The social sciences research network has been left out of European Union structural funding, raising alarms about the country’s capacity for evidence-based policymaking.
The SoDaNet infrastructure(Social Data Network) – coordinated by the National Center for Social Research (EKKE) and linking seven universities nationwide – ranked 27th in a recent evaluation, falling outside the 20 projects selected for up to €100 million in ESPA 2021-2027 funding.
The list includes eight newly proposed infrastructures, despite earlier program guidelines indicating new projects would be limited.
Critics say the joint evaluation of established and newly proposed infrastructures is fundamentally flawed, since mature projects are assessed on demonstrated performance while new ones are judged on projections.
Officials from EKKE and the University of the Aegean warned that SoDaNet represents Greece’s sole mature social data infrastructure and its only node in the European CESSDA-ERIC network.
