Giving Voice to the Margins: Shifting Power in EU Environmental Research
Varjú, V., Sorman, A. H., Cabello, V., Bálint, D., Loewen, B., Tagai, G., Crowther, A., Avendano, D., Robison, R., & Foulds, C. (2026).
Reclaiming the margins in environmental research: Epistemic inequalities across Europe’s geographical and disciplinary peripheries. Applied Geography, 192, Article 104029.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2026.104029
The Core-Periphery Divide in Academic Capitalism
European research policies widely champion the concept of “spreading excellence”, yet a deep structural divide persists within transnational scientific collaborations. Set against the backdrop of academic capitalism—a market-driven, metric-governed research regime—knowledge production has increasingly shifted toward marketised competition for external funding, institutional prestige, and output maximisation. This environment disproportionately penalises Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) actors from Southern and Central-Eastern Europe (SE/CEE), particularly within the critical domains of climate, energy, and mobility research. Instead of fostering genuine integration, current EU framework programmes often reinforce historical hegemonic hierarchies, locking Western European institutions into central “hubs” while driving peripheral regions into structurally subordinate positions.
Methodology: Capturing Peripheral Voices
To evaluate these epistemic inequalities, the research utilized a mixed-methods design conducted under the Horizon Europe SSH CENTRE project. The researchers gathered qualitative and quantitative insights through an online survey of 137 SSH researchers native to or working within SE/CEE countries. To validate and deepen these survey outcomes, two regional hybrid workshops were subsequently hosted in Bilbao, Spain, and Pécs, Hungary, bringing together 59 participants across 25 nations. The study strategically focused on SSH disciplines because their research is less dependent on expensive, capital-intensive laboratory infrastructure. Consequently, any persistent barriers to participation highlight relational and institutional biases rather than mere gaps in material research capacity.
Key Findings: Multidimensional Pillars of Inequality
The empirical analysis reveals that peripheral disadvantage is not an isolated capacity gap, but rather a compound marginality shaped by several distinct, interrelated systemic barriers:
- Polarized Financial Distribution: Funding emerged as the most critical and dividing bottleneck, with a strong consensus that SSH disciplines receive vastly lower resources than STEM fields. This perception is more prevalent among researchers from the Southern region than in Central and Eastern Europe, although it is high in both areas.
- Under-resourced and Fragmented Networks: While some researchers note having collaboration opportunities, networking remains fragmented. Peripheral institutions struggle to form standalone horizontal ties with each other and are forced to rely heavily on personalized, dependent links to established Western hubs to enter the EU ecosystem.
- The Disciplinary Visibility Deficit: Disciplinary boundaries strongly dictate professional visibility, with the general perception that SSH research is less visible than STEM. At the same time, researchers operating strictly within pure SSH domains report notably better options to popularize their work than those attempting to bridge the gap at the multi-disciplinary SSH-STEM interface, highlighting the difficulty of transdisciplinary integration.
- Epistemic Recognition Hierarchies: A profound systemic bias exists regarding scientific credibility as well, with many respondents stating that SSH is undervalued and not viewed as “real” science compared to STEM. Crucially, this lack of professional recognition has a stark gender dimension, being experienced far more frequently by female researchers than by their male colleagues.
- Institutional support: SE and CEE researchers both feel the need of improving a wide range of institutional support, including working conditions, infrastructure, training opportunities, access to information, and related issues.
Network Centrality and Thematic Biases
The research illustrates how cumulative advantages solidify the network centrality of a select few Western universities. Because selection criteria for project coordinators inherently favour well-resourced institutions with extensive administrative machinery, a self-reinforcing feedback loop is created. Peripheral partners are left spending substantial time drafting complex proposals with low success probabilities at the expense of core academic work like publishing. Furthermore, a distinct thematic bias exists; EU research calls regularly prioritize issues aligned with Northern and Western European interests. Regional priorities vital to the South and East—such as localized heatwaves, severe droughts, and post-socialist transition challenges—are frequently excluded or minimized.
Strategic Levers for Genuine Power-Sharing
To transition from performative inclusion to meaningful participation, the study outlines several mechanism-aligned policy remedies. First, funding bodies must look beyond headcount metrics and proactively track the distribution of budget control, work-package leadership, and co-coordination roles. Second, there must be front-loaded funding to build up the administrative grant-management capacities of peripheral institutions. Third, the EU should diversify its evaluation criteria to genuinely value SSH methodologies and design dedicated funding lines tailored to regional, space-specific environmental challenges. Finally, fostering horizontal, peripheral networks among SE/CEE nations can stimulate solidarity and create robust counter-weights to established Western hubs, ensuring a truly democratic European research ecosystem.
Suggestions based on the research are also detailed in a position statement by the authors for supporting the Social Sciences & Humanities across Southern and Central & Eastern Europe (available at: https://sshcentre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Position-estatement_English.pdf).
