Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

184
Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020
Evaluations are an important instrument in RTI policy 
and administrative management and they help sup-
port transparency, accountability and evidence-based 
decision-making. Their implementation in Austria is 
based on general legal requirements, on specific re-
quirements in the context of guidelines and funding 
activities, on budgetary requirements, and it is also 
sometimes done on a voluntary basis.
192
As far as the 
institutions are concerned, RTI policy is primarily de-
termined by the Federal Ministry of Education, Sci-
ence and Research (BMBWF), the Federal Ministry for 
Digital and Economic Affairs (BMDW) and the Federal 
Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, 
Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK). These 
are the main clients for evaluations at the federal lev-
el, and they frequently act together. The subject 
matter of the evaluations – often RTI programmes – 
is in turn generally implemented by agencies on be-
half of a ministry. In the field of applied research, 
these agencies are the Austrian Research Promotion 
Agency (Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft – FFG) 
and the Austrian Promotional Bank (Austria 
Wirtschaftsservice GmbH – aws). In fundamental re-
search, it is the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur 
Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung – FWF).
Austria is one of the top-ranking countries in Eu-
rope when it comes to the number of evaluations do-
ne in the RTI sector. Studies dealing with evaluations 
emphasise the generally high professionalism and 
quality of Austrian evaluations.
193
On the other hand, 
an increased institutionalisation and routinisation 
can be observed which impacts the benefits of eval-
uations and lessons learned from them.
194
For this 
reason, there has been a lively discussion in recent 
years regarding the possibilities, functions and bene-
fits of evaluations, the requirements placed on those 
192 See Streicher et al. (2019).
193 See Tsipouri and Sidiropolous (2014); Dinges and Schmidmayer (2010); Reiner and Smoliner (2012), Federal Ministry of Science, 
Research and Economy (BMWFW) and Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) (2017).
194 See Streicher (2017); Landsteiner (2015); Biegelbauer (2013).
195 See OECD (2018a); Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW) and Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation 
and Technology (BMVIT) (2017); Warta and Philipp (2016).
196 See fteval (2019). 
https://www.fteval.at/content/home/standards/fteval_standards/
197 See Federal Chancellery (BKA) (2020).
evaluations and the process for dealing with them.
195
This discussion has not only led to new standards for 
evaluation in research and technology policy
196
, but is 
also reflected in current developments and challeng-
es. These include the discussion on granting evalua-
tors limited access to the planned research funding 
database covering the whole of Austria for the dura-
tion of the relevant evaluation project, as well as the 
accessibility of registry data and microdata of official 
statistics for the scientific community. A report on 
this latter factor and on the market situation in the 
area of RTI evaluation in Austria can be found in Sec-
tion 4.1.