In reply to Anonymous.

Difficult. The constraints are those of the political environment and government policy on one hand and the research community that the funders support on the other. Government funders in particular usually run peer review panels where members of the community rank proposals. This means that any policy or strategic direction the funders take is usually filtered by (or less charitably, stymied) by the panels who have their own agenda (generally supporting the status quo). In addition to these challenges in acting there is also a conservatism that is necessarily forced on funders by needing to retain the confidence of the research community. In the UK this is certainly near to breaking point for many funders. My own opinion is that funders have more freedom to act than they normally feel they do but there are real barriers to action. These also differ across national boundaries.

To remove those boundaries would require the research community to be more radical than the funders. Unfortunately this is almost never the case and is exemplified by the fact that the funders taking action here are private (or at least independent) ones. The depressing thing is that government usually has a more radical agenda than both the research community and the funders.