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Short abstract:

This paper uses the trials and tribulations of a project designing an evaluative frame for a more balanced academic recognition and reward at 3 Dutch universities to reflect on the ambitions and practices of Dutch research evaluation reform and its internal tensions around diversity and inclusion.

Long abstract:

In the past decade movements to reform research evaluation have been growing internationally, concerned about misapplications of narrow performance criteria at the expense of other qualities or priorities such as open science, team science, diversity and inclusion, societal relevance, mission-oriented and transdisciplinary research, or citizen science. These debates have brought to the fore the diversity of ambitions, actors and activities coming together in academic work, and the struggle to be inclusive of these in meaningful and effective criteria and frameworks of academic quality and relevance. Between 2021 and 2023 the authors were involved in a project that aimed to facilitate strategic and evaluative decision-making in Dutch academia taking a more balanced approach to the recognition and reward of academics. The purpose was to provide an evaluative framework that was sensitive to a range of diverse and often previously invisible activities specific to different disciplinary contexts. While the project ended prematurely and didn’t deliver on its ambitions, we learned a lot, both from the qualitative research that we did with six different disciplinary teams and from our internal struggles to bring together our ambitions and data. In this paper we will use these lessons to reflect on the ambitions and practices of research evaluation reform in the Netherlands and its internal tensions around diversity and inclusion.