The Joint Research Centre…shall consist of the establishments set up by the Commission to carry out the Community’s research programmes and other tasks entrusted to it by the Commission.
Commission Decision 96/282/Euratom
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is a directorate-general of the European Commission, currently housed in the portfolio of Commissioner Mariya Gabriel. It employs about 2700 staff and has an annual budget of about €370m (2017 data). Its legal underpinning lies in the vague sentence cited above – meaning, whatever the Commission decides it should do.
Despite certain appearances, JRC is not an EU agency – it does not have a separate legal personality to the Commission. One sues the Commission, not the JRC. But if it were an agency, it would be around the fourth largest by budget (exceeded by only three agencies, SRB, EUIPO and GSA).
In recent years, the JRC has branded itself as ‘the Commission’s knowledge and science service’. The knowledge and science environment of the Commission is, obviously, not an empty space – in reality there are already many science and knowledge services (not least the EU-ANSA bodies, but also the myriad of consultants, academics, firms, and member states, that inform and lobby the Commission). It is also worth noting that the JRC’s advisory relationship to the policy activities of the Commission (‘close to the political heart’) remains unclear in legal terms, as it is not specified in regulations or the treaties (again, c.f. EU-ANSA bodies).
What, therefore, is this entity? The JRC was founded under the EURATOM Treaty in the late 1950s (it was initially called the Joint Nuclear Research Centre). Due to insufficient funds, the idea of building a bespoke research center from scratch was abandoned. Instead, the JRC was brought together from existing national research centers – notably, an Italian government laboratory at Ispra, about 70km north of Milano, on the shore of Lago Maggiore.
In 1959, the plan to take over the Italian laboratory, which had been built with Italian taxpayers’ funds, was met with opposition in the Italian parliament. This is said to be the origin of the term ‘joint’ in the name, as it was marketed to Italian MPs as a joint, Italian-European center; by which means compromise was reached (the center is known in Italian as Il Centro comune di ricerca; comune, denoting ‘mutual’ in reference to that compromise).
The Ispra center undertook nuclear research, hosted a nuclear reactor (closed 1984), and also a computer facility supplying services to the EURATOM commission, such as machine translation.
In the early 1960s, additional research centers in other member states were established under the JRC brand, and by similar means, namely, Karlsruhe (DE), Geel (BE) and Petten (NL).
This circuitous early history as nuclear facilities explains the eclectic and relatively inaccessible locations of the establishments which exist to this day. The JRC does now also have staff at Seville (ES), in a center established in 1994 (that was initially concerned with technology assessment and forecasting capability); and centrally, at Brussels. It is worth noting that an attempt to establish agreement with the French government for a laboratory at Grenoble failed.
The closest thing we can find in EUR-Lex to a foundational legal definition of purpose for the JRC is Commission Decision 71/57/Euratom (1971), which is basically the same as the text currently in force (96/282/Euratom – quoted above).
This legal purpose seems to have been executed via multi-year research programs, periodically agreed with the Commission. Another feature: periodic critiques; periodic reviews by worthy individuals such as Sir Hermann Bondi (1995); and periodic exhortations to do better (performance criteria never quite clear, though).
Through much of this period, the focus of the JRC was firmly on specific programs of scientific research, e.g., nuclear safety. However, in the early 2000s, it seems the JRC was tasked with implementing aspects of the European Research Area (ERA), such as networking. In other words, there was a move away from research, as had been conventionally understood.
This changed further with the re-branding of the JRC as ‘the Commission’s science and knowledge service’ – suggesting a role supporting policy design, and even day-to-day decision making across a full range of topics within the Commission. This was a task possibly (?) absent in the JRC’s previous incarnations. (JRC also sought closer links with academic institutions. This, however, was not a new phenomenon; JRC had done so previously in response to the criticism that it was a closed shop and not open to outside ideas.)
Here is the particular terminology used in a recent JRC strategy (2030 Strategy), launched under the Juncker Commission:
More and more policies require a solid evidence base. This gives DG JRC, as the Commission’s knowledge and science service, a very clear mandate. The opportunities for it to add value to the Commission are immense…
DG JRC can best be described as a ‘boundary organisation’ sitting at the intersection of the scientific and policy spheres. This poses very specific challenges. Indeed, the science/policy interface should perhaps be seen as a specific field or discipline in itself, requiring a particular set of methodologies and skills. DG JRC must promote the emergence of this new field and become its leading practitioner…
It must be a strategic partner which is close to the political heart of the Commission. Rather than acting as some kind of “consultant”, responding to ad hoc requests from individual parts of the Commission, its focus should be on the real political priorities, which will often mean working with many different parts of the Commission at the same time.
We could, obviously, quibble whether the basic premise above is, indeed, universally true (policies, presumably, always required evidence bases). It is also debatable whether we need this new ‘science/policy interface’ field, or what ‘being a strategic partner close to the political heart’ might mean, etc. But it is aspirational talk, the full meaning of which should gradually appear in practice over the coming years. Certainly, the 2030 document acknowledges it all seems quite a change from what the JRC had done previously.
Half a century of a particular (research) approach has been packed off to the country, never to be seen again? In reality, the legal obligations regarding nuclear stewardship never disappeared, but they no longer appear particularly germane to current priorities.
Aspiration and (historically-contingent) reality – herein are some interesting contradictions, which, broadly, comprise the following:
As has already been alluded to, the JRC lacks a legal position in the policy process. There is no legal requirement for the Commission to consult it. There is no legal sense it should give an independent opinion across the design, implementation and evaluation of policies.
In terms of oversight, the JRC has a board made up representatives from member states. This might be significant. The question is, would member states want a Commission that is better informed, as would be implied by a JRC that was more effective? The expert capacity of the EU is small, compared to one of its alleged strategic competitors, the USA. Just a single US government agency, the CDC, has a larger budget than all the EU agencies + the JRC combined. Perhaps the EU is just good at acting less but better, as the former EU Commission President, Jacques Santer, said.
One might also ask about the JRC’s relationship to the EU agencies. The agencies seem to have a much more clearly-defined legal position in regard to policy advice (?). They also constitute quite a large body of experts, far larger than the JRC. As was noted in a recent EU-ANSA report from some of the agencies, they might feel marginalized from the shaping of research that would be vital to fulfill their regulatory missions. Lacking budgets themselves to fund major research programs, how to influence the JRC?
If the EU is to become more expert, or at least to use its under-powered expertise better, the above aspects might become clearer-cut, legally speaking; by which is meant: formulating a legal relationship between the entities generating knowledge and evidence, and the various stages of policy-making, i.e., design, implementation and appraisal. But it is not immediately clear what this would look like. It also seems extraordinarily unlikely anyone will have an interest in doing it.
The JRC has been subject to a lot of criticism over the decades. But its unique position, historically contingent, sitting between different priorities, is perhaps never going to satisfy its detractors. Indeed, its history, going back to EURATOM, has always been about trying to deliver something, in often unpromising political circumstances (which are not of its own making). Herein is the art of being the JRC.
Science Think Tank 