The role of competitive funding instruments in promoting excellence and relevance in research

As part of my Ph.D, I am looking into how funding instruments for research are used to communicate and enforce funders’ objectives and requirements, and how they consequently impact researchers’ norms and behavior. In particular, I am researching competitive funding instruments geared toward excellence and relevance using multiple case studies. I rely on data from a variety of sources such as grant calls, application proposals, evaluation reports and semi-structured interviews with funding agency personnel and researchers.