New Zealand’s ‘perfect storm’ hits humanities research
Jenny Sinclair
Thu Mar 20 2025 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Uncertainty reigns as NZ and Australian governments prioritise research areas with “real economic impact”
In December, arts and humanities researchers in New Zealand were shocked when Judith Collins, who was science minister at the time, shut down the social sciences and humanities panels of the government’s flagship Marsden Fund, effectively cutting project funding nationwide.
“The focus of the fund will shift to core science, with the humanities and social sciences panels disbanded and no longer supported,” Collins said. “Real impact on our economy will come from areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences.”
Sociologist Jessica Terruhn was with around 150 of her peers at the Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand’s annual conference—the theme of which was “the sociology to come”—when the cuts were announced. She says a wave of “consternation and frustration” swept through the group.
“It was an interesting time to be told the news and that our research wasn’t ‘having an impact’,” Terruhn says.
Her work is far from purely theoretical: her current research has highlighted the drivers that sustain housing insecurities, especially for the growing number of households who are renting, she says. Like many countries, New Zealand is in the middle of a housing crisis that has pushed home ownership further out of reach for working people, while the cost of rent is rising.
But Terruhn’s fixed-term contract as a senior research fellow at the University of Waikato concludes this month and she had been planning to apply for money from the Marsden Fund—New Zealand’s main source of contestable funding—to study international policy solutions to housing issues. She’s spent the nine years since gaining her doctorate building a “really good network” across New Zealand, Australia and Australasia.
Until the cuts were announced, her “main plan was to apply for a Marsden Fund [grant because] that and the revamped Rutherford [scheme] are the only ones to pay salary costs”.
Without Marsden funding, she fears her research will become harder to carry out. “People are keen to work together, but if you don’t have permanent employment it can be really hard,” she says.
Not just sociology
Research organisations in New Zealand were dismayed by the Marsden Fund changes. Jane Harding, president of the Royal Society Te Apārangi—which administers the fund on behalf of the government— issued an open letter calling on Collins to “continue investment in fundamental research in the social sciences and humanities”, arguing that these disciplines are important to economic growth, as well as to New Zealanders’ wellbeing and the retention of researchers.
The exact share of the Marsden Fund’s annual budget of around NZ$75 million that goes to social science and humanities disciplines is not clear; the most recent figures published by the Royal Society date back to 2016, when around 20 per cent of funding went to the social sciences and humanities.
The vice-chancellors’ body Universities New Zealand simply called the move to cut the disciplines from the fund “astonishing”.
Subsequent revelations showed that the cuts were made at relatively short notice, with direct intervention from Collins’s office.
Paul Spoonley, who chaired the Marsden Fund’s social sciences panel, tells Research Professional News that until the last moment, “there was no indication that the social science and humanities Marsden funding was going to be defunded”, and that he was only notified by phone the day before the announcement.
He says his panel “was the one that received, by some margin, the largest number of Marsden Fund applications, covering the full range of social science disciplines, methodologies and research topics”. It also received the highest number of applications “that dealt with topics of significance to Māori or that involved Māori research teams”.
“The defunding of the social sciences and humanities reduces the opportunities for these research communities to be funded in Aotearoa New Zealand,” he adds.
Spoonley also stresses that other disciplines will be affected by the cuts. “It is hard to think of a science question in any science field that does not have a social component, from the ability to do the research through to contributions to behavioural and community wellbeing,” he says. “This decision significantly reduces the ability to ensure positive outcomes for a range of New Zealand communities.”
Collins is no longer the minister responsible for the Marsden Fund. That role is now with Shane Reti, who has since taken over as science minister.
A spokesperson for Reti said that “to achieve the greatest impact in the current economic environment, the government is focused on developing our science, technology and innovation system”.
“Changes to the Marsden Fund ensure our limited funding is focused on the areas of science and research with the greatest potential to grow our economy, to help generate more jobs in the future, grow wages and help businesses succeed.”
The spokesperson said the humanities would continue to be supported via general funding for “universities, wānanga [Māori-focused institutions] and technical educational institutes, as well as the Performance-Based Research Fund, Centres of Research Excellence and tuition subsidies”.
Careers on the line
Without the Marsden Fund, Terruhn’s options are limited. She is considering applying for a grant through Horizon Europe, the EU’s €93.5 billion research and innovation framework programme. But the New Zealand government has also withdrawn top-up funding and other support for local researchers applying for the scheme’s second cluster, which funds work on culture, creativity and inclusive societies.
This will “obviously make it harder to apply for that funding”, Terruhn says, although her university has told her it will support her application process. One way or another, she hopes to keep working in New Zealand. She considers herself mid-career and is also editor of the journal New Zealand Sociology.
But others in the field are seriously considering leaving the country to find academic and research work, especially given the continued rounds of redundancies in the cash-strapped university sector, she says.
The final report of the national University Advisory Group, which is advising the government on how to improve New Zealand’s higher education sector, is being keenly awaited as researchers wonder what their future will be, Terruhn says. “This is a perfect storm...There really aren’t many possibilities.”
Australian concerns
New Zealand is not alone in prioritising funding for science and technology research. Across Western nations, support for arts and humanities is coming under pressure as higher education budgets shrink and politicians pin their hopes for economic growth on science and technology.
In the UK, for example, the British Academy, a humanities and social sciences organisation, warned that cutbacks across universities thanks to a “lack of sustainability in university finances” are leading to a “severe loss in UK [research] capability”.
Across the Tasman Sea in Australia, arts and humanities researchers are similarly dependent on government and university support. The main source of government funding for the disciplines is the Australian Research Council.
The publication NiTRO Creative Matters, put out by the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts, has been tracking the rates of funding for creative work. In December, it wrote that only five of the 536 ARC Discovery Project grants in the latest round had gone to creative arts projects.
Last year, the deans ran an online seminar about the difficulties creative researchers find in fitting their work into conventional funding structures, and it published a special edition of the journal on the problem.
As if to illustrate that, the terms of reference of Australia’s current review of R&D funding ask the review panel to consider “the benefits to economic growth and productivity from a more purposeful approach to R&D”, echoing the language seen in New Zealand.
But the ARC is overhauling its funding systems, and the deans say they are hopeful the new system will make it easier for creative arts researchers.
Figures for 2024 show that the ARC gave A$174m to its top funding field, engineering, and around A$75m to the following five fields combined: human society; history; language and culture; creative arts; and religion and philosophy.
In December, the Australian Council of Learned Academies took the unusual step of joining the outcry over the New Zealand cuts. The links between the nations are so close that some Australian-based academics serve as Marsden Fund reviewers.
The combined academy heads wrote that solving humanity’s problems will “require a skilled and adaptive workforce, and a robust multidisciplinary sovereign research capability”.
As governments across the globe look to get faster and clearer economic returns from their investments in research, arts and humanities researchers can only hope that they can convince leaders of their importance, too.