ARIA can’t stay out of the political fray
Andy Burnham has moved science “onto the frontline of politics,” the science minister has said, as if that was something to be excited about. Definitely the kind of thing we’re going to be keeping an eye on.
The bigger story from last week, however, was Matt Clifford’s departure from ARIA following controversy over his new gig at Anthropic in a role working with governments including the UK’s. He had previously been the Prime Minister’s special adviser on AI, so you can see why they were keen to poach him.
ARIA was set up to be more independent of government and politics alike, and yet it is increasingly dogged by public affairs challenges. Many of these are the same controversies afflicting other aspects of the research system, yet ARIA – perhaps fittingly – is running into them in a faster and more experimental way.
As colleagues in the Research Agenda newsroom have looked at recently, under the management of new CEO Kathleen Fisher the funder has shaken up its approach to the thematic areas it now expects programme managers to work within. Many of these sit firmly within the contested spaces between science, ethics, popular interest, and – of course – media and politics: programmable physiology, neural interfaces, and above all climate science.
ARIA has run into dedicated opposition already on this latter stream of work, with a steady drumbeat of press coverage suggesting that it is putting plans in place to “blot out the sun” – though weekend coverage in the Observer of so-called solar radiation management sought to stoke concerns about DSTL-funded research, with ARIA for once not mentioned.
Elsewhere its work in funding AI research is scaling up, representing another area in need of judicious navigation, given that popular blowback to government munificence seems nailed on to be an ever-growing theme in this country’s future politics.
As seen in the Matt Clifford saga, this has also resulted in the funder’s enmeshment with US tech and capital – an inevitable part of working in this space, but also a source of negative headlines as UK government investment is seen to be flowing abroad. Especially when what remains gets concentrated in the golden triangle: can a UK-wide public funder really escape public opprobrium when none of its funding reaches Wales or Northern Ireland, and various regions of England receive only minimal amounts?
There are clear signs that ARIA has begun to take stakeholder management and media engagement more seriously, in a way which (optimistically) was never central to its original remit. It now has a public policy team; a recent recruitment round for one such role looked for candidates with a “nuanced understanding” of how to navigate Whitehall, and a “demonstrable interest” in how politics affects government priorities and policies. On regional funding spread, it has introduced new rules around programme approval, requiring the demonstration of meaningful engagement across the country before giving the green light.
Some might argue that ARIA’s mission was to stay outside of the political fray and fund whatever the hell it wanted to. But as it matures as an organisation we can see signs of it getting sucked back into wider debates about the research system, a state of affairs which has both good and ill. It’s important to fight for spaces where science can stay out of politics, but it’s foolish to imagine that the two can ever really exist as separate worlds.
Spotted a politician meddling in the research system? Or a blurry line between academia and government? Email the man himself: haldane [at] researchagenda [dot] news