes and higher education institutions:
- Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, Split
- Institute of Economics, Zagreb
- Institute for Development and International Relations, Zagreb
- Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health, Zagreb
- Croatian Forestry Institute, Zagreb
- Institute of Physics, Zagreb
- Institute for Adriatic Crops and Karst Reclamation, Split
- Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb
- Institute for Social Research, Zagreb
- Institute for Tourism, Zagreb
- Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb
- Institute of Archaeology, Zagreb
- Institute of the Croatian Language, Zagreb
- Zagreb University of Applied Sciences
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