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Restructuring Welsh higher education came under active consideration from the start of the millennium, when a broad policy consensus emerged that the country had too many universities, often of a scale that limited their potential. From 13 higher education institutions then, the total is now 8 (plus the Open University in Wales). This chapter reviews the major policy positions and phases of these developments, from one in which the funding body for higher education sought institutions’ own proposals to one in which, at the Minister’s request, it offered a structural “blueprint”. It illustrates developments with reference to specific cases, and highlights the key role of institutional and political leadership in these processes, and the challenges involved in securing change in a context of high institutional autonomy. Finally, it identifies the tension, perhaps particularly evident in small countries, between responsibility for governance of individual institutions, and for securing the best possible overall higher education system.

The technology of so‐called new public management (NPM) in the UK encompasses a broad range of approaches to the reform of public services based loosely around notions of downsizing the State, cost‐cutting, marketisation, competition and emphasis on the reform of accounting within the Government. NPM has been utilised in the reform of the old public sector science and technology laboratories. This paper sets out the reasons why the provision of science and technology services may be a discrete area of public service, not necessarily amenable to NPM. It then charts the development of policy and practice in this area, using actual examples of agencification and privatisation. Finally it offers a tentative evaluation of the manifestations of NPM in this area concentrating on ownership, control and accountability; markets and customers; and financial costs and rewards.

Until recently, serious study of the rationale underlying the space policy announced by the Macmillan government in May 1959, even when attempted, was hampered by the "thirty year rule". Now, knowledge of the arguments deployed by the principal players in this one area of policymaking lay and scientific civil servants, scientific advisers and ministers, academics may be of interest to students of other areas, and of contemporary British history. Although the policy-makers of the late 1950s were alive to the importance of establishing the priority of the new field, to raise this issue did not necessarily imply even the wish, let alone the ability to wield prioritisation effectively as an aid to policy-making. What is clear, however, is that policymakers were unconsciously weighting at least some of the "criteria for scientific choice" identified in the well-known science policy debate of the early 1960s.

For nearly a decade after 1955, the UK military establishment struggled to reach consensus on the military value of space applications. Because of the pivotal role of military technology in all early space activity, and the virtual necessity for some form of military subsidy to go about it, military equivocation had very serious effects on the development of UK space policy as a whole. When, in the early 1960s, a measure of military consensus was achieved, economic straits encouraged alliance with civil interests and maximum co‐operation with the UK's allies.

Moving from the post of President of Queen's College, Cambridge, to that of Chief Scientific Adviser in the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) may not be everyone's idea of a natural career step. For Ron Oxburgh, who made this move three years ago, one difference he noticed was that the Ministry of Defence is properly staffed for the job. Whereas, he told Physics World, running a university earth-sciences department and a college sometimes led to "severe fragmentation of the intellect", life in MoD is better ordered, with appropriate numbers of well qualified support staff, so that he can give his entire mind to the job.

Now that peace has broken out in Europe, a question mark hangs over the future of defence science and technology, and over the employment of scientists and technologists in the defence sector. The question is especially pointed in Britain and France. These are the two countries in Europe that maintain the greatest range of defence forces, equipped for a wide variety of roles, from direct defence of the homeland by land, sea and air, to nuclear deterrence. The bill for that equipment is correspondingly large, as is the scientific and technological infrastructure that has been built up over the decades to support defence research, development and production.

This paper discusses a surprisingly understudied aspect of science studies, namely, the area of defence science and technology policy. It reviews work done in the past, and outlines a number of more recent developments that show that the interest taken in the field is growing. It discusses new directions that might be followed from sociological and economic perspectives, and suggests that the analysis of defence science and technology policy offers scope for integration between different fields within the social studies of science.

FOR FORTY YEARS THE COLD WAR, WITH ITS PRESUMED threat to Western Europe, has been used to justify the level of military budgets in NATO countries. The United States, Britain and France, in particular, have sustained high levels of military spending throughout this period. Each has sought to maintain capability across a full range of military options, including nuclear forces and the ability to intervene in Third World conflicts. Each has maintained a large, and quite stable, industrial and technological infrastructure in support of these military goals.With the ending of the cold war, the basis for that stability has been undermined. Defence spending is set to fall. With it will fall overall spending on defence equipment. But the rate of decline, and its distribution across the different sectors of the defence industry, remain to be determined. Upon the outcome turns the future of investment in defence technologies, with further consequences, complex in nature, for national and industrial technological capabilities. To complicate analysis further, these changes arise at a time of considerable concern on both sides of the Atlantic about industrial competitiveness. This concern had already led to upheaval in industrial structures and strategies within both the defence and the civil high technology industries.

This chapter examines the impact of administrative change in the 1980s and 1990s on the supply of science and technology services to British central government. Our concern is with the consequences of these changes for the operation of the supplying organisation, for its management for its customer department and for its relationship with its department. Hence, within our chosen policy domain, we explore the variety of organisational forms that have emerged during the late 1980s and 1990s. We seek to explain why they took the form that they did and we ask what effect these changes have had, in terms of the ostensible purposes of the reforms themselves.

The debate about the costs and benefits of military RD and to the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ But they also took it upon themselves to decide which of their inventions and discoveries should be published, and which kept secret, adding, darkly, that ‘some of those we do reveal sometimes to the State, and some not.’2

With the end of the Cold War, the old security policies and structures that served the countries of Western Europe have been called into question. In the heady days of 1988 and 1989, there was talk of massive disarmament and of a substantial ‘peace dividend’. Events since then, in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere (including post-Mikhail Gorbachev Russia) have dampened that early optimism. Nevertheless, the basic questions remain of what West European defence and security policy is for, and within what framework it can best be pursued.

