Stakeholder interactions in Dutch animal sciences

This paper investigates the effects of the changing institutional environment on academic research practices in the case of Dutch animal sciences. The two most important changes in the Dutch agricultural research system in the past few decades have been shifts in the available funding and the rise of performance evaluations. Our analysis shows that these have only stimulated interactions with societal stakeholders in fields where this helped to sustain a basic research agenda. In other fields there turns out to be a tension between satisfying the needs of application-oriented funding sources and reaching high scores on evaluations that are dominated by bibliometric indicators.