International & National Funding Bodies

Research funding is organized nationally before it is organized by discipline: each country maintains its own funding council or councils, its own flagship award programs, and its own administrative conventions, and a research administrator working with international collaborators or multinational funding needs a reference organized along those lines. This sub-cluster covers national and multinational funding bodies outside the US-federal-agency material addressed elsewhere in this cluster — the funding councils of the UK, Canada, Australia, the European Union, and other jurisdictions, along with the flagship programs each one runs. The structure of this sub-cluster follows how the research-administration profession itself is organized internationally, since no single global standards body governs grants administration the way, for example, accounting has the IASB. In the United States, NCURA (the National Council of University Research Administrators) is the principal professional association; in Europe and the UK, EARMA (the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators) plays a comparable role; in Canada, CARA (the Canadian Association of Research Administrators); and across Australia and New Zealand, ARMS (the Australasian Research Management Society). These bodies do not fund research themselves, but their conferences, certifications, and communities of practice are where national funding-agency conventions get documented and compared, and pages in this sub-cluster reflect that country-by-country organization rather than attempting a single unified international framework that does not exist in practice.

Comparisons