This paper aims to set the scene for the more detailed discussion of defense conversion strategies that will follow. It does so by addressing the following issues: The effects of the end of the Cold War on military planning; The consequences of those effects on defense equipment development and production; How companies have responded to those consequences; and The implications for this discussion of important changes that are taking place in the relations between technologies of defense and of civil origin.

Until the late 1980s, the size and shape of western defence activities reflected the specific geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War. As these circumstances changed, the defence sector suffered not just a loss of demand, but a loss of coherence. The military strategies and force structures pertinent to defending against massed attacks from the East lost their relevance. It became less clear how to organise military forces in response to the more diffuse set of risks that have emerged. This is true in relation both to the possibilities of threats from weapons of mass destruction, and the use of national armed forces in multinational coalitions, such as the burgeoning United Nations interventions and NATO’s intervention in Bosnia.

Alvey. Britain's Strategic Computing Initiative. By Brian Oakley and Kenneth Owen. MIT: 1990. Pp.337. £24.95, $40.

The Second Culture: British Science in Crisis — The Scientists Speak Out. By Clive Cavendish Rassam. Aurum: 1993. Pp. 242. £16.95.

The impact of defence procurement on a country's industrial and technological base can be considerable—among NATO countries, the USA, Britain and France stand out in this regard. Equally, concern is also often expressed about how to safeguard the civil technology base as a necessary foundation for security, broadly conceived. This article examines the changes taking place in the UK, and more broadly in Europe, regarding defence procurement: first, by examining arguments and events regarding defence RD and second, through analysing procurement issues relating especially to industrial structures and strategies. Much strategic repositioning by firms is currently taking place, often encouraged by governments, who seem to lack adequate means of regulating the restructuring, thereby creating unintended problems.

This article reviews the context in which British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. applied in 1977 for outline planning permission for a plant to reprocess spent uranium oxide fuel at the Windscale Works in Cumbria. It summarizes the report of Mr Justice Parker, the inspector who was appointed to conduct a public inquiry into the proposal, and examines Parliamentary and press responses to the report. Finally, it draws certain lessons from the issue, including the need to keep options open in complex technological decisions, the need for better access to information, and the need for better procedures for evaluating proposals of this type.

From late 1972 the Department of Trade and Industry (and its successor, the Department of Industry) began to operate new machinery for formulating policy towards R & D outside the nuclear and aerospace fields. Under the new machinery, the research establishments of the Department no longer arrive at their programmes through a series of advisory committees, with final endorsement by the Department's Chief Scientist, but rather have requirements placed with them by one or more executive Requirements Boards, comprising industrialists, academics and officials. This paper reviews the developments, beginning in the former Ministry of Technology, which led up to this new machinery, and then examines aspects of its operations from the viewpoints of the Departmental headquarters and of the research establishments involved. Attention is paid to the strategies and composition of the Boards, and to the requirement that the research establishments earn part of their income from industry.

FOR those concerned with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, 1980 was a busy year. February saw the final plenary conference of the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE); July and August saw the meeting of the UN Committee on Disarmament; August and September saw the second review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and scheduled for later in September were the annual General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the first meeting of the IAEA's new Committee on Assurance of Supply. Throughout all these meetings there continued the tripartite negotiations on a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. The failure of those final negotiations to make further progress as 1980 drew to a close, coupled with the failure of the Carter administration to secure the ratification of the SALT II treaty and the debate about the NATO theatre nuclear force modernisation programme were symptoms of a switch in the emphasis of nuclear politics from the horizontal back to the vertical dimension. This eclipse of non-proliferation policy by the problems of controlling the super-power arms race was endorsed by the attitudes of the incoming Reagan administration. Then, in June 1981, non-proliferation returned to the centre of the stage with the Israeli attack on Iraq's nuclear complex outside Baghdad. Evaluating these developments is likely to be a protracted business to which this article seeks to contribute by focusing on INFCE. We begin by reviewing briefly the history of the NPT, then outlining the context in which INFCE arose, examining several of the major conclusions with an eye to the political differences which underlie some of them, and hence reaching some conclusions both about INFCE and the question of how far international thinking about non-proliferation had developed between the negotiations which led to the NPT in 1968 and the events of 1980-81.

On the 31st of October 1967 the Council of Ministers of the European Communities instructed a working party on scientific and technological policy, the PREST committee, to examine the possibilities for European technological cooperation in seven principal sectors. After a year long hiatus caused by a dispute over the British application to join the EEC, detailed proposals appeared in the ‘Aigrain report’. This document was sent to several non-member countries, including Britain, along with an invitation to participate. Following discussions in a committee of senior national officials drawn from 19 interested countries (the COST committee) a conference of Ministers responsible for science took place in 1971 at which agreements initiating seven so-called COST research projects were signed. This paper describes the events leading up to this final conference and the launching of the COST projects. These historical details are then used to examine the venture in terms of the concept of commitment to collaborate. Two different analytical perspectives are adopted: firstly we deal with the mechanics of COST as a formula for cooperation and consider the choice of research areas and the machinery used to implement the proposals; secondly we look at the relationship between technological cooperation in COST and the framework of the European Communities. We conclude that the structure of COST is very much related to its political milieu, but that few of the predicted advantages of Community research are likely to be realised. However, several of the difficulties associated with intergovernmental forms of cooperation do appear to have been at least partially solved. Finally, some reflections are offered upon the setbacks to the history of the projects and upon their mixed reception in terms of the conflicting goals of pragmatism, on the one hand, and an attempt, to promulgate a broadly based European science policy on the other.