The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap, OCW) is responsible for Dutch higher education and research, with the exception of agricultural research and some ‘innovation-oriented research’ (innovatiegericht onderzoek, particularly Wageningen University & Research), which fall under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy (Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat, EZK).

The Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO) is the primary national funding body for researchers in the Netherlands. NWO’s specific funding schemes are introduced in Section 4.2. The Institutes Organisation of NWO (NWO-I) is a sister organisation and is the umbrella organisation of nine research institutes (see Section 1.1). NWO and NWO-I have different missions and executive boards.

A new structure of NWO became effective in January 2017. One of the goals of the restructuring programme was to create larger domains in which interdisciplinary research would be more easily accommodated. NWO’s reorganisation has strengthened its paramount position by unifying research policy and practices and by promoting interdisciplinary initiatives. The NWO website and its newsletters are a reliable source of updates on national debates related to higher education and research.

NWO receives its funds directly from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and this means that political priorities, e.g., support for the ‘top sectors’ (see Section 5.2), a government economic programme that stresses applied research, play a part in the evaluation process, in addition to the excellence of the researcher and the research proposal. 

NWO-I funds and manages nine research institutes (see Section 1.1). There often exist strong collaborations between these institutes and the universities, with shared research programmes, student supervision and practical teaching. 

The national research schools (nationale onderzoeksscholen) or graduate schools are, arguably, a uniquely Dutch phenomenon and deserve separate mention. These schools, currently more than forty in number, bring researchers from Dutch universities together in a shared research domain to train graduate students (mostly PhD candidates, but also research Master students) and encourage transregional scholarly collaboration. Each national research school is housed in one of the universities, spread more or less equally over the universities. They may also collaborate with the NWO-I and KNAW institutes.