Ensuring Sustainable Evaluation: How to Improve Quality of Evaluating Grant Proposals?

Grażyna Wieczorkowska and Katarzyna Kowalczyk
Additional contact information
Grażyna Wieczorkowska: Department of Managerial Psychology and Sociology, Faculty of Management, University of Warsaw, Szturmowa 1/3, 02-678 Warsaw, Poland
Katarzyna Kowalczyk: Department of Managerial Psychology and Sociology, Faculty of Management, University of Warsaw, Szturmowa 1/3, 02-678 Warsaw, Poland

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-11

Abstract: The principle of sustainable development is an obligation placed on all entities involved in the implementation and delivery of the structural funds made available not only by the European Commission but also by grant donors from all over the world. For this reason, when applying for a grant, proposals need to demonstrate the positive or neutral impact of the project on sustainable development. To be able to select projects that will ensure sustainability, we need to ensure the effective evaluation of the proposals. The process of their evaluation should be objective, unbiased and transparent. However, current processes have several limitations. The process by which grants are awarded and proposals evaluated has come under increasing scrutiny, with a particular focus on the selection of reviewers, fallibility of their assessments, the randomness of assessments and the low level of common agreement. In our studies, we demonstrated how some of those limitations may be overcome. Our topic of interest is the work of reviewers/experts who evaluate scientific grant proposals. We analyse data coming from two prominent scientific national grant foundations, which differ in terms of expert’s selection procedure. We discuss the problems associated with both procedures (rating style of the reviewers, lack of calibration and serial position effect) and present potential solutions to prevent them. We conclude that, to increase the unbiasedness and fairness of the evaluation process, reviewers’ work should be analysed. We also suggest that, within a certain panel, all grant proposals should be evaluated by the same set of reviewers, which would help to eliminate the distorting influence of the selection of a very severe or very lenient expert. Such effective assessment and moderation of the process would help ensure the quality and sustainability of evaluations.

Keywords: institutional funding; science policy; sustainability; evaluation; grant proposals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2842/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2842/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:5:p:2842-:d:511589

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().