Transnational cooperation and policy networks in European science policy-making

In the last decades, a host of transnational organizations representing national universities, research organizations and industrial research have been established in Europe. This article gives an empirical account of the role of transnational organizations in European science and technology policy and of the policy networks established between these organizations and supranational institutions. The analysis shows that because of the strong horizontal and vertical segmentation of transnational cooperation and interest intermediation, science, industry and politics are only weakly linked in European S&T policy. If institutionalized links between the major actors and institutions from different social sub-systems are an indispensable property of an efficient system of innovation, these missing links must be considered a major obstacle for European S&T policy to be successful. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.