Responsible research funding
The RCF promotes accountability and sustainability through research funding, organisational research expertise and stakeholder cooperation.
Our funding decisions are based on the results of international peer review. By offering competitive research funding and science policy expertise, we promote the quality and impact of research and support scientific renewal.
We work closely with the scientific community, other research funders and various actors in society to strengthen the conditions for science and research, promote the use of research knowledge and identify topical research themes and topics.
We are also an expert on domestic and international science policy issues and collect and analyse data on science and research. The production of high-quality data and analyses supports the use of research-based knowledge in decision-making. By gathering data and making it available, we also support the competence-based reform of Finnish society.
Expert-level research funding contributes to the development of Finnish knowledge and know-how in understanding phenomena related to sustainability and accountability.
In addition to facilitating new research knowledge, research funding from the RCF supports the research community in producing new knowledge, nurturing new generations of researchers and creating robust international research expertise and cooperation networks in Finland. Since the late 1990s, through national and international cooperation, we have funded large-scale research projects on issues such as climate change, energy systems, biodiversity and sustainable development.
Through our own activities and indirectly through the research teams we fund, we have a global impact on how, for example, the understanding of the different dimensions of climate change has deepened, and how research has helped to find solutions to manage and mitigate it. RCF-funded research also increases the utilisation of international research results in Finland.
We monitor the impact of funded research
From the research projects we fund, we require responsible conduct of research and consideration of the SDGs. We have no role in measuring the footprint of the research or research infrastructures we fund; this is the responsibility of the research organisation, such as a university or research institute.
There is a need to make the monitoring of the impact of research funding increasingly systematic, in particular as regards the monitoring of the SDGs. This is an objective that is included in our commitment to sustainable development.
